Bruce Mau, co-founder and CEO of the Chicago-based holistic design consultancy Massive Change Network, has joined Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts as its newest Institute Professor, working alongside current Institute Professors Wanda Dalla Costa, Maria Rosario Jackson, Liz Lerman and Daniel Bernard Roumain.
Mau’s academic home is in The Design School, where he will serve as a professor of practice in graphic design. Mau’s partner in work and life, Aiyemobisi “Bisi” Williams, who co-founded MCN with Mau, has also joined the institute as its senior advisor to the dean and director.
During his inaugural lecture March 27 at Neeb Hall, Mau talked about his experiences as a designer, author, educator and artist, including first encountering and collaboration with ASU President Michael Crow shortly after President Crow joined ASU.
Mau was tasked with bringing the design imperatives outlined in Crow’s “A Manifesto for the New American University” to life around the ASU campus. To do so, Mau proposed using existing challenges and orienting the entire university toward purpose and entrepreneurial learning.
“Designers see possibilities where other people see barriers,” Mau said. “We have the responsibility to bring optimism, whether we like it or not.”
Institute Professors work across the institute on a number of different initiatives and programs, with the goal of promoting cross-disciplinary progress as well as trans domain activities with the university community and across the city and state. They demonstrate new ways for artists, designers and students to thrive on campuses through a spirit of enterprise, discovery, innovation and change.
At ASU, Mau will contribute to growing the visibility, reputation and impact of Dreamscape Learn, an ASU Fourth Realm initiative, as well as work on design-related projects with InnovationSpace and other initiatives in The Design School.
In January, Mau and Williams helped organize the world premiere screening of “I Have a Name,” a film directed by artist and activist Jon Linton, founder of Let’s Be Better Humans, at the ASU Downtown Phoenix campus, in partnership with the Herberger Institute, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions.
Building on Linton’s “I Have a Name” street photography series, the 40-minute film examines the plight of people who are homeless and underserved populations in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The screening was followed by a Q&A session with Linton, the film’s executive producer, Adam Bronfman, and Arizona Jews for Justice founder Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, as well as a design workshop around the issue of homelessness led by Mau and Williams.
A serial entrepreneur beginning at the age of 9, Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark “S,M,L,XL,” designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas.
He founded the Institute without Boundaries in 2003, a purpose-driven postgraduate design program at George Brown College in Toronto, and it is there that he and his students co-created the groundbreaking exhibition and best-selling book “Massive Change.”
Another one of Mau’s publications, “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” a 43-point declaration on sustaining a creative life written in 1998, has been translated into 15 languages and has spawned a multitude of creative interpretations that are widely shared on the internet to this day.
Mau practices a life-centered design approach to help his clients envision and articulate their purpose and future. Across nearly 40 years of design innovation, he has collaborated with leading brands, companies, organizations, heads of state, entrepreneurs, renowned artists and fellow optimists to create positive change and strategic impact across a broad spectrum of projects.
Mau evolved a unique design methodology of 24 Massive Change Design Principles, or MC24, that can be applied to inspire solutions to challenges in any field or environment at every scale.
