Creating Massive Change
Visionary designer Bruce Mau spoke with students in Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program about life-centered design.
Reimagining, redesigning, and recreating our future is the greatest opportunity in human history.
Visionary designer Bruce Mau boldly made that statement as part of the 2021 feature-length film, "MAU," that chronicles his life and professional work. It's a story of a young man from Canada who went on to become a world-famous graphic designer and creative director.
Mau has written or designed more than 250 books, including S, M, L, XL (The Monacelli Press, 1995) — one of the best-selling books on architecture — and MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work (Phaidon Press, 2020). He also contributed to THE NEXUS: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World — The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science (The MIT Press, 2022), written by former Northwestern Engineering Dean Julio M. Ottino.
Mau is currently the co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a global design consultancy based in Evanston aspiring to design a better future. He also is a distinguished fellow of Northwestern's Segal Design Institute. Mau is a notorious optimist who brought his optimism to Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program — a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management, where he spoke with students about life-centered design.
Afterward, he shared additional perspective on his talk, his creative journey, and his advice for aspiring designers.
What were the most important lessons you wanted students to understand?
I wanted the audience to understand four things:
- We need to encourage conscious awareness of life, connecting us within one planetary ecosystem.
- We are all designers.
- We need to evolve from designing discrete objects to designing complex systems.
- This is a movement, and we need to accelerate it.
How do you think MMM is preparing students to be massive change leaders?
The MMM program’s website speaks to a redefined skillset necessary to compete, and areas of study that build upon what is already one of the best MBA programs in the world today. That skillset can be summed up in one word: design.
I define design as the ability to envision a better future and take the steps necessary to make it happen. I always say that where you fail to design, you design for failure.
These young people, wherever they are from in the world, wherever they will go once they leave Northwestern, will be stepping into a world that needs a lot of help — a lot of massive, positive change to navigate a crisis stack of challenges. MMM students are gaining both business and design skills that are teaching them to look at the entire ecosystem surrounding challenges and approach them with optimistic systems thinking.
The principles in MC24 demonstrate your belief in the power of design. What do you think makes the principles so impactful?
They’re approachable. The 24 “slogans” are articulated in everyday language and presented in a bold, graphical way that makes them engaging. Although there’s no fixed sequence to the MC24 Design Principles, there’s a reason we put "First inspire, design is leadership, lead by design" first. The subtitle of the book also points out the design principles are applicable to both one’s life and work.
What are some recent projects you've worked on?
MASSIVE ACTION is a broader program that we’ve been working on for some years. In 2022, we gained a good deal of traction on it when we enjoyed an immersive month of learning with a cohort of faculty, staff and students at the School of Arts, Design & Architecture at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). They launched the Center for Massive Action in Sydney and focused on applying our design methodology to develop projects in support of their strategic 2051 goals, which are centered around climate, health, and empowerment.
We remain engaged with five teams who continue to collaborate on five projects that began during that experience.
MASSIVE ACTION takes many forms, all with the goal of empowering 100 million designers with the tools of life-centered design to tackle the world’s most vexing problems and design a better future for all of life. In 2024 we began work on one of those escalating global challenges: homelessness. We have a wonderful partner in Theorem Media, the producers of a powerful documentary, “I HAVE A NAME.” We’ve collaborated with them on a series of screenings that include a Q&A plus design challenge workshops. It’s an incredibly powerful experience and an important project.
What do you pride yourself most on professionally?
Clearly, my design ethic is focused on the public good. It’s not a Johnny-come-lately scenario; The first design studio that I co-founded in 1982 was named Public Good Design and Communications. We were proudly committed to only taking on projects that we recognized as contributing to the public good.
The work that I’ve been doing over the last couple of decades with my life and business partner, Bisi Williams, at Massive Change Network is similarly grounded in creating positive change. Bisi and I are both proud to share with our children that we have always tried to do the best we could.
So that we contribute to the world in productive ways, every day, we try to bring an ethical and just approach to our work. It’s certainly a challenging approach — and we haven’t always succeeded — but, ultimately, when I look back upon our accomplishments and I consider the work that lies ahead, it really all comes back to making choices that serve the public good. We’ve had many other projects that I’m satisfied with, but I consider advancing the public good as probably our greatest achievement.
How do you maintain an optimistic attitude?
Some of it is the extraordinary people that I get to work with from all over the world. Some of it is the opportunities that many of those people bring to me as a designer — their great challenges. Accordingly, I have no choice but to be optimistic. It’s one of the most important tools in my designer’s toolbox.
This is an unprecedented time in history, and I believe we have an unprecedented future as well. The opportunity is off the charts. Right now, we can say, “I can envision a future, and I can help people arrive at that future.” Designers have the magical ability to create a vision, to inspire people to move to a new place. It’s an absolutely extraordinary power and privilege.
What advice do you give aspiring designers?
My advice echoes one of our MC24 Design Principles: Work on what you love.