Bruce Mau: A Designer Puts Life on the Drawing Boards

In “Mau,” a new documentary-cum-biopic, the Canadian-born, Chicago-based designer Bruce Mau simply counts Coca-Cola bottles to give you a sense of the scale of the environmental crisis the world faces as its population approaches eight billion. He calculates that the sale of Cokes over the next 50 years, if uncorrected, will dump 2.7 trillion empty bottles into an environment already endangered.

Hoisting a small fact to its statistical extreme, Mau concludes that a Coke bottle is not just a bottle, not simply a matter of an industrial designer shaping an icon. He advocates redesigning the corporate culture that produced it and the larger culture that drank it.

Mau thinks big.

In 2017, the Austrian filmmakers (and brothers) Jono and Benji Bergmann heard Mau speak at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, and, impressed by this environmental prophet, they wanted to both spread his message and ground the messenger in a biography that rooted his thinking.

The film starts with glowing testimonials by famous colleagues: “powerful,” “brilliant,” “creative,” “visionary,” “optimistic,” “ingenious.” The filmmakers then whisk us to his origin story: Mau was born on the moon. When NASA sought a lunar environment in which to train astronauts, they booked his hometown, Sudbury, in Ontario, Canada, for a trial landing: Nickel mines had transformed swaths of the landscape into a chemical desert that Mau calls the “dead zone.” Miners here, including his father, spent perpetually “jet-lagged” lives in the darkness of the mines only to emerge after work into the night and the Canadian winter.

On a filmed safari back to this landscape, the normally loquacious, suddenly hushed Mau finds the family’s abandoned farmhouse on a desolate road that dead-ends in an endless forest headed toward the North Pole. He steps into a frame building open to the elements, eerie with lacy curtains hanging limply. The camera spots the entry vestibule where, one day, he recalls, his alcoholic father crashed through the storm door in a rage after a brawl, swearing and bleeding.

Life in a dead zone coupled with domestic violence prompted the teenage Mau to design his way out. He put his life on the drawing boards. “I didn’t even know the word design, but the moment that you have a particular outcome in mind, you become a designer. Systematically executing an outcome is design,” he explained in a Zoom interview for this article. “You either leave it to chance or design what you want.”

This single realization gave him agency in both his life and career, and it forms the basis of an empowering public lesson that, as a design motivator, he tirelessly delivers in conferences and lectures: everything is design, everyone is a designer, and design can produce positive change at all scales.

The film cuts to an overnight ride on a Greyhound to Toronto and the Ontario College of Art, where Mau discovers its advertising department and the “intersection of the word and image” that he finds riveting. His portfolio leads him to a job in London with the renowned graphics firm Pentagram, which he doesn’t find riveting. He decides to dedicate himself to working for the public good.

Returning to Toronto in 1982, he co-founded Public Good Design and Communications, and tried to mate 9-to-5 reality with idealism: “How do we use the power and creative energy that we have to make the world a better place for more people?” he asks in the film. The group worked for the Red Cross, the nurses’ union, and small arts institutions.

Feeling that he didn’t have an education, he built his own, through people. His “library of people” included Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Eileen Gray, the Eameses.

With the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, he created “S, M, L, XL,” a three-inch-thick, six-pound almanac of Koolhaas’s built and unbuilt structures. Organized from small to large and extra-large buildings, the book is fat, brash and raw, with grainy, in-your-face images. With words and images toggling for position, Mau visualized the written word, giving the book the filmic impact of a flipbook.

With “S, M, L, XL,” Mau became famous as an Andy Warhol of the page, in a high-impact form of intellectual advertising that sought to change the way readers process information. The book anticipated how the internet chunks language. Onstage the designer may speak in paragraphs and think in chapters, but Mau broke down the page itself into sound bites, headlines and blocks.

As in the Koolhaas book, the scale of Mau’s projects in the film graduates from small to extra large and even super large, as he ramps up from the designed page to the designed earth. To get to super large, Mau breaks down the boundaries of graphic design to include art, science and technology in what he calls a “fact-based optimism” that propels him from city planning and country branding to exhibitions and even birch-bark canoes.

As a career biography, “Mau” shades into a history of design. Not since midcentury industrial designers aspired to elevate the quality of everyday life for everyone, everywhere, has a designer thought at such sweeping scale. With their potato-chip chairs, aerodynamic cars and aquadynamic steamships, designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Henry Dreyfuss and Raymond Loewy shaped how America looked after World War II. Their futuristic designs gave form to progressive culture: “The best for the most for the least,” said Charles Eames. Mau was putting both scale and idealism back into design, necessitated by what he calls the possible coming “extinction events” that give urgency to his environmental call.

In 2005, he exploded the graphic innovations from “S, M, L, XL” onto the walls of a 20,000-square-foot exhibition, “Massive Change,” in Toronto.

Coca-Cola, which had worked with Loewy in the 1940s and ’50s to design its visual culture, contacted him to make sustainability a platform on which to restructure its organization and identity.

City planners from Mecca found him, asking him to rethink how better to handle the Hajj.

Guatemala found him, asking him to redesign and rebrand the country; 36 years of civil war had destroyed its citizens’ belief in a future.

Acknowledging that “Massive Change” didn’t give people the tools to implement the change, Mau — acting on an invitation from China — planned an even more ambitious show, “Massive Action.” At 65,000 square feet, the exhibition was to be perhaps the biggest design show ever produced. But relations between Canada, where Mau was then based, and China soured, and the show has been shelved pending new venues.

“Mau” marches to a triumphalist beat. But inevitably there are obstacles. The Mecca plan stopped: Mau was not Muslim. The initial success in Guatemala was cut short by suspicions of an outsider tampering with Guatemala’s identity.

Glossing over failures and incomplete projects, the film seems colored by the very optimism — “positivity,” in Mau’s word — that makes his growing vocation at the pulpit so charismatic. Nor does the film follow up the glowing descriptions of Mau with any doubts or criticisms voiced by skeptics — megalomania, per one critic — that would dimensionalize the film, and Mau.

The designer who thinks big, for example, sometimes fails to think small. The reformer who diagnosed the health of a planet headed for eight billion people suddenly faced the prospect of his own extinction event because of an enlarged heart. “I had designed everything else but I had left my heart to chance,” he says in the film. “I wasn’t designing the health I want.”

The value of the documentary is that for 78 well-paced, jump-cutting minutes, we see the cherubic face of Mau’s youth mature into its current, more prophetic Walt Whitman version. For all his exposure in lectures and conferences, as a motivational speaker, Mau has, like Greta Garbo, dodged the spotlight, the rare celebrity who doesn’t talk about himself. He does not use his fame as a mirror. The messenger is not the message.

In our Zoom interview, Mau talked of other recent trips to his hometown, to work in design courses with Indigenous groups who teach him and students how to live with nature. He cites how they remove bark off spalling trees to craft canoes, for example, and then return the boats at the end of their life spans to the forest floor, to re-enter nature’s cycle. He is bypassing the city’s extractive mining culture to embrace the notion of a sustainable culture — “food for the next generation of life,” he says in the film.

“Their cosmology puts life, not humans, at the center of life and the universe,” he told me. “Everything I’m working on now is to establish life-centered design, moving from designing the object to the ecology. Making one thing is not a problem. Making a billion of the things is a problem. The greater the problem, the more significant the design opportunity.”

The answer to the dead zone was a living zone that was already in Sudbury’s backyard. Mau, a work in progress, has made a round trip.

Mau

The film can be seen in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and will be available for rent online starting June 7.