Designing the Future with Bruce Mau

Bruce Mau is internationally recognized for his achievements in design, including visual identities, brand systems, books, packaging, and exhibition graphics. His most recent work applies design tools and concepts to environmental, social, economic, and political problems. Mau’s current design consultancy, Massive Change Network, founded in 2010 together with partner Bisi Williams, is based on twenty-four principles that individuals or a global brand can use to set goals and achieve solutions.

On November 20, 2015, Bruce Mau was presented with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Collab Design Excellence Award. Collab, the Museum’s friends group for modern and contemporary design, awards a designer annually, which is accompanied with an exhibit in the Collab Gallery.

Mau’s associated exhibit, Work on What you Love: Bruce Mau Rethinking Design offers examples of the designer’s innovative solutions for clients like Coca-Cola, the country of Guatemala, and Biomuseo in Panama City, presenting a portrait of a tireless designer at the vanguard of the field’s search for solutions to global concerns. In addition, the exhibition highlights nine of these concepts, beginning with the eponymous “Work on What You Love,” and a display of more than two hundred books that Mau has designed for artists, architects, and clients such as Gagosian Gallery and the Getty Research Institute. Throughout the exhibition, graphics, books, objects, videos, and interactive digital displays highlight the story of each project and its guiding design principle.

Because Mau’s work is inseparable from his workshop design process, the exhibit will also include three workshops held throughout the city in the Spring of 2016. Focusing on issues specific to our city, the workshops will demonstrate the potential of design to combine aesthetic with ethical and social considerations, and, in the process, bolster the efforts of Philadelphians to foster positive change. The workshops are hosted by PennPraxis and the Penn Institute for Urban Research, Fleisher Art Memorial, and Taller Puertorriqueño.