Design What You Do - Bruce Mao

 

Bruce Mao is the chief creative officer of Bruce Mao design, and a creative force of nature.

[via Meet Bruce Mau. He wants to redesign the world. by Warren Berger]

Mau is at the forefront of a loose movement embracing a new way of
thinking about design. It includes individual designers and larger
companies like IDEO,
as well as several prominent design schools, where new theories about
“design thinking” are being developed: what it is, how it works, what
it can accomplish. But this “glimmer movement” (the “glimmer” being
when a life-changing idea crystallises in the mind) also includes
people from outside the design profession - basement tinkerers,
technologists, do-it-yourselfers, “crafties”, social activists,
environmentalists, video-gamers and business entrepreneurs. What links
them is their belief that everything today is ripe for reinvention and
“smart recombination”. And what makes them all designers is that they
don’t just think this, they act on it.

[…]

“The truth is that every object is not a separate thing but is incorporated into larger flows,” Mau says.

This is where Mau’s principle, “Design what you do”, comes into play. It sounds simple, but it’s actually a radical use of the term “design”. Businesses are used to designing what they make (the products); they may also be used to designing what they say to the outside world (advertising and communications). But it’s more unusual to think of applying design principles and approaches to the full spectrum of a company’s behaviour - encompassing everything the company does, including what it does behind closed doors. Mau’s position is that there really is no “inside” the factory any more. Changing conditions are calling into question the long-held assumption in business that there are two separate realities: the one that is shared with the outside world (in the form of product offering, advertising, communications) and the one that is considered private (the way a company actually makes things, operates, treats its employees, disposes of its waste and generally conducts itself ). The internet has brought about an unprecedented level of transparency that allows the outside world to see - and to comment on - the way that a company performs and behaves.

Early in his career, Mau began to consider the idea that everything a business does matters; that every action communicates a message to the world and also has consequences on some level. “One day I saw a truck driver with a big rig,” he says, “and I had this moment of clarity where I thought, ‘That driver doesn’t know what’s in the truck.’ And we allow him to remain ignorant and to say, ‘My problem is getting whatever is in this truck to the right address. Whether it’s a dirty bomb or an order of hamburgers is not consequential to me.’”

Mau saw this kind of compartmentalised thinking as standard practice in business, and felt that it allowed industry to wreak havoc on the world. “It led companies to say, ‘We are only going to express our values when we’re communicating - but when we’re manufacturing and doing all these other things, we don’t have to worry about it, because those things aren’t visible.’” Although many businesses tend to compartmentalise, Mau, as a designer, tended to look for the connections between things. This was a particularly resonant idea with him because he’d grappled with the concept of “incorporation” which was the subject of one of his 90s Zone books. He designed each book to create a richer, more immersive experience, “so that the experience correlated to the subject,” as he explains. So a book all about cities was designed not just to illustrate the qualities of urban environments, but to model those qualities, “to behave as a city does - with friction, congestion, things moving in opposite directions”.

“The truth is that every object is not a separate thing but is incorporated into larger flows,” Mau says. Everything is connected. This “incorporation” concept was much on his mind while researching his ground-breaking 2004 design exhibition, Massive Change, which started in Canada and moved to the US. He laid down some ground rules with the Vancouver Art Gallery, which commissioned it, namely: this was not going to be an art show. “I said, ‘I’ll do a show about the future of design, but only if we agree to take aesthetics off the table,’” he recalls. So he focused on design’s potential to solve problems and change lives. Or, as he puts it, “Instead of being about the world of design, it would be about the design of the world.” Design was no longer a subset of business, culture and nature. Instead, because of new technological advancements, increased sharing of knowledge and good old human ingenuity, it was now possible to design everything from a better corporate structure to better human body parts or a better breed of dog. How can we reboot and rebuild, people were asking, and do it better, do it more thoughtfully?

[…]

Perhaps the strongest response to the show [Massive Change, “an ambitious travelling exhibition, publication and educational program
series that mapped out the power and possibility of design”] came from the business
world, including large companies such as Nokia, MTV and Coca-Cola. Mau
had tapped into something that was just starting to emerge in business
- a sense of urgency with regard to the need to embrace profound
change. He was approached by a number of top executives, all wanting to
know more or less the same thing: could the concepts behind Massive
Change be applied to a major corporation? Was it possible for business
to design not just more stuff, but a better and more productive future?
Before long, Mau was meeting with these executives and starting up the
process of asking them “stupid questions” and showing them his little
sketches that just might transform their worlds. Parts of Mau’s
exhibition dealt with biological and environmental issues and
particularly with the ways in which complex ecosystems function. Every
organism in a system affects and depends on what is around it, which
means “there really is no ‘exterior’,” he says. He thought this notion
of “no exterior” pertained to the business world too - that businesses
had to stop dividing reality into “the company” and “the outside
world”. Massive Change proposed that entities or organisations could
transform themselves by designing new behaviours that adapted to change
in the world around them. Cities could change, water-delivery systems
could change, transportation could change - and companies could too.
But to do so meant reworking a broad spectrum of activities. In
business, that might include everything from the raw materials used to
supply-chain issues to the way the employees are managed.

The Massive Change viewpoint was that all these separate functions
should be seen as part of a completely integrated and thoroughly
designed system.

In the preface to Massive Change, Mao sets his context:

It’s not about the world of design, but the design of the world.

I am fascinated with smart design of business, and the way that businesses will operate as they adopt more of what we are learning works on the Web. And the central insight is that connectedness is the point of the web. We created the Web to happen to ourselves. And business has a huge role to play in how that unfolds in the greater social context. 

An important example of ‘smart recombination’ is when businesses learn to fuse what works from the past with what is emerging now, on the Web. Examining businesses horizontally, as a collection of flows, and examining how the objects in those flows — information, products, money, transport, raw materials — need to be reconfigured, and recontextualized for redesigned businesses to meet new imperatives.

We need more minds like Mao’s, and more people to hear his message.