The Toronto Star's Christopher Hume reviews Bruce Mau's Massive Change. Its title-- "A massive fraud?"-- pretty much sums up the tone of the piece, but it does make one very substantive, if arguable, point about Mau's call for design to be reconceived as "a way of thinking that is relevant to all aspects of living," a discipline that "allows us to reimagine the way we live." Hume sees this kind reform as something that's been tried before, and has always been a notable failure.
There is no question that design, in its broadest definition — from architecture to engineering, from fashion to the workings of a mechanical loom, from the handmade buggy to the latest mass-produced car — has shaped our world. Of course, designers have been as much a part of the problem as the solution. Let's not forget that burgeoning cities, gas-guzzling SUVs and every other planet-destroying, toxin-spewing, ozone-depleting feature of contemporary life, big or small, were designed. And not out of some romantic notion either, but in the service of a rapacious market economy....
In Mau's vision, the future of design lies less in individual accomplishment than in collaboration, and not just between various design disciplines but among all of society's players.... [D]esigners working with "architects, artists, writers, curators, academics, entrepreneurs, businesses and institutions," as Mau says on his website, can work together to use the "promise of design" to "minimize unintended consequences and maximize positive outcomes."
The utopian urge to create a better society is close to the heart of all designers, and it stretches back to William Morris. The 20th century, especially, bred countless would-be saviours, ready, willing and eager to remake the world in their own image.
None got the chance, which was fortunate in some cases — the damage would have been incalculable. For example, the great apostle of modernism, Le Corbusier, once suggested tearing down the heart of Paris and rebuilding it as an over-sized St. James Town.... The notion of the designer as god-like creator reached a peak with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.... in which architect Howard Roark blows up his own building rather than see it compromised.
Mau's collaborative approach stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Rand's rugged individualism. But where his predecessors provided the backdrop and the stage for modern life, Mau would redesign modern life itself.
I've been a fan of the "design is more than industrial engineering" school of thought. But Hume's implication is that its intellectual lineage is suspect, and has been bad for both design and society. Could Hume be right? Or would a more collaborative approach avoid the kind of authoritarianism that Corbu and Roark saw as synonymous with good design?
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