Core77

Toronto-based "design activist" Bruce Mau shared an hour and a half worth of thoughts last night with a nearly packed auditorium at Parsons The New School for Design. Parsons Dean Paul Goldberger provided discussion topics.

Although nominally a graphic designer whose hand has touched genre-shattering books, buildings and exhibitions, Bruce Mau is most notable for his optimism and ecuminism: he sees tremendous progress in the history of human endeavour, and has great faith in human ingenuity to continue this progress through the application of well-considered design to all aspects of life and environment.

Case in point: In response to a quote by Segway designer Dean Kamen -- "The world may not have embraced secular democracy, but it has embraced traffic..." -- Mau pointed out that South Korea has seen an 80 fold increase in per capita GDP since the 1970's, but the automotive traffic that has accompanied this growth is among the worst in the world. Rather than portray it as a devil's bargain, he sees it as a qualified good coupled with a design challenge. "How do we reduce car traffic?" is part of it, but "How do we redesign the system of transporting people?" is the greater question. The Segway was brought out as one possible solution, and Mau showed his more pragmatic side when asked about its spectacular failure to deliver a transit revolution: "It just wasn't marketed very well."

In his signature all-encompassing style, Mau took the Segway as one small part of a solution, noting that modern cities and towns owe most of their structure to the existence of the automobile, and that different modes of transport necessitate different structures. This integrative attitude toward design recurred throughout the evening, showing up in discussions of contract writing ("Gehry's real genius is in writing contracts that allow ongoing collaboration between different groups"), air travel ("we know airplanes -- and the whole global air travel system -- work so well because we're so surprised when they don't"), and urban planning ("the planning separation of 'city' versus 'park' is tremendously damaging").