Design News
November 2004

Within the sturdy walls of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Bruce Mau and his creative team at the Institute without Boundaries have built a positive view of the future. Based on design's role in the world economies and social welfare, Massive Change: The Future of Global Design models the forms and shapes of Mau's vision of the future—in collaboration with a creative curatorial team. The exhibit was created in large part by students in Mau's Institute Without Boundaries, under a partnership program between Mau's studio and the George Brown-Toronto City College.


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What Mau has created (on two newly renovated gallery floors) is a ten-step program for overcoming pessimism about the future. In its first three weeks, 20,000 people visited the gallery, curious to find out how things are going to improve for them. (William Gibson made the ferry trip over from Vancouver Island to catch the counter-argument to Neuromancer.) The popularity of the exhibit is testament that Vancouverites are ready to see change and to witness design in its role as a contributor to sustainable society.

(The idea of featuring design in the art gallery met some resistance within the local arts community. Gallery director Kathleen Bartels, a bit of a rebel and one of the youngest museum directors in North America, commissioned Mau's exhibit.)

Massive Change treads on broad territory that is both familiar and disturbing. The exhibit opens with Arnold J. Toynbee's (1889-1975) own prediction of his future. "The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective." (The quote is taken from a 1957 speech by Lester B. Pearson, arguably Canada's most renowned Nobel laureate. Pearson was recognized most for his contribution to the creation of the United Nations.)

Toynbee's eloquent words frame Mau's drive to show the positive social changes created by design through systems and organizations. Be it craft, trade or science, the exhibit aims to observe design within a framework of these systems of exchanges…without consideration for aesthetics. "We don't care what design looks like!" adds the disclaimer. The introduction is a concise, inviting start, printed in black on a white wall. But, given such an ambitious project, what follows in the galleries is not exactly as black and white.

The exhibit begins by taking its first step into a densely populated future outlined in city landscapes. "By 2007, for the first time in history, half the world will live in a city," reveals the voice-over.

Urban Economies, the first system of exchanges represented in Massive Change, is a brief look into the future shape of our shelters. A video loop presents a rapid-edit view of the current trend towards urbanism and sustainable-living solutions, offering brief clips on problem solvers who are building sustainable ways of living. Environmental activist David Suzuki, green architect Michelle Kaufmann, and "cradle-to-cradle" coiner Michael McDonough are all present, but as a brief, fleeting view into changes in urban building, it remains just a taste. And the more interesting aspects of addressing rapidly growing urban areas are omitted: As Brazil's "poster child for sustainability," the city of Curitiba is mentioned, but not its stunning transformation. The simplicity of Curitiba's solution to traffic congestion—more buses with more room on major routes—is a gem that gets lost within a cluttered picture. (After an exceptionally high growth period in the 1990s, Vancouverites would be particularly interested in this arena. The city has made a name for itself as a champion of high-density living.)


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The video presentation ends with the hyperbolic statement: "Everything=City=Design=Hope" and then it's on to tackling world transportation issues. In Movement Economies, viewers can see big ideas about changing transportation that came to fruition in little packages. Visitors are treated to Twike, the Swiss-invented two-passenger motorized bicycle, as well as a bicycle ambulance for sub-saharan African nations, created by Niki Dun, an Emily Carr Institute for Art + Design graduate. The Sinclair C5, a 1985 design launched in the United Kingdom, is characterized as "perhaps twenty years ahead of its time"—which, taken literally, means that this coming new year will see a huge demand for these low-riders! Intended for short city distances, the electric-motored vehicles had a 35 kilometre per hour speed range. Set against black and white images of congestion from Bangkok to Dhaka, these modest transporters are meant to steer the way toward freedom of movement. However, the viewer is left to ponder whether these inventions can dissuade people from mindlessly hopping into their living-room-sized cars.

The venerable Dean Kamen is featured here prominently. An entire room is devoted to recreate Dean Kamen's DEKA studios and his noteworthy revisioning of mechanically-assisted human movement (in the form of the iBot and the Segway). These designs are presented as prototypes, promising a strong presence in the landscape of the future.

Or, they might be steps towards something else—much like the many computer inventions collected by researcher and designer Bill Buxton. Watches, keyboards, computer mousing devices and joysticks are encapsulated in glass bubbles within the Information Economies. Relics of the past trace their way to direct and indirect developments in the creation of technologies that help bridge the gap between human and machine. An unappealing Bit Pad One from 1975 indirectly leads to the extremely responsive Inspector Mouse System.

Amid such meticulous developments, the bigger questions about design are brightly shown. Attractive, magnetic "portraits of the Earth" are set in a dark room. Light boxes showing divergent maps of the globe are like spheres of knowledge—from a scan of Internet networks to color-coded views of the depletion of the ozone layer. Voyeuristic urges are satisfied by satellite imagery that zooms in on the streets of New York City.

Most strikingly, one room is left entirely dark and equipped with small flashlights. Messages written on the walls speak to world populations living without access to sources of power or clean water. The light at the end of the tunnel is represented by peep holes, revealing an adjacent brightly-lit room graffitied with ideas for alternative energy solutions.

At the other end of the first floor, Massive Change Credit Cards (provided with the price of admission) are swiped through scanners to buy a wealth of information on branding and product placement in Market Economies.

These virtual VISAs activate speakers that communicate the power of corporations such as Walmart and Mecca Cola (a Dubai-based soda company that donates 10% of its profits Palestinian charities). Mecca Cola is used as an example of effective branding with its trademark slogan: "Drink with Commitment."

Though sleek and shiny, the info booths neglect to take a deeper look into the dynamics of the corporations they represent. Mecca Cola itself holds strong reservations about the capitalist system that funds most design and branding—the company's website is highly political, speaking against the Zionist movement and corruption-inducing capitalism.

(Essentially, such is the danger with the Massive Change exhibit. Observers cannot dwell on the sometimes-disparate range of issues and concepts presented without becoming overwhelmed. Mau set out to focus on the accomplishments rather than the aesthetics of design. Ironically, the visual presentations are appealing and absorbed before analysis or emotional reaction can catch up. One wanders from fascinating x-ray images of people being smuggled across borders in produce trucks, towards a map of the regions receiving the most solar energy. But it's hard to take a breath of reflection in between.)

Upstairs, a very large space is devoted solely to materials. "Instead of designing a thing, we design designing a thing." Hung on shockingly yellow walls (perhaps to avoid aesthetics) are materials in the spelled-out-shapes of their most fitting descriptors. "Self-Cleaning" is Pilkington Activ™ Glass. After such densely crammed information in previous rooms, the space seems wasted and sterile. Self-healing plastics and the hyper-light aerogel are, predictably, kept out of reach.


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The Material Economies leads the way to the Military Economies where white banners display useful developments either created or adopted by the military system. Napoleon's army ate canned food; now there is Natick Food—the company developing food packaging embedded with antioxidants. Other examples of combat-terrain gadgets are Global Positioning Systems, Hummers, and Gortex jackets.

Although there was some trepidation in including this section in an exhibit about positive change, this is not visually resolved. The banner display, inevitably, looks like harmless advertising. Such product placement displays continue in the Manufacturing Economies: A ramp showcases a Hewlett-Packard printer, Mountain Equipment Co-op T-shirts made from organic cotton, and Herman Miller's Mirra chair. Here, one feels a conflict between Massive Change as an interactive learning experience and Massive Change as a concept and product display.

In Living Economies, science and design merge from the starting point of DNA mapping. The section is simultaneously disconcerting and awesomely impressive. Featured is a BioCD, a device from David Nolte at Purdue University, "poised to become a fast, cheap and reliable analytical system." Remarkably, it records a patient's health at the molecular level, based on a blood sample.

This section is also where viewers are invited to agree or disagree with stem cell research, genetically-modified foods, and the inserting of vaccines into vitamins. (Here, people can have their say in an exhibit that, despite itself, neglects the human aspect to a large extent. Although full of information and impressive inventions, people are eerily absent from the overall picture; voice-over recordings speak out from the walls and nondescript maps represent nations. Clothes hang on mannequins and bikes lie empty. In the final analysis, it is hard to tell what kind of impact these ideas can have without seeing how they will be used.)


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Reflection on the current state of inequality in the world's population is invited in a large red room decorated with silver globes. These silver balloons represent the disparate global state of Wealth & Politics Economies. For example, according to Unicef, 33 billion US dollars are spent on bottled water worldwide, compared to the 6.7 billion dollars required to provide clean water and sanitation to all. We are asked, how will solutions to such inequalities be communicated to shoppers in Japan who cover their umbrellas with disposable wrap every time they enter another store? Or to North Americans who are still deeply in love with their SUVs?

Ideology and positive intention is clearly shown in Massive Change. According to Mau, design is meant to create solutions to the discontents of rapid globalization. But, in being relegated to the walls of a gallery, does design lose its functional qualities? "We don't tend to see design as a gallery thing," said Alan Boykiw, head of Vancouver's Emily Carr Institute for Art + Design. "It's about people."

Pat Henson, a Vancouver resident since 1949 making her second ever visit to the gallery, had a cheerless reaction to the exhibit: "The world is getting away from me." Other pessimistic thoughts were posted in a room for viewers' comments on the major question of the exhibit: "Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

One response: "Buy more stuff."

According to Toynbee's historical theory, a civilization can either thrive by responding to challenges, or deteriorate by failing to do so. Regardless of whether Massive Change overwhelmes with optimism or simply overwhelmes, it presents a creative and ambitious response to more than a few of our world's biggest challenges.

Caroline Dobuzinskis first discovered design in the form of a Herman Miller vintage shell formica chair left in a university classroom. Caroline now lives and writes about arts and culture in Vancouver.