Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

This is a reblog from August 2013. We have revamped our website and wanted to carry a select number of blogposts over to the new site and this is one of them. Hope you enjoy. I love this list.

Bruce Mau is a well known self-taught Canadian designer who, until recently, worked primarily with brands and environments. His firm Bruce Mau Design continues this work, but Bruce Mau the man along with his wife has started a new venture called Massive Change, which was borne out of an art exhibition on the future of design. In this exhibition for the Vancouver Art Gallery Mau insisted that it be about ideas and developments that were changing the world rather than strictly visual results. This “redefinition” of design as thinking and process rather than style and outcome makes it so much more relative to real life. The Massive Change project is taking design principles and strategies and applying them to real world social and political challenges. As they say on their website,”It’s not about the world of design. It is about the design of the world.” I think Bruce is a brilliant thinker and has beautiful ideas. A decade or so ago he wrote what he calls the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. I just found it and felt that it very much deserved sharing. Admittedly, I have a soft spot for manifestos like this, but this may be the best one I have found yet. There 43 points to his manifesto but every one of them is worth consideration. I have included a few of my favorites below.

If would like to read the whole thing click here: Massive Change Network

#22. Make your own tools in order to build unique things.
Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

#24. Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.

#29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependant.

#32. Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

-Bruce Mau