Organized from small to large and extra-large buildings, the book is fat, brash and raw, with grainy, in-your-face images. With the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, he created “S, M, L, XL,” a three-inch-thick, six-pound almanac of Koolhaas’s built and unbuilt structures. His “library of people” included Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Eileen Gray, the Eameses. The group worked for the Red Cross, the nurses’ union, and small arts institutions.įeeling that he didn’t have an education, he built his own, through people. Returning to Toronto in 1982, he co-founded Public Good Design and Communications, and tried to mate 9-to-5 reality with idealism: “How do we use the power and creative energy that we have to make the world a better place for more people?” he asks in the film. He decides to dedicate himself to working for the public good. His portfolio leads him to a job in London with the renowned graphics firm Pentagram, which he doesn’t find riveting. The film cuts to an overnight ride on a Greyhound to Toronto and the Ontario College of Art, where Mau discovers its advertising department and the “intersection of the word and image” that he finds riveting. This single realization gave him agency in both his life and career, and it forms the basis of an empowering public lesson that, as a design motivator, he tirelessly delivers in conferences and lectures: everything is design, everyone is a designer, and design can produce positive change at all scales. “You either leave it to chance or design what you want.” Systematically executing an outcome is design,” he explained in a Zoom interview for this article. “I didn’t even know the word design, but the moment that you have a particular outcome in mind, you become a designer. Life in a dead zone coupled with domestic violence prompted the teenage Mau to design his way out.
The camera spots the entry vestibule where, one day, he recalls, his alcoholic father crashed through the storm door in a rage after a brawl, swearing and bleeding.
He steps into a frame building open to the elements, eerie with lacy curtains hanging limply. On a filmed safari back to this landscape, the normally loquacious, suddenly hushed Mau finds the family’s abandoned farmhouse on a desolate road that dead-ends in an endless forest headed toward the North Pole.
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