Bruce Mau

Bruce Mau joined Freeman as Chief Design Officer, believing that the multisensory live brand experience is the most influential medium we could possibly imagine. By applying the transformative power of design thinking, Bruce leads Freeman to develop creative solutions, increase efficiency, and drive innovation. World-leading visionary, innovator, designer, and author, Bruce is committed to creative, healthy, ecological and economic abundance. Informed by 25 years of studio experience in design innovation and collaboration with some of the world’s leading artists, institutions and businesses, Bruce has made the simple commitment to connect his life and work to business, education and human development. As Co-founder of Massive Change Network, he is committed to developing purposeful projects in education, health, leadership, and security. Bruce is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for whole system transformation. He has been a serial entrepreneur since he was nine. Twenty-five years in the business of design gave Bruce the practical, holistic insights for going into the design of business with his Massive Change Network. In doing so he laid the foundation for the new discipline of enterprise design, successfully applying his design thinking methodology to economic, cultural, governmental, environmental and social change. Motivated by the certainty that the future demands a new breed of designer, Bruce founded the Institute without Boundaries – an innovative studio-based postgraduate program in collaboration with George Brown College, Toronto. Bruce and his students created the groundbreaking exhibition and best-selling book, Massive Change (Phaidon) — a project that declared, “Massive Change is not about the world of design, it’s about the design of the world.” Bruce’s newest book, The Third Teacher (Abrams) which he and his studio co-authored with OWP/P Architects and VS Furniture, presents a compendium of ways that design can transform teaching and learning for students, families and teachers to thrive in tomorrow’s world. Bruce is renowned as an author and designer of award-winning books, including LifeStyle (Phaidon), S, M, L, XL (The Monacelli Press) in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas, and the iconic and celebrated ZONE BOOKSseries. Translated into several languages, Bruce’s "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth "has been an inspiration with his aphoristic articulation of his personal philosophy and design strategies for unleashing creativity. Bruce is featured in the recently released book GLIMMER: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe the World by Warren Berger (Penguin Press). According to Berger, Bruce seeks to prove that the power of design is boundless, and has the capacity to bring positive change on a global scale. Distinguished award highlights from Bruce’s career include the Design Mind, National Design Award, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Collab Award, the Global Creative Leadership Award from the Louise Blouin Foundation; the AIGA Gold Medal for Communication Design; being named the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Distinguished Fellow, Segal Design Institute, Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University. According to Bruce, “A new world is evolving. It is driven by purpose and committed to sustainable human development. The new world inspires and demands a new approach. Our future is no longer about selling more stuff to more people –it’s about understanding our potential as citizens and designing and producing shared prosperity and abundance.” Bruce’s purpose is to contribute the most that one possibly can to this new world. Bruce is Chief Design Officer at Freeman, and the Co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network.