Designer Bruce Mau says he wants a world with oil ‘and so much more’
Proposes assumptions to mitigate guilt, open possibilities for future
Tuesday January 26, 2010 -- Michelle Strutzenberger
TORONTO - Design guru Bruce Mau advocates that designing intelligent yet compelling products and systems is the new way to create a “beautiful future.”

Mau says the world he wants is one with oil and “so much more,” proposing that eliminating oil dependency is an extreme objective, implausible “in our lifetime,” and possibly even unnecessary based on several assumptions he puts forward.

Photo by Dave Gillespie

Speaking to about 200 delegates at a one-day symposium in Toronto where leading designers conversed on what a world without oil might look like and how to achieve that, Mau said the time has come to stop defining the future negatively, as environmentalists have done for decades.

For instance, since the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, a book that has been widely credited with launching the environmental movement, people have been prodded to “get out of their cars.” But, in fact, the human population has done the exact opposite on a “global, collective and consistent” scale.

“I think the change we need is actually a change in mindset from no to yes. And that is where design comes in,” said Mau.

The Canadian designer and founder of Institute Without Boundaries suggested that the guilt be taken out of the environmental equation and the focus turned to “simply looking at our possibilities.”

Mau offered several assumptions to contribute to the reduction of guilt:

• assume climate change is “not our fault,” which is plausible, he said, considering the climate is a “vastly complex system we have only begun to understand;”
• assume “we never run out of oil,” also plausible, said Mau, referring to reports which show “we find oil when we need it,” and there are predictions that there are 50-70,000 years of oil still to be extracted;
• assume the cost of oil remains low, also possible as research shows humans are doubling their technological capacity every 12 months, thereby increasing the capacity to use the energy in oil;
• assume interest in sustainability decreases, another likely scenario as research is showing the human population is at the high point of commitment to sustainability and a decrease in support is on the way.

Combining these assumptions with the projected population increase over the next four decades or so — about three billion — and the monumental change that would be required to completely eliminate oil dependency for a society that currently consumes one cubic mile of oil annually, Mau proposed that the objective should be to design a world, with oil, that is both “intelligent” and “thrilling.”

“For me, this combination of intelligent and thrilling is the critical operating idea that we need to introduce to this discussion,” he said.

— More to come

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