Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.

In order to understand and harness these emerging forces, there is an urgent need to articulate precisely what we are doing to ourselves and to our world. This is the ambition of Massive Change.

Massive Change is a celebration of our global capacities but also a cautious look at our limitations. It encompasses the utopian and dystopian possibilities of this emerging world, in which even nature is no longer outside the reach of our manipulation.

For many of us, design is invisible. We live in a world that is so thoroughly configured by human effort that design has become second nature, ever-present, inevitable, taken for granted.

And yet, the power of design to transform and affect every aspect of daily life is gaining widespread public awareness.

No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes. Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, will map the new capacity, power and promise of design.

Massive Change explores paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image and information. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves: Now that we can do anything what will we do?

We want to produce a new breed of change maker - citizens who think as designers. These people would be, in the words of inventor and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, a "synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist."

Massive Change is a project by Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries. >from *Massive Change*. It's not about the world of design. It's about the design of the world.

related context
> the world is not running out of oil. october 19, 2006
> destruction by design. june 9, 2006
> how does your city affect you?. november 4, 2005
> 'one world, one health' paradigm. june 24, 2005
> state of the world 2005. january 14, 2005
> climate change. december 21, 2004
> oil peak. june 23, 2004
> aids epidemic. november 12, 2003. [more]
> flow: the design challenge of pervasive computing. november 6, 2002
> earth 'will expire by 2050'. july 12, 2002
> worldwide hunger. january 30, 2002

imago
> tricky tunes of massive change

sonic flow
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