Project initiates change
Famous designer trains interns
By Carolyn Wong

Photo by Glenn Brown

Greg Van Alstyne, Director of Institute Without Boundaries, design students Vanessa Ahuactzin, Alejandro Quinto, Jennifer Leonard, Lorraine Gauthier, Mark Beever, Tyler Millard and Bruce Mau at a reception last February celebrating the first graduation ceremony of the IwB program, offered by George Brown College and Bruce Mau Designs.

Imagine you are an intern at a design studio and your first assignment is to find 100 ideas being used to change the world and present them to world-famous designer, Bruce Mau.

For many, that seems like a tall order. But for the eight students who helped Mau research and design the Massive Change exhibit, coming soon to the AGO, it was nothing short of amazing.

"It was very challenging but a really fantastic experience," says Lorraine Gauthier, a recent graduate of the Institute Without Boundaries (IwB) program, offered jointly by Bruce Mau Design and George Brown College's SCHOOLOFDESIGN.

When the first IwB class set up shop in Mau's studio on Spadina Avenue in 2003, Mau had developed the idea for the exhibit, which was commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, and identified 12 "design economies" or categories including urbanization, manufacturing and energy.

"Our job was to look for ideas that had the capacity to change the world in our specific economies," explains Gauthier, who was assigned to explore military, and wealth and politics.

What her colleagues predicted would be a mundane economy to research turned out to be one of the most interesting because of the resources that military organizations, particularly the U.S., put towards developing technology and design, Gauthier says.

"I was given security clearance to attend a military conference... Manufacturers of various things like tanks, gear and all kinds of weaponry were there so I got to see all that stuff. It was pretty mind-boggling," she recalls.
Each student uncovered hundreds of amazing finds and big ideas, shared them with Mau and helped him incorporate them into the project.

"Throughout the year, we were also sketching the exhibition and what each room would look like based on how we would convey the ideas that we wanted to present," Gauthier says.
The current IwB class contributed to Massive Change through the creation and building of the exhibition which was first shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery in October 2004.

Since completing the program, Gauthier and a fellow IwB grad, Alex Quinto have started their own company called Work Worth Doing.

"When we got to the end, we realized that we had spent a whole year looking at how other people were changing the world so our next step would be to start our own work," Gauthier says. "That's where Massive Change goes from being a noun to a verb."

The exhibition runs from Friday to May 29 with several related events scheduled at the AGO including a panel discussion with the IwB students on March 16 at 7 p.m. They will share their extraordinary experiences in researching, developing and producing Massive Change.

Find more information about the Institute Without Boundaries postgraduate program.

Find more News and Event at George Brown School of Design

Read more about Massive Change Project in Vancouver

Revised: September 17, 2009