Listening to Bruce Mau tell the story of the Massive Change exhibition. Click permalink for more...

rough and incomplete notes

"The Twentieth Century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical innovations but as an age in which human society dared to think o f the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective."
--Arnold Toynbee

Bruce is explaining that inn his view we can now do nearly anything in terms of design, so the real choice is what is worth doing? Also, it is not a matter of heroic individuals but increasingly of networks of people working together.

"The world may not have embraced secular democracy, but it has embraced traffic." Luckily, worldwide we are designing solutions for sustainable mobility...

We have to envision the world in a way which has more meaning, and allows us to conceive of the problems in a new way: "We will build a global mind."

There is a revolution going on in governance; social entrepreneurs, for instance.

There is a super-imposition of poverty and solar energy: that is, the poorest places on the planet are also the places which get the most sunlight -- points to solar cookers.

He noted self-healing plastics, which we've blogged before...

"You can't imagine design independent of the military -- it's been a huge incubator of the lives we live." But now the design edge is in the private sphere.

Talking about River Rouge (which I wrote about last week) and Living Machines...

Now talking about genetics and "the design of life itself"