Since Bruce Mau founded his Toronto studio in 1985, his think tank of design, editorial, artistic, and curatorial collaborators has steadily gained international recognition for producing innovative, multidisciplinary work. The immense success of the book S,M,L,XL, Mau's collaboration with architect Rem Koolhaas, jettisoned the two designers to cult-figure status and spawned many imitations.

Mau's latest book, Life Style, to be published by Phaidon Press later this fall, illustrates his firm's creative process and studio practice, documenting collaborations with such publishers, cultural institutions, and architects as Zone Books, the Getty Research Institute, Vitra, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, and Frank Gehry, among others. This 624-page tome--a manifesto, polemic, memoir, and retrospective all at once--goes beyond the standard design monograph and urges the reader to confront the ever-changing world of what Mau calls "the global image economy." "There is no longer a distance between foreground and background," Mau explains. "On the contrary, what we consider our work--that is, the objects we produce, whether they are books, cinema, systems, objects, spaces, or language--is, in fact, embedded in the thickness between the foreground and background. The objects, in effect, are formed of the world beyond them. And that world has produced a new and volatile set of forces, conditions, and practices."

As one of the few designers who believe that the content is the design, Mau argues that design is something one lives--a life style--rather than something one does. According to Mau, the advent of computer technology, which is making design more accessible to everyone, allows for a redefinition of design as a thinking activity, principally with an aesthetic dimension.

Life Style promises to be a handbook for designers--a personal brand-ing toolkit. It's a call for the death of graphic design as we know it, and a glimpse of a better future, where the designer is a creator of content as well as of form.



Styling Life: Declaration

Life style. There are few terms that have been as savagely commodified and gutted of meaning in recent years. Our first instinct is to leave its empty carcass to the vendors and merchants. But in the spirit of dé-tournement (the diversion of aesthetic artifacts into contexts of one's own device), we are wresting it back. We are interested in recuperating and reinvesting the term "life style" so that it speaks of the designer's role in shaping the lives we lead and the world in which we live.

One of the revelations in the studio has been that life doesn't simply happen to us, we produce it. That's what style is. It's producing life. It's inverting the energy flow. Rather than accepting that life is something that we passively receive, accept, or endure, I believe that life is something we generate. We use our capacities. And that all boils down to style. Style may be presented as theory, serendipity, or happenstance. It may be presented as all these different things. But, for the most part, style is a decision about how we will live. Style is not superficial. It is a philosophical project of the deepest order.

Design is intrinsically rhetorical, the expression of a series of more or less convincing propositions about life and the way it might be ordered. I am a firm believer in what Jean-Luc Godard says: "Style is merely the outside of content, and content the inside of style." This observation en-genders two principal issues that animate our practice: formal innovation and content development. While the former has established the reputation of the practice, the latter is the focus of our work.

This book is conceived and designed as an active field, not a classical object that follows a chronological, linear model. There are developmental lines, movements of attack and decay that evolve in a network relation to every other node. We try to take John Cage at his word: everything we do is music and everyone is in the best seat. We accept the accidents, the encounters, the interruptions, and the failures of design practice along with its successes and elations. This is a documentary portrait of the culture of design through the lens of one practice--our own--as we attempt an ongoing, problematic, and evolutionary engagement with the world.