Bruce Mau

Bruce Mau Designs creates brand identities for places and design organizations. They have worked with countries to museums to bookstores. What I recognized as soon as I searched, was the publications- especially the Life Style book.
Bruce Mau attended Ontario College of Art+ Design, but left prior to graduating. He founded Bruce Mau Designs, and was the Creative Director for ID Magazine in the early 90s.
One of the things that really strikes me about Bruce Mau is his articulation in communicating his theories- especially his approach to design, and the way he views this as an approach to a variety of concepts and problems.
In his Massive Change project, which is in collaboration with the Institute Without Boundaries, the concept is to use new ideas, technologies, and collaborative design to address social problems in the world. This inclusive and broad-minded approach to working and creating is something that I am seeing more of now than ever before. I think that combining disciplines or collaborating cross-discipline is the direction of future design- or at least the cutting edge where the breakthroughs will occur. A quote from AIGA describing the Massive Change project: "What if we could do anything? What if the questions surrounding design turned out to be the big questions? What if life itself became a design project? What if - as Arnold Toynbee once suggested - we were committed to an audacious, altruistic global project that imagined "the welfare of the entire human race as a practical objective"? What if design turned out to be that project? What if we succeeded?"
Bruce Mau Designs seems to act as a think tank for branding and creating identities for their clients. On their website brucemaudesign.com, there is a link to The Incomplete Manifesto which lays out the philosophy behind the Bruce Mau's designs. Bruce Mau was an AIGA Medalist in 2007 recognized "or his mastery of the craft of graphic design and for his expansive, strategic sense of design’s role in shaping civilizations."