July 20 – 31, 2011
Last year, the Toronto Complaints Choir collected over 1000 grievances, gripes, and annoyances from people across the city. The choir transformed these troubles into a siren song for the disenchanted. For twelve days in July, Bruce Mau Design (BMD) will work to do something about it. Our pop-up studio, working in real-time in the Propeller Gallery, will design solutions in response to the complaints. A book of these ideas will be simultaneously designed, and then given away throughout this city we love. BMD’s Bureau of Doing Something About It is organized by studio designers Amanda Happé, Kar Yan Cheung, Chris Braden, Michal Dudek, and Paul Kawai.
Bruce Mau Design’s Tries to Solve Toronto’s Problems
Here’s an idea for a pop-up shop: take the hundreds of grievances and annoyances filed by residents to the Toronto Complaints Choir and try to somehow solve them. That, in a nutshell, is what Bruce Mau Design is up to at its pop-up studio in the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts. It’s a bold project, and sure to produce a mix of ingenious, wacky and downright silly ideas â which is, of course, the whole point.
Along with the initial feedback given via the complaints choir, the design team hopes that Torontonians will stop by the studio to watch them work through some of the problems they’re dealing with, which range from the weather to the TTC to, you guessed it, Rob Ford. As the designers come up with solutions to all of our problems, they’ll collect them for a book that will eventually distributed throughout the city.
Given that it serves as the inspiration for the performance/project, the Complaints Choir will also give a special performance from the gallery on July 28th, just a few days before the pop-up closes down, having made Toronto the ideal place to live.
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Photos by Jesse Milns
