Remarks by Bruce Mau
Thank you, President Tepper, members of the Hamilton College leadership, faculty and staff, distinguished guests, proud families and friends, and most importantly, the reason we are all here today, the 2025 graduating class of Hamilton College!
Congratulations on getting to the starting line!
I know you think it’s over — but your learning has only just begun!
It is a profound honor to stand before you today. However, more than honored, I am thrilled.
You see, I grew up on a farm outside of a mining town in Northern Canada. We lived on the last farm on a winding road into the Canadian wilderness, with hundreds of miles of boreal forest beyond our home. Our house was built on a rocky hill, and as a consequence, we didn't have running water in the winter months. My job, as a young man, was to drive my snowmobile down to the well in the valley every morning and provide water for a family of seven.
For a long time, I was embarrassed by our poverty and way of life. I couldn’t see how it was relevant to the life I was imagining. Eventually, I realized that I share my experience with over a billion people who don't have access to safe running water. I know what water weighs. I know what it takes to provide water for a family. I never take water for granted. Every day I turn on the tap and beautiful, clear, safe water comes out and it’s an awesome day!
While still on the farm I saw the outside world on a small black and white television. We had two channels, French and English. When Expo 67 happened in Montreal, I saw the work of Buckminster Fuller. He designed the American pavilion as a massive geodesic dome that had a monorail passing right through it. It was magical. I wanted to be part of that emerging world.
So, I changed my focus from science and math to art. (I had no idea about design.) But I couldn't get into art school. I had taken only the minimum of art classes. I had to stay an extra year in high school. I met a teacher who changed my life, Mister Jack Smith, who ran a program called "Special Art." It was the best year of my life.
My first time leaving the farm to visit a city was for my college interview. Mister Smith prepared me, and I got in.
But I failed.
I lasted only a year and a half. I just couldn't fit into their way of being. So, for most of my life I thought that I failed college. Not surprisingly, because they told me that I failed college. They were clear and explicit about that.
Recently I realized that I hadn't failed. I did what college was supposed to do, I just did it quickly.
I blew my mind. (I had never experienced anything like art college and city life.)
I fell in love. (With the magic of words and images.)
I learned a new language. (In my case, graphic design.)
And I got a job doing what I had fallen in love with.
(I became a designer.)
Most people take four years or more to do that.
I did it in eighteen months.
So, you can imagine, being here today, addressing graduates from this esteemed institution with only "some college," as they say on online surveys, is truly extraordinary.
When I became a designer, without realizing, I set out on a life-long adventure of learning. I have worked with some of the greatest artists, writers, architects, philosophers, innovators, educators, and world leaders of every sort. I consider myself one of the most fortunate designers of the last half century.
I can't imagine a better life.
I designed the fan experience for the New York Jets and Giants new NFL stadium.
I worked with architect Frank Gehry on the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Together we designed the world's first Museum of Biodiversity in Panama City.
I designed a social movement in Guatemala to recover the ability to dream for a population that had suffered 36 years of civil war.
And I designed a thousand-year plan for the future of Mecca, the spiritual home of Islam in Saudi Arabia.
In a stroke of genius, I married a brilliant woman, and we had three amazing daughters! It was Bisi that encouraged me to become a writer, to clarify and publish my ideas beyond the projects that I was designing.
Bisi and I worked together to develop a new approach that we call Life-Centered Design. Life-Centered Design begins with compassion for the individual human, like human centered design, but it doesn't stop there. We extend our compassion to their social context, their family, group, business or institution. And from there to the ecosystem that sustains them. You cannot have a thriving citizen in a toxic ecology. We have only just begun to see the impact of this work, and we are still on that awesome learning adventure together.
Now, if you had met me down at the well on some crisp cold Canadian winter morning, and said, “Bruce, pay attention, because you are going to have to design Mecca someday,” I would have said, “I don’t think so. Not very likely!” But that is what happened. And I went on to design the plan for a post oil economy innovation city in a linear model that predated “The Line,” by over a decade.
This long-life learning journey, sometimes directed, sometimes unexpected, is a testament to the idea that remarkable things can happen, often in ways we didn't initially imagine, if we remain optimistic and open.
In preparation for today, I had a wonderful opportunity to spend some time with several Hamilton graduating students. They were deeply impressive.
Thoughtful, ambitious, compassionate, and profoundly optimistic. They shared their deep gratitude for their experience here, but also their concern about the world outside what they called, “the Bubble” here at Hamilton.
They were fully aware that they are graduating from this utopian ideal into one of the most volatile and challenging environments that has ever existed. And they were excited by that. They were fully charged to lean into the potential that they have developed here and looking forward to the tests that will come as the world transforms around them. I was deeply inspired. I want to thank them for restoring my faith in humanity.
Now, any commencement speaker worth their salt will tell you that the world needs you. But I'm here to tell you that you need the world. You need the commons, you need the collective potential of all of us, you need the ecosystems that sustain us, you need the social connections that give meaning to life. You need the radical possibilities for purpose and impact in the complex, urgent and sometimes dire opportunities that you will be called to address.
Don't think of them as challenges. They are entrepreneurial opportunities.
You will live through a scale of change that has never happened in human history. Just consider the combination of Quantum and AI, and the radical potential that now exists.
It is the biggest opportunity that could ever be imagined. Your ability to design — to think critically, to see potential, to connect the dots that others can’t, to communicate with nuance and compassion, to inspire — all the skills of a Hamilton education — will be critically important in the global transformation that you will guide and lead.
Those opportunities will open up for you, but only if you are open for them. Only if you sustain the wild optimism that is the first responsibility of any designer.
Designers cannot afford the luxury of cynicism.
That is for others. Cynicism is easy; optimism is hard.
You are a designer, or you wouldn’t be here. You have a future in mind. You have intention. The moment that you have intention, and will not accept random outcomes, you become a designer. So, lean into your power, your capacity to envision the future and systematically realize the vision, and you will tap into the full gift of the Hamilton experience.
Many people, when they hear the word “design” think of beautiful objects, sleek cars, or expensive furniture – the shape of things, something visual and formal. And yes, design can be that. But that's what I call “small d” design. What you are capable of is Big D Design.
Design is not just about making things; it’s about making things happen.
Design is a mindset of optimism in action. In its broadest sense, design is leadership. As design leaders, we don't always have the authority to force change, but we always have the power to inspire it. With what you have experienced here at Hamilton, you have the power to show people a future more exciting than their past and inspire them to work together on the journey to a new world.
Alice Waters has said that “the most common way that people give up their power is to not realize that they have it.” You are the most powerful generation in the history of mankind. I look forward to seeing your dreams come true.
Go forth. Fail. Learn. Fail again. Learn more. Succeed. Be wild, thorny, and optimistic.
Design your world for the welfare of all of life.
Thank you, and congratulations to the Hamilton College Class of 2025
