Bruce Mau’s Massive Change is a full-scale argument about design as the operating system of the modern world.

Produced with the Institute without Boundaries, it moves across cities, transport, logistics, biotechnology, information, energy, war, branding, media, climate, economics and global infrastructure — basically everything design touches once it stops pretending it only makes chairs and logos.

Published by Phaidon in 2004, it sits in that very particular early-2000s moment when globalisation, systems thinking, “innovation,” urbanisation and ecological crisis were all beginning to collapse into the same conversation. Some of its techno-optimism now has the haunted glow of a TED Talk found in a bunker, but that is partly what makes it interesting: this is design culture at maximum ambition, before the bill fully arrived. Visually dense, conceptually sprawling, and very much a Bruce Mau object — part manifesto, part archive, part gorgeous corporate fever dream.

Phaidon hardback, 2004. Very good copy with light cover/shelf wear.