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John Maeda Wants to Jump Start Your Brain

John Maeda is an artistic computer nerd who designed Reebok sneakers and is constantly challenging people’s ideas. But as RISD’s new president, the person he tests most of all is himself.

Photography by Dana Smith

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“It’s like going to the market in Paris,” he gushes. “You see all these wonderful fruits and vegetables— things you just wanna—don’t eat this by the way. But uh [unintelligible] salads of creativity, new kinds of meals for the mind. This is how it all starts—you have all these, all these parts you put together.”

Somebody once told Maeda that the human brain cannot think quickly enough to process spoken language, thus the brain fills in gaps the way the hearer wants them filled. “Most of what we’re hearing is, we make it up on the fly,” he says. He uses this to his advantage by tossing out his observations on the fly, and probing people about their own. He purposefully delivers with enthusiasm and passion high-sounding, half-finished ideas and observations as a challenge for those around him—faculty, students, anyone who happens to be in earshot—to build on.

People in his presence often do pick up on his observations and expand on them. As a result, a lot of his nonsense accretes into pearls.

When editing the information he posts on his blog, “Our (and your) RISD,” Maeda allows some of his goofier observations to go through; he does not want to appear flawless, so he himself draws back the curtain to expose the human being behind the wizard projected by the president’s chair.

“The best way to be is to always be vulnerable because people know what’s real,” he says in an interview in his new office. “If you’re invincible, you’re saying: ‘Listen to me or else!’ When you’re vulnerable, people have a choice about how to feel about you.”

Maeda takes a risk in presenting himself as the always enthusiastic, sometimes goofy “old man of new media,” constantly photographing, recording, writing and posting his unfiltered observations; but the risk is not entirely his. In doing so, he is giving people a choice in how to interpret him, and those who choose to underestimate him are also taking a risk. Not for nothing has Esquire named him one of the twenty-one most important people of the twenty-first century. And his ratio of nonsense to pearls is good enough, at age forty-two, to land him in the president’s chair at RISD.

John Maeda does not own a necktie. He drapes his whippet-thin frame in gray or black suits, usually Issey Miyake, calculatedly rumpled, but nicely tailored, high quality and minimal. He likes to quote from comics, another habit that can be traced to his Japanese-American roots.

In Japan, a style of comic book called manga—usually printed in thick, black-and-white books—is widely read by people of all ages. Maeda’s mother, a third- generation Japanese-American born in Hawaii, was exposed to the custom, and she used comic books and word search puzzles to stimulate her children’s interest in reading.

This was perfect training for a future RISD president; it’s arguably more important for the president of RISD to be familiar with manga and animation than to be able to quote Longfellow and the Transcendentalists of Concord because RISD is an unusual place, an incredible incubator of genius. Its hottest graduate is currently Seth MacFarlane, creator of the animated series “Family Guy,” who recently signed a contract with Twentieth Century Fox TV for more than $100 million. Other graduates include famous musicians (Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz of the Talking Heads), film directors (Mary Lambert, Pet Sematary, Gus Van Sant, Good Will Hunting) and artists in many mediums (four of the twenty-five winners of MacArthur Fellowships, aka “genius grants,” named in 2006 were RISD alumni.)

The school’s been around for 131 years, since a group called the Centennial Women—formed to raise money for the Rhode Island exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition—discovered that they had $1,676 left over after meeting expenses, and decided to use it as seed money to form the Rhode Island School of Design.

A primary objective of this group, some of whom were the high-class wives of mill owners, was to teach artisans to apply “the principles of art to the requirements of trade and manufacture.”

Maeda at first resisted his call to practice “the principles of art” in his own life. In fourth or fifth grade, he painted a mural of King Tut for his classroom, and “my art teacher went crazy!” he recalls. The teacher told his parents that their son really could be an artist. “My parents kind of ignored that.”

He says that his parents hoped that one of their five children would attend Harvard or MIT, a realistic goal in young John’s case because he always was a good student. He liked school because it was so much less demanding than his time out of it, much of which was spent in his parents’ tofu manufactory, “Star Tofu,” where “you keep moving around this mashed bean substance in various ways.” His hands would go numb from reaching into vats of cold water to press the tofu; then he’d drop it into vats of hot oil and spitting grease would burn his arms.

So school was a nice place, a respite. “Going to school was like ten times better, and the teacher doesn’t yell at you,” Maeda recalls. “I loved being at school. I excelled at it.” In fact, he did well enough at it to win acceptance to MIT.

As gruff as his father was, he was also humble; and John’s acceptance to an elite eastern school made him very proud. He practiced an extreme form of Shintoism, which Maeda sums up as: Do no harm, and be grateful for what lies around you and inside of you. It is a philosophy that has shaped Maeda’s own world view. “It’s as simple as that,” Maeda says. “My father is a man without a high school education—yet his basic philosophies led me to where I am today, to lead one of the top learning institutions in the world. When I try to figure it out I really can’t. I’m just grateful that I can have an impact right now at this ripe time in the world that is ready to embrace hope for the future, and co-designing the changes that will get us there together.”

After freshman year at MIT, Maeda landed a summer job working for Tandy computers in Fort Worth, Texas, where he worked on an alpha version of Microsoft’s Windows, designing an alarm clock that Windows users could set to remind them of future events. The next summer he also spent in Fort Worth, this time working for Texas Instruments, handling some complex assignments until his boss figured out he was not an MIT graduate but just a sophomore, and his workload suddenly became less complex.

“I found that interesting, if people think you are a certain age they have different expectations.” He vowed not to do that in his own life—he would base expectations on observations.

And a funny thing happened that summer: Maeda discovered that, when pre-paring a project, he loved designing the graphics for it, much more so than the writing. One of his professors, Muriel Cooper, encouraged him to explore the artistic side of himself that he’d shelved in fifth grade, and he soon discovered a talent for using his programming knowledge to make art. This was a radical idea in the mid-1980s; he was not programming for a specific application, such as a word search. He was programming to make art.