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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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“I made a series of books in the early nineties called The Reactive Books that demonstrated how you could make the computer respond and behave in fluid, visual ways,” Maeda wrote in an email. “This led to the rich vocabulary of Flash as seen today on most websites….” Adobe Flash technology allows websites to have animation and interactive features, which he now believes are way over-used.

He felt something like guilt about helping to clutter up the Internet with too much “eye candy” and wrote as atonement a small book called Simplicity, which argues for a less-is-more approach to design —at least to a point.

“Simplicity is knowing when less is too little and more is too much,” he writes. “Simplicity = Sanity.”

Maeda earned a master’s from MIT in the late 1980s, then enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the Tsukuba Institute of Art and Design in Japan. After graduating from there he joined the MIT faculty in 1996; since he was living in New England, he began paying visits to the Connecticut studio of Paul Rand, the great graphic designer whose work everyone is familiar with whether they know it or not: he designed the logos for IBM, ABC, UPS. By offering himself as kind of a gopher, Maeda wound up getting a credit in Rand’s last book From Lascaux to Brooklyn, published just before his death in 1996.

Maeda, too, has done graphics for large corporations—Reebok, for example, hired him to design a shoe that features Maeda’s handwritten computer code on the sock liner, while the graphics generated by the computer code decorate the outside of the shoe. He has also made strange and wonderful art by marrying computer programs with food: He once scanned into a computer a small packet of sugar, discovering in the process that there are 70,000 crystals in a single packet, then used every crystal in creating a design; he loaded Cheetos into something like PhotoShop’s paintbrush, then used “strokes” of Cheetos and his own fine, black hair to make realistic-looking monarch butterflies; he scanned French fries and turned them into a forest —good creative work, some of which has wound up as part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

In 2006, Maeda earned an online MBA degree from the University of Arizona; so when RISD was looking for a new president to succeed Roger Mandle, who had run the school for fifteen years, they found a perfect candidate in Maeda—an artist and designer who understands business and technology. They hired him away from MIT where, as associate director, he had headed a program with a $30 million annual budget, the MIT Media Lab.

Curiously, John Maeda is not always an “early adopter” of new technology. He’ll sometimes let the latest gadget, such as the Nintendo Wii, languish on the market for a couple of months before he buys it. “Every time I adopt something new, it hurts me,” he says, so he avoids it. But then he steels himself and plunges in, for he feels it’s important to adopt new technologies in order to earn “trust” from his college-aged students.

That implicit trust is obvious as Maeda banters with the twenty-something developers of Openmoko, Inc., Sean Moss-Pultz and William Lai. After their meeting with the mayor, the three of them rendezvous in RISD’s administration building, giddy with the post-adrenaline high of actors who have just been onstage.

“The mayor was geeking,” Moss-Pultz says as a compliment to Cicilline. “He was totally geeking!”

And as three men stand in a room cluttered with boxes of Maeda’s books, they kick around some ideas for the phone—not for its applications but for its design, what it should look like, feel like, in the palm of the hand.

Maeda is a big believer in what he calls nude electronics, that is, designing gadgets to be “smooth, seamless and small.” He pulls from a bag his iPhone, smooth and as polished as a mirror. “It looks expensive,” he says in praise of it.

The prototype of the phone, Neo, in Moss-Putz’s palm strives for a different look; the back half of it is seamless, but the front incorporates a design that looks like trees and has a roughened texture. Maeda likes it.

“Maybe the message here is people are tired of perfection,” he says of the design. “This feels like a pebble. And what are pebbles? Pebbles are imperfect.”
He encourages them to continue that look and texture farther down the phone’s edges. “Complete the story,” he says.

As the three of them talk, animatedly, Maeda looks up and sees Roger Mandle, the outgoing RISD president, standing in the doorway. Mandle is going home onhis last day as RISD president, passing through the administration building on a farewell tour. He wears a pressed shirt the color of raspberry sherbet, shades of which are nicely repeated in his tie. The conversation stops; it feels as if youngsters have been caught playing with dad’s things.

“The office is all cleaned out,” Mandle tells Maeda—he hasn’t left a scrap of paper in it.

“I’ll find out where the leaks are,” Maeda jokes, but Mandle doesn’t take up the badinage.

“I don’t know of any,” Mandle says. Then he adds, “Good luck. I’ll see you at graduation.”

Maeda and his young entrepreneurs return to their lively discussion of their cell phone’s design. Maeda opens his iPod with a click to show an image of a nice look he saw in New York: a mirror covered with a smooth, opaque surface. Perhaps they could use that look on the cover of Neo?

If the Centennial Women who founded RISD in 1877 were passing by, they might not recognize a tie-less college president who quotes comic books and occasionally spouts nonsense to stimulate conversation. They certainly would not recognize the product in his hand—an open source cellular telephone. But had they been in that room, the Centennial Women would have seen their first new president of the twenty-first century doing what they incorporated their school to do: helping a new generation adopt “the principles of art to the requirements of trade and manufacture”—or “geeking.”