John Maeda is the first designer to be appointed President of RISD or any other college, according to an interview published today by the Wall Street Journal. Certainly the first design school or designer covered in the WSJ, he's described as,
Mr. Maeda, age 42, looks disarmingly like the cartoon figure on the cover of "Computers for Dummies"; he says he represents an intertwining of art and design, technology and the handmade.
From his interview,
"A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together," says Mr. Maeda, cocking his head, widening his eyes, moving his hands as if he were shaping a pot. Mr. Maeda considers himself post-digital; he has outgrown his fascination with hardware and is driven by ideas. "I want to reform technology. All the tools are the same; people make the same things with them.
Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology." He describes a visit to the campus by an executive from Yahoo. Mr. Maeda took him to see the visual resources center in the new library. Hundreds of thousands of drawings, photographs and news clippings, and images of art, architecture and decorative arts -- on slides -- are cataloged and stored in old-fashioned metal and wood file cabinets. The Yahoo executive was stunned. "This is a real live Google!" Better, says Mr. Maeda.
Read the whole interview
Illustration credit: Ismael Roldan, via WSJ
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