The Trail Blazer
By GWEN MURANAKA
RAFU ENGLISH EDITOR IN CHIEF
Thursday, July 3, 2008

The next step in the remarkable career of John Maeda.

John Maeda knows about hard work. The award-winning graphic designer,
computer scientist, author of four books and now president of the
prestigious Rhode Island School of Design spent his youth toiling in his family’s tofu store.

“I grew up in a tofu store in Seattle. It was very hard work, we’d wake up
every morning at 2  a.m. and work until 6 p.m. at night,” said Maeda. “It
taught me how hard work is hard work.”

Now the 42-year-old Sansei is starting on what may be the most challenging job of his life. This month he took over as head of the prestigious East Coast design school, joining a list of only a handful of Asian American university  presidents, that includes Bob Suzuki who served as president of California Polytechnic State University Pomona from 1991 until his retirement in 2003.

“They’re curious as to what I’m going to do,”said Maeda in an interview with The Rafu Shimpo. “It’s kind of an art project for me — to design a school and create artists and designers.

“I would like to believe that there’s a future where artists and designers
leave school and don’t believe they’re going to become poor. It’s a stigma
in our society. ‘I’m gonna be a artist, I wanna become a designer, oh
there aren’t many jobs out there.’ You can become a lawyer and not get a
job, you can become a doctor and not get a job.”

Before the RISD appointment, he was associate director of Research at the
MIT Media Lab, he has been on the MIT faculty since 1996.

“It was a cushy job, tenured professor, I’d get five pieces of paper,
staple it and drink a latte everyday,” he quipped.

Actually, at MIT, Maeda was responsible for managing research
relationships with more than 70 industrial organizations. He earned his
Bachelors and Masters degree from MIT in Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering. He then received a Ph.D. in Design Scienc e from the
University of Tsukuba Institute of Art and Design in Japan.

As a digital artist, Maeda has been featured in the permanent collections
of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. He has also been a practicing designer since 1990 and has developed advanced projects for an array of major corporations including Cartier, Google, Philips, Reebok, Samsung, among others. His early work in digital media design is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Friend and mentor Mits Katoka, UCLA professor emeritus of design, observed that Maeda is a “leading-edge type of guy.”

Kataoka first met Maeda when he was still a student at MIT. Maeda was told to seek Kataoka out by Takenobu Igarashi, a noted Japanese sculptor and designer.

“If you see the stuff he’s been doing, most of the design research he’s been doing, along with the students at MIT media lab, he’s been a pioneer. In much of what he does, he’s the leading person and that’s why he’s gained such notoreity,” said Kataoka. “He says I’m a tofumakers son. John comes from a working class background and here he is is the president of RISD.”
 
Maeda’s appointment was a bold choice for the 131-year-old private arts college in Providence, Rhode Island, known for its classical arts instruction. The students at RISD will be a generation that grew up on YouTube and Facebook, whose lives have been shaped by computers and digital communication — a world view that Maeda himself has helped to shape.

“I’ll speak Googlese,” said Maeda, referring to the popular Internet
search engine.

“I think they’re curious — artists and designers are curious. I like how
RISD is now, I want to help it get even better,” he said. “Creativity is
about making mistakes, I’ll make a lot of mistakes probably. I have three
rules to life; don’t speak ill of others, don’t have passive agressive
behavior. Third is to listen broadly and don’t walk alone.”

Kataoka hosted an informal luncheon for Maeda in May  drawing some of the most influential leaders in Los Angeles’ design and architecture to hear Maeda size up his latest endeavor. The UCLA professor compared Maeda to Barack Obama and said he is taking a great risk, when he could have stayed as a tenured professor at MIT for the rest of his life.

“RISD is hoping that because of his talent and ability, they’ve hired him to see if he can transform the school,” said Kataoka.  “He knows if he’s going to become an usual, normal regular, don’t-create-any-waves president, he’ll do fine. But I don’t think he’s that kind of person. He’s there to upset things and do some major changes.”

Maeda first heard of his appointment in December. When he met with
faculty, he told them a story of a salt and pepper shaker that he observed
at a bed and breakfast he was staying at.

“I took a photograph of the bed and breakfast I was at and there was table
with a  long narrow column with a salt and peper shaker at one end.I
showed them the picture and I said, you’re just like me, you see the salt
and peper shaker and imagine it running across the table, don’t you?  And
they all said, yeah,  yeah,” said Maeda. “We’re all like that, we’re all
kind of ADD. Creative people can’t help but imagine. It is a wonderful
curse that all artists have.”

I think design is valuable because it’s a way of creative thinking. As we
learned from our art teacher Mits Kataoka you can never stop being
creative in whatever you do in business, journalism, or even in cooking.
The creative vibe, that rhythm in your heart, that’s what design is. if
it’s a design object then sure, fine, but it’s about the spirit,” said
Maeda.

Where Maeda’s creative vibe has taken him now is to lead a university
where he notes his powers include signing documents and sitting on
committees. For the tofumaker’s son, he admits he’s unsure whether he’ll
succeed or fail, but he says he’s going to go for it.

“The average university president burns out in 6.7 years, so I have 6.7
years left,” he noted.

“I’ll know I’ve been successful when maybe 30 years later when there’s a
bunch of kids out there leading industry, leading disciplines who went to
RISD. And they were told they could never get there because you were just
an artist, you were just a designer.”