John Maeda is a Japanese- American
born in 1966, currently the president of the Rhode Island School of
Design. He is a designer, artist, and computer scientist constantly
working on intertwining design and technology. Maeda's art pieces are
in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art and is a designer
consultant for Apple and Google among other companies. He is the leader
for creating simple design solutions for the digital age. Simplicity is his
motto, the topic which he successfully written about in his book "The Laws
of Simplicity", which features ten laws in promoting simplicity in design.
The question that he always works on answering is “How do we simplify
increasingly complex technologies?”. In Maeda's perspective he wishes to
harnesstechnologyandmake
it useful to everyday people in order to simplify rather than complicate their
daily lives. The Seattle native was a software engineering student at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was captured by the
work of Paul Rand and Muriel Cooper, the directors of the university's Visual
Language Program. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in computer
science at MIT, Maeda went on to earn a PhD in design from Tsukuba University Institute
of Art and Design in Japan. There he began to work on ways to connect
computational expression and traditional bookmaking. His studies became a
series of publications called "Reactive Books," which are now
recognized as classics in digital media design.
