Who is JM?

  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 harness technology and make 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.