Skeleton Crew: At RISD, Maeda will have access to some surprising bare-bones equipment. | photograph by Jake Chessum 
Digital images from Shiseido calendar series, 2005 | rendering courtesy John Maeda At first blush, John Maeda doesn't seem all that intimidating. A slender, gentle man with a brilliant mind, quirky wit, vast wardrobe of T-shirts, and long fingers gone knobby from too many years at a keyboard, he looks like the geeky head of a computer-science lab. Which, until last winter, is exactly what he was.
Then, in December, in a decision that stunned the clubby academic design world, trustees of the 131-year-old Rhode Island School of Design unanimously picked Maeda (pronounced my-AY-da), the former associate research director of MIT's famed Media Lab, as its next president. "Early on, we decided to be open to somebody not in the normal path of college presidency," says Rosanne Somerson, the head of RISD's furniture department, who served on the search committee. "John certainly fell into that category."
In choosing a technologist, the committee is gambling that a highly networked, Web-enabled thinker who also happens to be an artist, designer, and author -- probably the closest thing to a Renaissance man the digital world has produced -- can help reconcile the design world's competing impulses: creativity and pragmatism, uniqueness and mass-marketability. And no one was more surprised by the selection than Maeda himself. "RISD rhymes with risky!" he says cheerfully, in June, displaying his fondness for goofy aphorisms ("RISD is the right-brain MIT!" is another favorite). A month later, at a Harvard boot camp for 60-odd new college presidents, the son of a Seattle tofu maker is still marveling at the adventure before him. "America is a weird country. It's like I was a waitress somewhere, and now I'm in a movie -- a futuristic astronaut cast in a new kind of Wild West picture. [At RISD] I get to make, like, a space Western."
People who know Maeda hailed his casting as a stroke of genius. But within RISD's redbrick halls, his appointment initially plunged the community into a state of high anxiety. What would it mean to have such a techie guy leading such an artsy school? Would he replace the studios with computers? Would he sell off the school's creative mojo to roaming tech entrepreneurs? Would everybody have to learn PowerPoint?
Soon, word spread that Maeda was thinking of axing the sacred Foundation Studies program, with its emphasis on drawing, art history, and building actual physical objects. Panic spread from the glass blowers' kilns to the weavers' workshops. "When I first heard that rumor, I freaked out," says RISD senior Adam Meyer. "Being in industrial design, my background is a little more technical than other majors, but I felt I needed this fine-art approach to things."
Maeda, it turned out, had no intention of killing the program. And he had anticipated some of the stir his appointment would create -- and quickly set about defusing it. The very night he got the news, he launched a blog for the internal community, called one.risd.edu, where he tackled the issues head-on. Setting the IT-takeover rumors to rest, he assured the campus, "I don't really love computers" (a fairly shocking admission for a guy with two computer-science degrees from MIT, as well as a PhD in design from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and an MBA from Arizona State). "I would not want to imagine an Ikea-ized, computerized RISD."
Then he began mapping out his vision of the school's future, articulating, in a series of posts, where he thought design education at RISD needed to go. This would be no autocratic exercise, he explained, but an open-source design problem that would draw on ideas from the school's faculty, staff, and students. "Creativity's about ownership," he wrote. "We all own RISD together, and we're going to design it together."
What shape that might take is a topic of intense interest even beyond academic circles. "If you're looking for someone to reinvent this very old construct -- the way we learn -- John is the kind of thinker who will turn it upside down, and you'll suddenly realize it got 100% better," says Chee Pearlman, director of Chee Co., an editorial and design consultancy in New York, and former editor of I.D. magazine. "That's why the whole design-education infrastructure is looking at this with a certain amount of skepticism and, perhaps, envy."
The skepticism stems from the suspicion that Maeda's digital background is a rather bloodless culture in which to nurture the creatives at RISD; the envy flows from the contrary idea that combining MIT's and RISD's cultures may prove extremely fertile commercially -- even threateningly so. What is taught in the nation's design schools invariably bleeds, after all, into the corporate world students inhabit postgraduation. And with companies increasingly looking to design for a competitive advantage in a merciless marketplace, the stakes couldn't be higher: Students who think in a larger social and economic context -- the ones with the big ideas -- stand to make a bigger impact than those looking to produce the next bit of design esoterica or rubberized kitchen tool.
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