Digital Thinking at Rhode Island School of Design

By: Linda TischlerWed Sep 17, 2008 at 1:30 AM

Skeleton Crew: At RISD, Maeda will have access to some surprising bare-bones equipment. | photograph by Jake Chessum

As the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda brings digital artistry -- and an obsession with business -- to an ultra-analog world.

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photograph by Jake Chessum

Digital images from Shiseido calendar series, 2005 | rendering courtesy John Maeda

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"We have to expand beyond the idea that design is good for business," says Richard Koshalek, president of the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. "It's true. But it's also good for the larger society and the challenges we face, ranging from global urbanization to sustainability." Maeda, he says, can brilliantly articulate the case for why designers should no longer be at the margins. "If I were a corporate executive, I'd go and spend time with Maeda."

The Nature Lab at RISD is a relic of a kinder, gentler, analoger time. The 71-year-old facility, with more than 80,000 stuffed and mounted moose heads, human skeletons, and dung beetles, is a treasured artifact in an institution that celebrates its history like some schools flaunt their juiced-up sports stadiums or slick computer labs. Freshman drawing classes are held here, and you can check out an armadillo or a tarantula for your homework.

"When something dies on the road, people call up to see if RISD wants to taxidermize it," says Maeda, roaming the room, pointing out bones and shells. "It's like the Hogwarts School of Art and Design."

Maeda loves the lab -- its history, its tactility, its randomness. For a guy who has spent most of his career in front of a computer screen, the sheer physicality of the place is exhilarating. "I've been an IT guy in a sensorially deprived space," he says. "All these things can't be replicated so easily. This is our basic competitive advantage. If this were all Googleable, it wouldn't matter so much."

Exploring a world that both reveres and is repelled by technology has been Maeda's passion. At the Media Lab, which he joined in 1996, Maeda, now 41, championed work designed to humanize technology. Last year, he authored a best-selling book, The Laws of Simplicity, a manifesto on how to muffle the noise of the digital age. Philips Electronics tapped his expertise to launch the "Sense and Simplicity" campaign that transformed both its products and its organization; Samsung hired him for advice as it transitioned from a hardware manufacturer to a consumer-experience-driven company.

But Maeda's a designer as well as a geek, and his own work is imbued with the same puckish humor that has helped him survive both academic politics and the chaos attendant in parenting five little girls. His line of digitally graffitied limited-edition sneakers for Reebok (based on simplicity laws, with names like Timetanium and Emoretion) was an instant sellout. Maeda's digital art has a permanent home at MoMA, and he recently had a show, "Maeda: MySpace," at the Riflemaker Gallery in London, which included, memorably, two iPods in love.

That oddball artsy streak naturally appealed to RISD's search committee. But Maeda's corporate connections were also a plus. At the Media Lab, he managed research relationships with more than 70 industrial organizations. While RISD already has a wide range of industry partnerships, trustees are looking to grow that area exponentially. It's likely to be a tricky juggling act.

Students at MIT, says Becky Bermont, who followed Maeda from Cambridge to Providence for a new role as RISD's VP of Media + Partners, want to build things that can be commercialized. "They're technologists. They want to see their stuff in the world," she says. But RISD students, as Maeda is fond of saying, are "heirloom tomatoes in a Cello tomato world." Since it was founded in 1877, RISD, one of the oldest fine-arts colleges in the country, has been turning out highly skilled graduates with a distinct point of view -- people such as Dale Chihuly, Jenny Holzer, Nicole Miller, Gus Van Sant, and Kara Walker. They're not the sort to obsess about what HP needs to make a snazzy printer, or how Whirlpool sees the future of the washer-dryer.

However, most of the school's 650-plus annual grads will need actual jobs. And, Maeda thinks, the corporate world could use an infusion of their avant-gardism to offset the more strategy-driven and market-obsessed approaches of schools such as the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Stanford. "I think that mapping corporate needs onto a design problem is sometimes really informative and can give students the language they need to be designers who fit into the world better," he says. "But sometimes you want to say, 'Let's think of problems that are totally impractical and different from what you're going to learn on the job.' I want our students to be able to talk to CEOs, but I don't want them to have to Drucker up."

"Mapping corporate needs onto a design problem can be really informative....I want our students to talk to CEOs, but I don't want them to have to Drucker up."