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
While the corporate world is obsessed with the idea of design thinking -- which relies on data and process for inspiration -- Maeda is skeptical. "Design thinking is basically about being able to make good PowerPoint slides -- the quad-chart slide, the stakeholder slide. I get that. I think it's important. But at the same time, you hear whispers, even at Stanford, that people aren't making things anymore." Scott Klinker, head of the 3-D design program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, who defended the intuitive, qualitative approach to design at this year's Industrial Designers Society of America conference, agrees: "The proponents of the strategy-based approach say, 'Don't worry about form. We'll save you with design thinking.' I think that's crap. Design has always been a complex synthesis of analytical and intuitive processes."
Even before Maeda's hiring, major companies were tapping RISD's eccentrics -- and liking the results. Students have worked with NASA on designing for extreme environments, for the Coast Guard on vehicle design, and with DuPont on new uses for the countertop material Corian. And a multidisciplinary group of RISD graduate students recently wrapped up a top-secret project for Target, coming up with so many cool ideas that the Target team had trouble choosing among them. "It surprised the hell out of us," says marketing VP Will Setliffe.
Paul Kim, director of marketing at Samsung Electronics America, also has high hopes for a project that RISD will launch in the fall semester. It uses seven of the company's RSS-equipped 52-inch LCD TVs as virtual student centers. Potion, a company founded by several of Maeda's former Media Lab students, designed a zooming, interactive interface that will incorporate feeds from the school's calendar and upcoming events, and allow students to post images of their own work for instant "gallery" shows. Says Kim: "We're hoping RISD will help us figure out how to make the screens a living, breathing tool for people in a community."
Ultimately, the form-givers need the strategists and vice versa, and few embody a fusion of the two more completely than Maeda. "I'm still trying to understand why this academic institution chose me to lead it," he concedes, after a long day at Harvard's president camp. "I've been fortunate to sit at the cutting edge of stuff in a different way than RISD. So I'm trying to bond the two sets of DNA together right now, to infect my DNA in this weird presidential world. I'm like the Ebola of the digital revolution. But it's not me; it's in them. The virus only works if it goes somewhere."
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Recent Comments | 26 Total
August 18, 2009 at 12:53pm by Sergio Mokko
Maeda is a good understanding of design. This was repeated for confirmation. By Sergio
October 20, 2009 at 9:56pm by dd dd
I went to this article because it was billed as the 25 top jobs for the next five years. I wanted to review it before I sent to my nephew who just entered undergraduate school. But instead of a foward looking article, I got the 10 best jobs for 2007 - backward looking. What gives??
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