John Maeda: How Art, Technology and Design inform Creative Leaders

October 9, 2012 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

John Maeda delivers a funny and charming talk that spans a lifetime of work in art, design and technology, concluding with a picture of creative leadership in the future. Watch for demos of John’s earliest work — even a computer made of people.

ABOUT TED

TED is a small Non Profit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design

ABOUT John Maeda

“John Maeda is the President of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.

In his fascinating career as a programmer and an artist, he’s always been committed to blurring the lines between the two disciplines. As a student at MIT, studying computer programming, the legendary Muriel Cooper persuaded him to follow his parallel passion for fine art and design.

Then when computer-aided design began to explode in the mid-1990s, John was in a perfect position at the MIT Media Lab to influence and shape the form, helping typographers and page designers explore the freedom of the web. At RISD, he is leading the ‘STEAM’ movement, adding an ‘A’ for Art to the education acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and experiencing first hand the transformation brought by social media.”

The VIDEO