John Maeda (born 1966) is an American designer, visual artist, executive, strategic advisor, writer, and educator.
Early life and education
John Maeda was born in 1966 in
Seattle, Washington, where his father owned a tofu factory.
Maeda studied
Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became fascinated with the work of
Paul Rand and
Muriel Cooper. Cooper was a director of MIT's Visible Language Workshop. After completing his bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT, Maeda completed his PhD in design at Tsukuba University's Institute of Art and Design in Japan.
He also has an MBA from Arizona State University.
Career
Corporate executive and strategic advisor
He is formerly executive vice president, chief experience officer at
Publicis Sapient where he developed the LEAD (Light, Ethical, Accessible, Dataful) doctrine
for technology products and services. Prior to that he was Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion at
Automattic where he sought to address the diversity gap in tech
by exploring how inclusion could be a key ingredient for success in the technology industry.
Before that he was Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) where he advised startups on the business impact of design
From 2019 until 2020, he was an executive vice president and chief experience officer at Publicis Sapient
Educator and academic administrator
He was a professor at the MIT Media Lab for 12 years where he fostered a community of designers who could code and engineers who could design called the Aesthetics + Computation Group,
and then created the Physical Language Workshop
with Henry Holtzman. Shortly after the launch of the Design By Numbers
project to teach artists and designers how to code, he helped to accelerate the Scratch language project in an NSF proposal with outreach across the digital divide.
He resigned from MIT in 2008
President of Rhode Island School of Design
In 2011, RISD's faculty majority passed a vote of no confidence in Maeda.
He survived the vote,
and subsequently led RISD to be recognized by the business community as number one in the world
while shepherding the national
STEAM fields movement,
feeling that "art and design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century like science and technology did in the last century."
For his work in advancing STEAM education, Maeda was recognized with a Tribeca Film Festival Disruptor Award
and the Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts & Public Policy
at the John F. Kennedy Center. Maeda resigned from his RISD presidency at the end of 2013
and joined KPCB.
Around the same time he also joined eBay's Design Advisory Board as chairman.
Visual art and other work
In 2014 and 2015, he guest curated and hosted PopTech: REBELLION,
and PopTech: HYBRID.
In 2015 he published his first Design In Tech Report[
]
Maeada's artwork is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City;
Awards and honors
In 1999, he was named one of the 21 most important people in the 21st century by
Esquire.
In 2001, he received the National Design Award for Communication Design in the United States and Japan's Mainichi Design Prize.
He received the 2005 from the Raymond Loewy Foundation.
Honorary doctorates awarded by City University of Hong Kong (2022), Drexel University (2017),
Personal life
Maeda is married to Kris Maeda, and together they have five daughters.
Kris and John Maeda worked together on the design consultancy, MAEDASTUDIO.
Bibliography
See also
External links
