John Maeda Quotes
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Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well.
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No place in the US better exemplifies the ethos to engineer new digital technologies than Silicon Valley
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Communication in every which way is everything for the leader.
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A book is a human-powered film projector (complete with feature film) that advances at a speed fully customized to the viewer's mood or fancy. This rare harmony between object and user arises from the minimal skills required to manipulate a bound sequence of pages. Each piece of paper embodies a corresponding instant of time which remains frozen until liberated by the act of turning a page.
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Growing up, I found I was good at two things: Art and Math. To hear my parents say it, though, it was only, 'John is good at Math.
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Art shows us that human beings still matter in a world where money talks the loudest, where computers know everything about us, and where robots fabricate our next meal and also our ride there.
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I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn't have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn't have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.
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In the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.
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Good problem-seekers are in higher demand than good problem-solvers.
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I don't like creating software anymore. It's too exact. It's like karate; there's no room for error.
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Museums are important. Design and art schools are important because they show how it should be done at the highest level of quality. Once people are exposed to quality, they recognize it right away and they appreciate it. People's tastes are changed by exposure to quality. Unless they can see it they can't want it. That's the brilliance of Apple - they provide quality in design.
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I have a confession: I'm not a man of simplicity. I spent my entire early career making complex stuff. Lots of complex stuff.
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What’s next for technology and design? A lot less thinking about technology for technology’s sake, and a lot more thinking about design. Art humanizes technology and makes it understandable. Design is needed to make sense of information overload. It is why art and design will rise in importance during this century as we try to make sense of all the possibilities that digital technology now affords.
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My role is to find strategic insights as to where design can have the most business impact. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage.
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I don't really love computers.
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With regard to what is designed really well, I think people are the best-designed objects in the world. Seriously.
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Too little confidence, and you're unable to act; too much confidence, and you're unable to hear.
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Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn't know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can't do myself, my graduate students should be doing.
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Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.
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Creativity's about ownership.
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Teaching is the rare profession where the customer isn't always right and needs to be told so appropriately.
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There is a construct in computer programming called 'the infinite loop' which enables a computer to do what no other physical machine can do - to operate in perpetuity without tiring. In the same way it doesn't know exhaustion, it doesn't know when it's wrong and it can keep doing the wrong thing over and over without tiring.
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People who can focus, get things done. People who can prioritize, get the right things done.
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Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities.
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Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.
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Simplicity and complexity need each other.
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Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.
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As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively - especially when they are well-designed.
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Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people.
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We seem to forget that innovation doesn't just come from equations or new kinds of chemicals, it comes from a human place. Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.
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