John Maeda is a world-renowned designer, innovator, and academic whose distinguished career has expressed in many ways his philosophy of “humanizing technology.” For more than a decade Maeda has sustained three parallel careers in which the fine arts, design, and technology interrelate. Perhaps more than any other contemporary thinker, his work transcends the “two cultures” mindset that has been debated so hotly over the past half century, ever since C. P. Snow first posited a breakdown in communication between the sciences and the humanities. Maeda’s work and career are testaments to a 21st century synthesis that changes how we think about art, technology, and education.
Maeda is a highly regarded digital artist. His one-man shows in London, New York, and Paris have met with wide acclaim. Maeda’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cartier Foundation in Paris.
Maeda has also focused on applying his analytical and creative impulses in the design of useful objects for the world in which we live. Since 1990 he has developed advanced projects for a wide array of corporations, spanning the range of Cartier, Google, Philips, Reebok, and Samsung, among others. His stature in the design world is widely acknowledged. He is a Trustee of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
As a public intellectual and academic, Maeda has held university positions, has written prolifically, and gained a wide following at the world’s most influential venues. He has been on the faculty at MIT since 1996 and in addition holds the position of Associate Director of Research at the MIT Media Lab where he has been responsible for managing research relationships with more than seventy industrial organizations. He has published four books, the most recent, The Laws of Simplicity, has been translated into fourteen languages and has become the reference work for discussions on the highly elusive theme of “simplicity” in the complex digital world. Maeda has lectured at numerous universities and institutions including Harvard, TED, Princeton, the Royal College of Art, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, Centre Pompidou, Stanford, San Francisco MoMA, UCLA, Walker Art Center and for corporations that include Herman Miller, Oxygen Media, Philips, Sony, Steelcase, Toshiba, Victoria's Secret, and Yahoo!.
In 1999 Maeda was named one of the twenty-one most important people for the twenty-first century by Esquire magazine. In 2001 he received the National Design Award; in 2002 he received the Mainichi Design Prize in Japan; and in 2005 he was awarded the Raymond Loewy Foundation Prize in Germany.
A native of Seattle, Washington, Maeda earned a Bachelors and Masters degree from MIT in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He then received a Ph.D. in Design Science from the University of Tsukuba Institute of Art and Design in Japan. In May 2003, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Maeda also holds an MBA from Arizona State University.
