This is a nice article in Fast Company on John Maeda’s new role as President of the Rhode Island School of Design. Here’s a good segment that will give you an idea of why Maeda-at-RISD is of interest:
The very night he got the news, he launched a blog for the internal community, called one.risd.edu, where he tackled the issues head-on. Setting the IT-takeover rumors to rest, he assured the campus, “I don’t really love computers” (a fairly shocking admission for a guy with two computer-science degrees from MIT, as well as a PhD in design from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and an MBA from Arizona State). “I would not want to imagine an Ikea-ized, computerized RISD.”
Then he began mapping out his vision of the school’s future, articulating, in a series of posts, where he thought design education at RISD needed to go. This would be no autocratic exercise, he explained, but an open-source design problem that would draw on ideas from the school’s faculty, staff, and students. “Creativity’s about ownership,” he wrote. “We all own RISD together, and we’re going to design it together.”
What shape that might take is a topic of intense interest even beyond academic circles. “If you’re looking for someone to reinvent this very old construct — the way we learn — John is the kind of thinker who will turn it upside down, and you’ll suddenly realize it got 100% better,” says Chee Pearlman, director of Chee Co., an editorial and design consultancy in New York, and former editor of I.D. magazine. “That’s why the whole design-education infrastructure is looking at this with a certain amount of skepticism and, perhaps, envy.”
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