John Maeda’s Fundamental Idea
Featured Artists

'Paola Antonelli Paola Antonelli

The most important part of Maeda's production, and the one he is most proud of, is nonetheless not the final object, but rather the process. In his work, the process is the core that informs the final outcome. Maeda's fundamental idea is that to successfully design with a computer, one has to design, or at least understand the program one uses.

By stressing the necessity to know in depth the tools of the trade, Maeda also responds to one of the major criticisms advanced by the detractors of the computer, the lack of self-discipline that the computing machine allows. Even though it is true that, in general appreciation, the new fields of design action, like computer-based graphic design ten years ago and websites or wearable computing today, seem to attract many amateurs and to provoke in designers a short circuit that erases the school memory of a correct design process, it is also true that it always takes time. Graphic design is undergoing today a post-industrial revolution similar to the industrial revolution that shook object design more than a century ago.

Maeda tries to bring designers and amateurs alike to a level of knowledge of one particular design process that paradoxically has almost Arts-and-Crafts feeling. He teaches people an approach to computer graphic design that is not different from an approach to wood-carving. The more the awareness of the new tools will be disseminated, the more designers will learn to incorporate them in their practice without being unsettled by them.