"Maeda grew up in Seattle, the second of four children who helped his father, a Japanese immigrant, run a tofu factory. "Family business means child labor," Maeda says. "That's why I love school." He studied engineering at MIT but always loved art, and his PhD, in design, is from the Tsukuba University Institute of Art & Design in Japan."
"No one attribution says it all, but Maeda's name (and work) is nevertheless rapidly emerging from the rarified arenas of art, graphic design, academia and gee-whiz technology--where he's been known since the mid-1990s -- and entering the more general range of 21st century visual culture."
"On January 12th, 2002 the students of the Design Deartment at the University of Applied Sciences awarded John Maeda the '“Cologne Thumper' (Kölner Klopfer)."
Includes high- and low-resolution Quicktime video streams of Maeda's talk.
Interview: Benjamin Morando & Virginie Sautter, "Textes: John Maeda". D-i-r-t-y.com, January 15, 2002.
Excerpt: "I have learned must [sic] of my design from my father. He's a Japanese cook and he learned me how to lay out the food. You know, in Japan, the food value is determined by how alive it is. It is about the material, which is given to you. It's changed a little bit by the human but it is also presented in the most natural form. That kind of value it's something that I recognize. Japan is also interesting because it is a country of animism: everything has a soul, a kind of a god inside and this kind of spirit inspired my family as well."
"For Maeda, who has devoted his career to making technology more human, the magic word is 'simplicity.' The lab's new research agenda, which he rolled out in a two-day conference this past March, is called simply that. Maeda wants to rewind 'overfeaturized' tech tools back to version 1.0, and make them seamless and intuitive. Maeda's vision finds its purest expression in his open-source infrastructure for creativity on the Web--a kind of Linux for art tools--in which the browser becomes a global hub for editing, annotating, and sharing digital media. He expects that one day it will fuel a vast, online marketplace for the creative arts. It's all part of Maeda's ultimate mission: to put the soul of the artist into the science of digital design."