John Maeda, Former MIT Media Lab Director, At Odds With RISD Faculty
nataliailyin.net
nataliailyin.net
I don't know the ins and outs of what has been going on with Maeda at RISD but when I heard he was going to become President there I was very confused as to why he would want such an administrative orientated role.
It's the classic example of taking a skilled craftsman, visionary ideas person, guru programmer, etc and putting them in a manager's role. They no longer can ply their craft nor are they necessarily the best person to actually perform that management/administrative function.
Granted he chose to take the role but I'm left wondering whether it was out of ego or a feeling a need to pursue career progression.
He seems to have decided in the mid-2000s that he wanted to turn his design ideas into more general, far-reaching philosophies applied to other areas, which I see his move into management as part of. I must admit to being a bit skeptical; I think he's a great designer but don't really buy the "it's like design but for X" sort of analogies. Sort of wish he stuck with art & design.
His first book in that vein was 2006's The Laws of Simplicity, which applied some of his design thinking to life in general. I didn't find it very interesting, but a lot of people did, so maybe it's a matter of taste. His upcoming book is on applying design ideas to leadership, Redesigning Leadership (forthcoming May 2011).
Why am I not surprised.
Since the OP seem so happy to worship the past here is a quote from Kirkegaard:
"People want progress, but fear change"
For those of you who don't know who Maeda is, perhaps you know two of his students. Casey Raes and Ben Fry who created the http://www.processing.org framework.
Sweet Jesus, universities are so ridiculously top heavy. There is going to be a tremendous collapse when the tuition bubble pops and all the government money goes away.
As an example, I am looking to hire 10 people, all of which could come from 1 department at RISD. Even though there post graduation placement rate is pretty low, it took several months of me chasing him down via email/phone to get a meeting and this is one of the more commercially oriented programs.
In a market where there is a lack of great UI designers RISD should be taking a lead positon, but it is stuck in decades past.
I had to teach myself everything about UI design while I was working on my degree in visual communications. None of my professors thought it was different enough than print design to warrant additional attention, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know.
Although to be fair CS departments sometimes get those complaints as well. We want to teach people fundamentals of computer science, but what a lot of other departments really wish we'd teach is practical programming/script-slinging, often in languages that none of our courses focus on (Fortran, Matlab, Perl).
A (somewhat) balanced set of opinions from current RISD students is over here: http://www.golocalprov.com/news/risd-president-comes-under-f....
The money quote for me was this: Maeda has been President of the University since 2008, when he took over the position from Roger Mandle — the longest-serving president in the school's history — who stepped down after receiving a vote of no confidence from RISD department heads in 2007. Mandle, like Maeda, came under fire by faculty members after proposing significant changes to the structure of the traditional RISD curriculum and accompanying financial decisions.