The new president of RISD is John Maeda!
Monday, December 24th, 2007John Maeda, design guru for decades at the MIT medialab and my personal source of inspiration for long years, is the new president of RISD. Here the most interesting Q+A from the interview at Business Week:
What sorts of new relationships with corporations might you cultivate at RISD, if you are interested in doing so?
Corporations today, by their razor sharp focus on the “bottom line” and quarterly earnings, have lost their ability to innovate. You folks at BW talk about it all the time. But no solutions are proferred. People think that mixing design school mentality into a business school might work; or maybe mixing business school mentality into a design school might work. Add technology, shake, then stir. Voila! What do you have? Essentially a nice mixture of oil and water that, with the progression of time will naturally separate back to the oil and the water. What is needed is a more integrative approach to engaging business-thinking with creative-thinking. How this will be done? What a great challenge to work on. That’s why I’m headed to RISD.