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John Maeda Wants to Jump Start Your Brain

John Maeda is an artistic computer nerd who designed Reebok sneakers and is constantly challenging people’s ideas. But as RISD’s new president, the person he tests most of all is himself.

Photography by Dana Smith

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The new president of the Rhode Island School of Design is about to meet, for the first time, the mayor of Providence, his school’s home city. The president, John Maeda, has in tow two twenty-something-year-old men whom he wants to introduce to the mayor. More accurately, he wants them to introduce to Mayor David Cicilline the new product they’ve been working on, a high-tech invention that just may be the new, new thing—the Holy Grail of the venture capitalist. Maybe the city can find a use for this new technology, Maeda thinks.

And so the three of them—Maeda, Sean Moss-Pultz and Will Lai—plop down on the stuffed chairs in an anteroom of the mayor’s chamber and begin a discussion about Lai’s passion for creating music by snatching bits of tunes off old records and stitching them together into songs.

“I’m a samplist,” Lai says.

Maeda, as is his wont, whips out a digital recorder attached to his iPhone, and extends it toward Lai’s mouth to record the conversation. Maeda is forever recording his daily encounters with people, pulling from a bag his iPhone, or a digital camera that records video as well as stills, or a notebook that he uses to write down phrases that strike him as profound (i.e. “When does a form become a chair?”). Maeda, who is forty-two, likes to call himself “the old man of new media.”

“A samplist?” Maeda says into his iPhone.

“We only take samples from records, like vinyl records,” says Lai. Analog sound is warmer, he explains, not as sterile as digital. “It’s kind of like a way to respect old music.”

“Respect?” Maeda says, pushing for more information. He often does this; in a way it’s disorienting—no sooner are you introduced to the new president than he’s thrusting a recorder at you, pressing for your insights, your philosophy of your passion.

The conversation is interrupted by the news that the mayor will see them now. So the three men tromp toward the mayor’s chambers, and when they reach the door, Maeda stops to let the two younger men pass first. He invariably holds doors open for others when walking in a group, a habit from his childhood. His father, a Japanese immigrant, owned a small tofu manufactory in Seattle, and whenever a customer entered or left his shop, one of the five Maeda children would always hold open the door.

The trio sits at the mayor’s long, oval table, Maeda with his back to the window facing his younger, entrepreneurial friends; he has no business ties with them but is just interested in their project and, perhaps, getting RISD involved with it.

Cicilline sits at the head of the table, watching with curiosity while Moss-Pultz, a handsome redhead with sallow cheeks, opens a box containing the invention. He pulls from the box a cell phone, but not just any cell phone.

“This is the Hummer of phones,” Moss-Pultz says.

Looking at it, the most distinguishing feature of the phone—a nonworking prototype of their latest model, the Neo FreeRunner, which just recently went on the market—is a row of lights that arcs from the left side of the phone, around the front, to the other side. What these lights do is allow you to sniff out free wireless access to the Internet. If wireless, or Wi-Fi, is available to your right, the lights on the right side of the phone light up; point the phone right at the Wi-Fi signal, and the front lights burn, allowing you to walk right up to the source. When the signal is strong, you can use it to make free phone calls over the Internet.

The phone has a global positioning system in it, Blue Tooth technology that allows you to use it as a walkie-talkie, two identical computer chips in case one goes down. “We took the kitchen sink approach” to designing a telephone, Moss-Pultz says, as Maeda looks on like a proud parent; he is thirteen years older than the twenty-nine-year-old Moss-Pultz.

A typical cell phone company, such as Nokia or Nextel, jealously hides its programming code, and subscribers can make calls only over their networks. That’s how they make their money, carrying calls. Moss-Pultz’s company, Openmoko, Inc., is bankrolled by FIC, a Taiwanese company that is one of the largest computer and consumer electronics manufacturers in the word. Openmoko does not operate a cell phone network. It makes its money by selling a piece of hardware—a cell phone—then encouraging people to type their own programming code into the phone to make it do all kinds of things—call up local street maps, for example, which people can edit to show which clubs have live music, or such Rhode Island-centric things as where the Del’s lemonade stands or duckpin bowling lanes are.

“These are all open source programming,” Maeda explains to the mayor. “Which means you can’t control them.” Once the phones are in circulation, people can make them do whatever they want.

“Open systems may be the ultimate expression of independence,” Maeda says.

Moss-Pultz adds, “It’s the power of the individual to go into something and rip out all the barriers that exist.”

“The idea of putting your own personal imprint on this,” Cicilline says, fingering the phone, imagining the possibilities.

Maeda: “People think of technology as something that is pulling us apart. Actually it gives us an unparalleled chance to be a part of something.”

John Maeda is a walking brainstorm. Whenever he’s walking, which is often since RISD’s campus is spread out over several downtown blocks, he is talking, probing, suggesting. As anyone who’s ever been forced into a brainstorming session knows, ideas are encouraged to flow unfiltered. And as a result, a lot of nonsense comes out. This is true of John Maeda’s musings—he spouts a lot of nonsense and he knows it.

He says of his own conversation: “Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.”

To get a sense of Maeda’s walking brainstorm style, watch him at http://welcome.risd.edu/category/maeda/. Click on “Tour With Maeda V: Stores of Creativity” and see as he enters the RISD art supplies store with a look of awe on his expressive face. As the camera pans across rolls of rainbow-hued masking tape, he says: “This gets me excited—tape. Because tape allows you to make perfect lines, like on the computer—you know, you can draw a line with your mouse, but uh, with tape you do a very similar thing: You sort of point and drag or you pull and drag. I love tape.” He plunges deeper into the store, looking at an array of colored felt-tip pens and tubes of paint and brushes.