Wow. He is a pretty cool and smart person!
John Maeda is currently the president of the renowned RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), appointed to that position just last year in 2008. Maeda was also the Associate Professor of Media Arts and Science at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
As a computer science student at MIT, Maeda was torn between his passions for both computer science and arts. One day, his instructor Muriel Cooper persuaded Maeda to follow his arts & design dream. And good thing she did because Maeda is truly a great designer and his teachings/thoughts really change one person's point of view on design.
He went on and got both his BS and MS degrees from MIT and PhD in Design at Tsukuba University Institute of Art and Design in Japan. He's written books on computer media designs and his most recent book was The Laws of Simplicity.
The Laws of Simplicity outlines 10 rules of simplicity. Some are contradicting the other rules, so what really are the laws? Or is there even one definite rule to simplicity? If Maeda can't even be sure of it, then I doubt I can. However, his 10 rules are pretty good "guidelines" to want to make simple things/designs.
If I have to live by one of his rules, it would be "Simplicity and complexity need each other." This statement really says it all—the whole simplicity business is not really simple and nothing can live without it's opposite. So in a design, it needs to have both simple and complex information.
Perhaps to make a good design it need to achieve a balance in simplicity and complexity, or maybe not, because that might be too harmonious and prove to be too boring...
Then again, one person might see one thing in simple whereas another sees it very complicated.
I don't know what to say now. My thoughts are both simple and yet too complicated to even describe them in words... Anyhow, Maeda is a very important contributor in the 21 c. He didn't get those honorary awards for nothing, you know.
He's pretty funny too, which makes him even more interesting. Here's a speech he gave for a TED conference and I enjoyed it immensely.
