Having earned an honorary doctorate at City University of Hong Kong, Dr John MAEDA delineates his path as a versatile leader in multiple disciplines and his pursuit of simplicity

Bristling with aplomb and buoyancy, Dr John MAEDA stands out at the intersection of design, computing, art and education for his pioneering innovations. He is a globally-celebrated technologist, designer, author and entrepreneur whose contributions extend beyond the disciplines.

Maeda, currently Vice-President of Design and AI at Microsoft, was an early catalyst for generative art and computational design for commercial applications across Web2 and Web3. During his early career, he taught Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and served as Associate Director of Research in the MIT Media Lab. He also served for the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as its 16th President from 2008 to 2014.

In November 2022, City University of Hong Kong (CityU) conferred an Honorary Doctor of Engineering on Maeda, who later engaged in a riveting dialogue with Prof Richard M WALKER, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) and Prof Christine HUANG Yi-hui, Associate Dean (Faculty and Research) of CLASS. He spoke of the bumpy but profound journey as a versatile leader and his wisdom on resilience and multidisciplinary education, imparting advice to young students in the digital era. 

A Powerful Combo

Unpacking the acronym “CLASS”, Maeda is quick off the mark with Liberal Arts. “It is a strange combination of two words,” says the technologist. “We spend all the time either making something or talking about something. Liberal Arts is a combination of the making and the talking, squeezing two areas together. It gets even healthier and better. All good start-ups are led by CEOs who are both good talkers and makers.”

The prologue of Maeda’s adventure also starts with a wondrous mix of two things as his parents taught him to speak both the languages of “human” and “machine”. “We are in an age when computational power is experiencing the next renaissance,” is his view of the digital age as people have been making what one thought impossible possible. For instance, while new systems of artificial intelligence spring about, robots begin penning articles in the press. He pinpoints that “to speak both machine and human gives people an advantage and resilience.”

Among Maeda’s accomplishments, one cannot miss that he launched the STEAM initiative. He added the letter A for the arts subject to the STEM acronym, which represents the learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. To him, art and design are twin transformational forces in the 21st century, carrying the same weight as science and technology did in the last century. He recalls, “I talked to art teachers in the States and found that art classes were shrinking and losing ground. I had to advocate for the art. I studied the development of science education and identified the solution that once tackled the preceding problem: to reveal the importance of it.” 

Beyond Boundaries

Having acquired technology, design, and business expertise, Maeda drives cross-disciplinary endeavours in full swing. Asked about disciplines and boundaries, he recollects his artistic pursuit in his late 20s. “I was still doing all kinds of stuff, but people told me to focus on one craft and stop doing many things. Until I met Takenobu IGARASHI, a Japanese sculptor and product designer, in his studio in Tokyo. He mentioned two ways of creating new lives: to be good at one thing or to be very broad.”

“Imagine you are building a mountain. When the mountain goes very high, but if one thing goes wrong, it falls over. When another mountain is low and very broad, it is stable. Mount Fuji represents the symbol of beauty in Japan because it is immovable.” Heeding the sculptor’s wise words, he has set his mind to cross-disciplinary and breadth-based education, which helps him be more resilient in times of change.

In Maeda’s view, academia is designed like the periodic table of elements. He elaborates that, “the power of academia is the ability to reduce elements to the purest form. But the problem is that when students want to dabble in different elements, they run into the fault line. I can tell CityU is finding ways for people to absorb different things more easily.”

“I like when people care about their disciplines,” he remarks. “If I can have multiple perspectives come together, the sum will be greater than its parts. While the faculty members are erudite about their disciplines, they may stay curious about other aspects. That is exactly what collegiality is.” 

Favourite Failure

Think about the decisions you have made today. Chances are you have made many decisions, some of which turn out to be mistakes prone to failure. Maeda frankly recounts his “favourite failure” when he was the President at RISD. He says, “I made many changes happen and moved things forward, like introducing systems and new ways to the school. It made me unpopular among the faculty. The entire faculty voted no-confidence in me. It went public and all over the media.” The harder he tried unravelling the problem, the more failure he had. 

Notwithstanding the rebuke, he was determined to soldier on. It was not until he sought advice from a consultant that he got to the bottom of what went wrong. He reminisces, “the consultant told me that I was a product of the American dream. I once reckoned that if you do the right thing, the right thing will happen for you. But it is a fictional concept. I was repeatedly failing because I thought the right thing would happen.”

Maeda gained a new insight into the talker’s world from the consultant, revamping his own worldview. He explains the epiphany: “There is the undecided majority who will go to the winning side when the dust settles. My mind woke up. It is not about right or wrong, good wins or bad wins. Instead, it is all about the momentum. The entire world has been living in this kind of binary system for so long. In the world of talking and relating, people constantly ask, ‘are you with me or against me?’ It is not about making anything.” He has stopped seeing the world in one way since then.

Breadth or depth

When asked what advice he would give students, Maeda heaves a brief sigh, expressing sympathy for and empathy with the young. “In the old days, you could choose what to become and educate yourself to become that. But nowadays, the job would be gone by the time you graduate. It is more challenging than the past when I was a student.” He advises future torchbearers to stay agile, and such agility comes from breadth instead of depth. 

Maeda peels away layers one after the other and comes in touch with the crux of simplicity. As he concludes, “learning makes things simpler. I believe in education, so I invest time in learning. That is how I make it look so easy. Also, saving time feels like simplicity.” One analogy he likes to use is “compression”. Just as this article attempts to compress his sagacity, a good compression of complex things indeed consumes plenty of time. If one is ready to make an effort, simplicity will not be out of reach after all.