Spy: Writing: Maeda@Media review (Eye)

‘Maeda@Media’ John Maeda (Thames & Hudson, 2000) ISBN 0500282358
Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk

Is John Maeda the new millennium’s successor to David Carson? Or the Leonardo Da Vinci the twenty-first century didn’t know it needed? A recent talk[1] at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts caused a near crush as design youth implored the besieged box office staff for returns, while back in Cambridge Massachusetts he was elevated to Associate Director at the MIT Media Laboratory[2], interestingly complementing ‘bits and atoms’ evangelist Nicholas Negroponte[3].

Both sides of the Atlantic Maeda@Media, a combination manifesto, retrospective and auto-biography, has broken new ground in design publishing in the spirit of Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau’s S, M, L, XL[4]. The Maeda story, which threads through Maeda@Media, has been told and retold in a hundred interviews and talks. From his immigrant Japanese father taking over a Seattle tofu factory to his being told by a teacher that he wouldn’t be able to attend MIT because “you are Oriental”, from studying computer science (partly from parental pressure) at MIT to discovering Paul Rand’s Thoughts on Design, from “going away” to art school in Tsukuba (at Muriel Cooper’s command) to explore his “artistic leanings” and his prodigal return (invited by Professor Whitman Richards) to create the Aesthetics and Computation Group.

Maeda’s short history (he is 33) is better documented and more widely communicated than that of his one time mentor, Paul Rand, or any comparable figure. Partly this is because Maeda uses his story to illustrate his ideas, but there is also an element of the American Dream-meets-designland in journalistic commentary on the Maeda phenomenon. He is also one of the few genuine practitioner-theorists working today, and his instinctive approach of researching a problem, analysing it, and devising a strategy for addressing it should be celebrated at a time when simply complaining is often mistaken for analysis and strategy. That said Maeda’s work itself has been received relatively uncritically, and journalists have been content to allow him to do the talking and avoided getting into debate.

Maeda’s critique begins with the observation that while, with the advent of computing, we have created a new digital medium it is approached with ways of thinking derived from other media. He believes that the separation of form and function represented by the computer – a phenomenon often referred to as the black box syndrome – is partly responsible for us forcing the computer into familiar metaphors inspite of its “wonderful metaphysical properties”. “I feel the need to explain the future of technology through art, that’s my mission. We can’t sit back and let this tidal wave wash over us without attempting to make sense of it”, he explained to Design Week.

Maeda envisages the digital as a multi-faceted conceptual space, a “ten-mile cube box” which we have a window looking into, a “manipulator of perfect abstractions of form unhindered by tactile reality”, a “shimmering material of pure electric thought”, a place where computer programs are “continually folding, collapsing, growing, and evolving at unimaginable speeds”[5]. Traditional notions of digital art don’t do justice to this vision. “Once [the output of a computer] is seen, it is trivialised, because it is only one facet in that conceptual space”, he explained to Elizabeth Resnick in the last issue of Eye[6].

For Maeda there is an acute disparity between his vision of the digital and the reality of the software tools and design thinking applied to it . “We’re in an age when the painter doesn’t really know about paint” he told The Independent Magazine. He sees an unholy alliance between software makers who have no idea what the future holds[7] and designers who substitute mastery of their software for mastery of the skills it is supposed to facilitate, leading to creative impotence. Interviewed in Graphics International he argued that “if in graphic design there weren’t people out there who challenged what the process was, because they understood what it was, how it worked, understood about paper and ink – there wouldn’t be cutting edge work”. “Unless experimental design expands, commercial design will continue to be uninspired”, he noted in Design Week[9], and he gives the example of Bradbury Thompson’s work with the printing press “capturing a spirit that has evaded contemporary digital design”.[10]

While this might appear to be justified by example his statement, also in Design Week[11], that “in order for design to evolve, art has to evolve first because art is the mother and father of design” is more difficult to substantiate.

Writing in the MIT’s Technology Review he attacked the current approach to computer art where the artist assumes the role of the creative genius while the engineer settles for the subordinate role of manual labourer[12], noting that the model of collaboration between the artist and technologist is flawed and that what is needed is “a true melding of the artistic sensibility with that of the engineer in a single person”[13]. As a consequence “I set out to develop myself as a true artist-engineer, with the computer as my medium” he concluded.

Not content with this fabulous challenge Maeda committed himself to teaching. In Japan, “my teachers in told me that if I were to do what I did, I would make a lot of money and be the only one doing it, and that I would never know it if I were any good or not” he noted in Eye[14]. Commenting that society has an “unfortunate push to manufacture two distinct types of thinkers: one who is technically adept and humanistically inept, the other who is humanistically adept and technically inept”[15] he is attempting to create a ‘post-visual arts education’, and argued in Technology Review that the same principle of “combining analytic and expressive skills in singular expressions of will and technology”[16] must be applied throughout the American university system.

He regards the development of education as critical to the future of design but is skeptical about the ability of existing design schools to teach new media, believing them to be stuck in old media. Neither can he see the impetus to the creation of schools coming from the successful designers with no formal education in new media, as they may be too clique-ish, or lured by the new found wealth designers could acquire (one problem that may have passed). Yet he is insistent on the need for the myth of a great school of thought in new media and talks of the need for “a revolution, a Bauhaus-type event”[17]. Perhaps the newly opened Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, with its Bauhaus-derived logo, fits the bill. Maeda has certainly endorsed it by agreeing to be part of its ‘Explorers’ Club’[18] advisory committee.

Maeda deserves all the credit he receives for his attempts to understand the digital medium in its elemental form, to communicate this effectively, and to create, through his teaching, apostles who can go beyond his insights. However his description of design as a discipline is very one sided, and this undermines the value of his insights to that audience at least. While his mentor Paul Rand, in a lecture at MIT that Maeda initiated, stated that “Design is the method of putting form and content together... Design can be art” Maeda appears to subsume design into art, as some kind of applied art or craft. “I’m much closer to the crafts idea of design” he told Peter Hall in and interview in Print[19]. There is precious little room in his description of design for the client or the person who will use the product of the design process. “The most difficult concept to master in design is not the actual execution of a design itself but finding a client willing to take a risk on your ideas and in the best of circumstances, leave you alone”[20] he writes, adding that “clients’ problems are indeed formidable but solving one’s own problems makes you realise they are not only the most difficult but the most difficult to articulate”[21]. While Maeda has a broadly humanistic approach it feels as if his understanding of design has only him at the centre.

His perspective is most eccentric when discussing Web design, which he told the ICA audience “didn’t exist”. “It is doubtful that there will ever be great Web designers in the manner that there were great print designers, such as Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Josef Muller-Brockman, and Yusaku Kamekura, for the simple reason that designing for the Web exacts a curse with each project… [While] a print piece is finished… a Web piece is never finished. Making sure that it [continues to work] is another set of creative shackles that prevents your mind from running free.” [22]

Viewing design in terms of finished things rather than processes doesn’t make sense if you believe design to be about solving a problem (yours or a client’s) and creating products that work well for their intended users. In the age of the Internet, which is both temporal and unstable, design has some exciting new problems to solve, not least of which is how to bring non-designers into the design process to create living products.

Maeda is right to argue for experimentation and a thorough-going investigation into the true nature of the digital medium. But this doesn’t invalidate a practical, relevant and client-focused practice of design, rather it complements it and provides a proper grounding for new ideas and insights. He rightly identifies many of the factors that have thus far restricted this investigation, though some, such as the developed world’s fetish for IT, are fundamentally social rather than design problems.

Two of Maeda’s insights do constitute briefs for design practice. In discussing digital art he notes that “a core challenge is to establish the relevance of a physical place in relation to a virtual space”[23]. With the growing hype around the mobile Internet the challenge is vital to address. He also notes that “there is no greater need for visual design than rethinking and redesigning programming itself”[24], an observation that must have forced itself on a lot of savvy designers working in the Wild West of Internet development.

Maeda’s elevation in the design world would seem to indicate a need for a serious discussion among designer of creativity in the digital domain. In this sense Maeda can’t be compared to David Carson. And Da Vinci? This may not be an age that spawns people of his callibre, but if Maeda’s ‘post-visual’ experiments can kick off in the twenty-first century what the Italian Renaissance painters, with their development of perspective, did for the visual five hundred years ago we will make some great strides.

[1] http://www.ica.org.uk/talk/111179/ [Link may be out-of-date.]

[2] He is also Sony Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Director of the Aesthetics and Computation Group.

[3] http://www.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/

[4] http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ISBN=3822877433

[5] p154

[6] Eye 37/00, p15

[7] Design Week, 11/11/00

[8] p94

[9] 6/10/00

[10] p225

[11] 11/11/00

[12] Technology Review, July/August 1998