On September 12, John Maeda will be newly inaugurated as the 16th president of RISD, one of the most elite art and design colleges in the country, as well as a sister school of my alma mater Brown University. President Maeda's curriculum vitae is extraordinarily impressive, unsurprisingly for someone being asked to helm such a prestigious institution or as he called it "RISD is MIT for the right brain." For not only designers ("...he is the first designer to be appointed president of RISD, to say nothing of any college) but for Asian Americans, as Maeda is Japanese American, this is a nice moment. If this was Dave Chappelle's "Racial Draft" skit, which parodies the NBA teams' draft of college players, any "race" would be lucky to have this guy on their team!
In addition to designing sneakers where his first effort 'the Timetanium" sold out in 14 hours, and being named by Esquire as one of the "21 most important people in the 21st century," Maeda has been:
...a professor at MIT since 1996, and more recently managed research relationships between the MIT Media Lab and more than 70 industrial organizations. His work in digital media design is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. But Mr. Maeda also attended the "anti-computer" University of Tsukuba in Japan, studying graphic design and sculpture.
Congratulations Pres. Maeda!
Read more here.
[Via]