John Maeda Headlines Drexel's Learning Innovation Initiative Launch

The Citizen Recommends: John Maeda

He put the "A" in "STEAM." Tomorrow he leads off a Drexel series featuring idea leaders who are rethinking learning

January. 23, 2017

When John Maeda was ix years old, his father, a blue collar worker, did something rare: He took off work to nourish parent-teacher night at his son's schoolhouse. There, John heard his teacher tell his father: "John is good at math and art."

The next day, however, John overheard his begetter say to a family unit friend: "John is actually good at math." Wait—what happened to art?

Today, Maeda is the groundbreaking designer, artist, technologist and thinker who was instrumental in the movement to put the 'A' — for fine art — into Stalk, under the theory that art and pattern are critical to helping the emphasis on Scientific discipline, Technology, Technology and Math bulldoze innovation. As a kid, though, he was similar so many others who, even today, get the bulletin at a young age that art just isn't practical.

"I can't tell you how common that story is, how many people come upwards to me to say that happened to them, too," he said, laughing, when I caught up with him last week. Maeda volition be boot off the Drexel ExCITe Middle'due south year-long Learning Innovation initiative tomorrow nighttime.  Equally a preview, hither'south a Maeda TedTalk:

It'southward off-white to say Maeda's whole professional life has been nearly answering his Dad past integrating fine art, technology, and business; the kid who wondered "what well-nigh art?" has become an unrepentant blurrer of lines. When he became president of the legendary Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, he told the Wall Street Periodical: "Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology." He tweeted his presidency in real time, calling those daily 140 graphic symbol missives of ultra-transparency "public therapy sessions."

What Maeda modeled at RISD was a different type of leadership, one infused with correct brain thinking. Predictably, the Academy was slow to comprehend change; once he ran into some Ivy League presidents at a briefing who said, "You're the guy who tweets? We've been watching you lot to meet how long until you lot get fired!" In 2013, Maeda moved on to Silicon Valley, and now he's Global Head, Computational Blueprint and Inclusion at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, where, he writes , he'southward "serving the Open Source mission."  There, Maeda has launched Design.blog , a site featuring new stories every week from thinkers, designers and writers. When I enquire Maeda what he's doing to reimagine our concept of media at Automattic, he laughs: "Oh, I don't know," he says. "I'm only getting started. But I am questioning everything."

Questioning everything . Wouldn't that be an awesome description to put on a business card? Maeda has made his way in the world by doing merely that, and in the process he has expanded our notion of what technology is. It harkens back to the '70s, when a guy named Jobs somehow intuited some of the same harmonic convergences. "Apple tree is interesting, because its founder, this failed liberal arts student, imagined a cultural application to applied science," Maeda says. "He wasn't asking, 'How exercise we brand this faster?' He was asking, 'How does information technology make yous experience?' Remember, no one wanted an Apple tree computer. It was more expensive—and who needs a designed computer?"

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Design, though, turned what had been a utilitarian technology into an iconic cultural touchstone. "The same thing happened in the car industry," Maeda says. "At get-go, it had to be all almost existence fast. But once y'all go too far past the speed limit, you can't get any faster. It changed when the engineering science became commoditized and it was suddenly about how this product fabricated you feel ."

And so talk about coming full circumvolve. Recently, Maeda was contacted by a student who was yearning to get to fine art school. But his father—citing practicality—was pushing computer science. "You lot can pursue both at the same time," Maeda told the student, who breathed a sigh of relief. To hear Maeda tell it, STEAM has caught on especially at the One thousand-12 level, but non quite as much at the higher education level, which moves much more slowly—as he found at RISD. "That's what makes Drexel'due south ExCITe Center so important," Maeda says. At that place, nether the leadership of ExCITe Director Youngmoo Kim, the Learning Innovation plan will exist rethinking just what learning is and can be, taking deep dives into only how innovations similar maker spaces and gamification can change pedagogy.

Only Maeda says the Drexel plan will actually exist doing something else. "Past creating a place where inventiveness, technology and commerce all come together, this type of convergence becomes normal," he says. And that means that fathers non quite getting the practical applications of art only might become a thing of the past.

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/john-maeda-drexel-university-learning-innovation-initiative/