John Maeda Quotations

Design is about crafting an experience that is unfamiliar enough to feel novel, yet familiar enough to instill confidence.

The artist needs to understand the truth that lies at the bottom of an enigma.

The best scientists that I've met are those that are humanists and scientists at the same time.

Videogames are indeed design: They're sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars.

With regard to what is designed really well, I think people are the best-designed objects in the world. Seriously.

Art shows us that human beings still matter in a world where money talks the loudest, where computers know everything about us, and where robots fabricate our next meal and also our ride there.

As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively - especially when they are well-designed.

How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don't want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.

There is a construct in computer programming called 'the infinite loop' which enables a computer to do what no other physical machine can do - to operate in perpetuity without tiring. In the same way it doesn't know exhaustion, it doesn't know when it's wrong and it can keep doing the wrong thing over and over without tiring.

Teaching is the rare profession where the customer isn't always right and needs to be told so appropriately.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

Design provides solutions, art asks questions.

Knowledge makes everything simpler.

Artists change how we see the world - and that can have value in the way people do business.

Communication in every which way is everything for the leader.

All artists yearn to struggle, when they struggle they know they're alive.

I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn't have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn't have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.

Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn't know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can't do myself, my graduate students should be doing.

My role is to find strategic insights as to where design can have the most business impact. A designer can bring a viewpoint of not just aesthetics, but economics and usage.

Corporations today, by their razor sharp focus on the 'bottom line' and quarterly earnings, have lost their ability to innovate.

Creativity's about ownership.

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

Technology makes possibilities. Design makes solutions. Art makes questions. Leadership makes actions.

Art is a conduit toward human needs and perception,

Information is expanding daily. How to get it out visually is important.

I don't really love computers.

I don't like creating software anymore. It's too exact. It's like karate; there's no room for error.

Growing up, I found I was good at two things: Art and Math. To hear my parents say it, though, it was only, 'John is good at Math.

Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people.

If there were a prerequisite for the future successful digital creative, it would be the passion for discovery.

No place in the US better exemplifies the ethos to engineer new digital technologies than Silicon Valley

Think of the computer as a spiritual space for thinking.

Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities.

In the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.

Really great products, like @nest, have #design baked in from the beginning instead of slapped on at the end.

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

People who can focus, get things done. People who can prioritize, get the right things done.

Anyone with a computer and a design program can create a page layout. But unless you're trained in design, it won't look very good and it won't communicate very well.

A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together.

We seem to forget that innovation doesn't just come from equations or new kinds of chemicals, it comes from a human place. Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.

Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are considered "useless," will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life.

A book is a human-powered film projector (complete with feature film) that advances at a speed fully customized to the viewer's mood or fancy. This rare harmony between object and user arises from the minimal skills required to manipulate a bound sequence of pages. Each piece of paper embodies a corresponding instant of time which remains frozen until liberated by the act of turning a page.

Apple products aren't simple technologies by any stretch, but there is a beautiful simplicity to them.

If you have no fear, no one has power over you.

I have a confession: I'm not a man of simplicity. I spent my entire early career making complex stuff. Lots of complex stuff.

Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form.

Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of 'I can' than 'I should' Technologists love to cram maximum functionality into their products. That's 'I can' thinking, which is driven by peer competition and market forces But this approach ignores the far more important question of how the consumer will actually use the device focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can.

When you're younger, think less and do more; when you're older, do less and think more.

If you are going to have less things, they have to be great things.

All I want to be is, someone that makes, new things and, thinks about them.

Good problem-seekers are in higher demand than good problem-solvers.

The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees - to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.

Too little confidence, and you're unable to act; too much confidence, and you're unable to hear.

The problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make the world more humane again.

Simplicity and complexity need each other.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

What’s next for technology and design? A lot less thinking about technology for technology’s sake, and a lot more thinking about design. Art humanizes technology and makes it understandable. Design is needed to make sense of information overload. It is why art and design will rise in importance during this century as we try to make sense of all the possibilities that digital technology now affords.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.