Technology is an important tool for asking questions and expanding dialogue, John Maeda, the Rhode Island School of Design's newly inaugurated president, told a Brown audience yesterday, but it should be humanized if it is to be effective.
Maeda, who has degrees in engineering, design and business, spoke to a full MacMillan 117 Thursday as part of the Computer Science Department and Center for Vision Research's distinguished lecture series.
Maeda, known for works that synthesize art and science, talked about using technology to create ways to communicate with people. The trick, he said, is humanizing the technology so that people feel like they can connect with it.
Along those lines, Maeda brought giant screens to RISD's campus that allow students to display art on them at any time. "Students have trouble sleeping, right?" Maeda said. "I want a student at 1:30 in the morning to be thinking and send in a piece of art."
Such screens are revenue-generating mechanisms at other schools, but RISD's screens are free for all to use. Maeda said he regularly posts images.
Maeda's art is also publicly accessible. Some pieces, like an online calendar he created, invite viewers to participate. With each click, the image changes.
His piece "Darfur" requires the viewer to scroll down - and down. The word "Darfur" repeats itself in a seemingly infinite list, with each letter of the repeated words representing one of the 400,000 people who have died in the east African genocide as of May 2006.
"Scroll your browser and everything will look the same. You will feel nothing - that's the problem," says a caption above the computer art, which is viewable at one of his Web sites, MaedaStudio.
For Maeda, that feeling of detachment can actually be conquered with better use of technology.
"Humanity is somehow about what is authentic, real and fake. This is why I came to RISD," Maeda said.
Much of Maeda's art depends on one's clicking a mouse, he said, but technology has become so inhuman that it fails to inspire.
"We're maxed out of it," he said. "The newest thing does not seem good enough." Maeda predicts a movement towards "the humanization of technology" will come about as a response.
Maeda, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he hopes to "free his hands" at RISD.
"We want the authentic, the real that cannot be made fake," he said.
In Maeda's teaching model, there is a free exchange of thought in a student body - questions trump answers. "Hierarchies are no longer valid," he said.
At RISD, Maeda's motto has been transparency and participation. To this end, Maeda has a blog.
He said he helped students unload when they moved in, eats in the RISD cafeteria and sparks conversations with students.
Colleges profess community but rarely emulate it, Maeda said. One example is e-mails that circulate saying, "'We need to build community,' that say at the bottom, 'Do not respond to this e-mail,'" he said.
Teodor Moldovan '09 is a computer science concentrator, though he had never previously attended the department lecture series. But Maeda's background in art excited him, he said. "This is the only one that remotely interested me."
"If you took it seriously as a distinguished lecture in computer sciences it was disappointing. If you did not take it seriously, it was a lot of fun," said Roger Blumberg, an adjunct lecturer in computer science.
"At the end I wanted to have a conversation with him. Hang out," Micha Elsner GS said.
Maeda, who came from MIT's Media Lab to become RISD's 16th president earlier this year, authored a bestselling book, "The Laws of Simplicity." He has exhibited work at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1999, Esquire magazine named him one of the 21 most important people in the 21st century.
