Main | In the Bubble: Designing in a complex world »
September 14, 2004
Maeda@media
| Title | Maeda@media | |
| Author | John Maeda | |
| Publisher | Thames & Hudson, London | |
| Date | 2001 | |
| ISBN | 0-50028235-8 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
| "Creating what seems most natural . . . can be a most unnatural task." With these words, John Maeda — a towering influence on digital visual culture — sums up 20 years of work attempting to achieve expressive immediacy using the tortured complexity of computers. His life explains this mission: Maeda, the son of a hardworking Tofu-maker he studied computing at MIT before (inspired by graphic designer Paul Rand), returning to Japan to study art. So his background straddles eastern and western cultures, as well as both sides of the art/science divide. These multiple influences are probably the source of his strength as a designer. Certainly they explain his goal of making his MIT students "humanist-technologists," rather than the either-or polarized people which society seems to prefer to produce. Resolutely hands-on, Maeda believes the computer will never realize its potential until "more artists (are) unafraid to peer deep inside the machine and directly affect a deconstruction of the software systems that imprison all digital expressions." He derides our current reliance on three or four operating systems, wonders at our habitual use of one basic computing paradigm which was designed over 50 years ago and laughs at the irony of the term ‘software’. Software, after all, isn’t soft: if it were, it would be "capable of being molded and recast into new tools by the will of the artist." Designing for the web, he writes, "exacts a curse with each project" — for a web piece is never finished, and maintenance is "another set of creative shackles that prevents your mind from running free." Yet his own work, with its extraordinary elegance of conception and execution, beautifully reproduced here in over 1,000 illustrations, is inspirational proof of what can be achieved within current computing restraints. | ||
Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM