SXSWORLD

DESIGN MAESTRO, JOHN MAEDA — On Why The Real World May Be A Better Classroom Than Academia. For Now... SXSW.COM | N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 6 | SXS W O R L D 1 7  Once he formally made the leap from academia to the corporate/ VC sector, he also saw what he'd suspected for some time: That in the business world, things move exponentially faster. Maeda says an "aha" moment came when he first saw Jack Dorsey's Square, the device that attaches to smart phones, laptops and other elec- tronics, allowing the owner to swipe credit cards and become, essentially, a one-person vendor:  "When this came out, it struck me: 'Wow, you can be a professor in a university classroom, but all it takes is one smart professor to stand outside in the park, or anywhere outside the school, and gather a bunch of students and do credit card swipes.' They (stu- dents) didn't need the university president or a professor to teach them how to do it."  But even as they're exploring and discovering outside of lecture halls and studios, Maeda emphasizes that aspiring designers must keep an eye on the human element: "I guess over time I've realized that what design is really about is connecting with people. Yes, you can make it perform better, you can make it feel better, but who are you doing this for? People ... But maybe you don't 'know' that person, and if you aren't inclusive of the people you're making it for, you're going to make something that doesn't really work …"  As an example, he cites the Snapchat app that finds a user's face and puts it in a mask or a framework. "But, if you're African- American or Mexican, it can't find your face," Maeda says. "And that's because the people who made it tested it on their own faces. And there weren't a lot of people with darker skin who made it, so then (if you're a person of color) the Snapchat app couldn't find 'you.' "  It is at this intersection of design, technology and inclusion that Maeda has discovered his latest classroom. And here, he's setting his own learning curve: "At this point in my life, I'm not just interested in designing cool things; I'm interested in asking who's designing these things, and who do they know when they're designing them? Do they know who they might be excluding in the process?"  However, he concludes, "It's not just about social justice. When the subject turns to 'the right thing,' I like to think more that it's just pragmatics. It's just business. If you're serving N customers, and there are Y customers you're not reaching, why not design it for N + Y?"  Now that may be design at its most Darwinian. John Maeda will present his "Design in Tech Re- port 2017" at SXSWedu 2017. For more.  esign is part of nature and in every manmade object we encounter. It's simple and complex, elementary and heady. Yet the bottom line is, if something isn't properly designed, then it doesn't work for the user. Nature knows this and responds accordingly.  Prominent designer and author John Maeda believes that today's designers, particularly in the tech field, are starting to follow that lead. They're learning to design for "inclusion," to engage the largest possible range of beneficiaries. And many of them are learning this outside the classroom. Kind of like … nature.  "Whether design for performance or design for emotions, it is extremely valuable for corporations and VCs today … and I think the education world is challenged to understand what that is, what that means." says Maeda, Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic Inc., the web development firm best known for WordPress.  For years, design at its highest levels has been taught—and learned—within the confines of academia, explains Maeda, for- merly a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab, and then the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) for six years. But lately, Maeda has found more satisfaction designing (and responding to design problems) in the real world.  Maeda believes that while design in technology is advancing at warp speeds, the teaching of design is not. He thinks that aspiring designers may well learn more by experimenting in the workaday world. And of course, that hinges on a more democratic view of its definition:  "Most people don't know what 'design' is—or they would like to know. But there's always a different answer. It can mean too many things. It can mean the design of your hairstyle, the design of your shoes, the design of your app, the design of your logo, the design of your food … When you think about why it's important, (you realize) it's about being able to make something better that was already good. It's either going to be technically better, it's been designed to perform better, or its design is more emotional, so that it makes you feel better."  Maeda's quest to broaden this view of design was part of a major career move. In early 2014, he left RISD to join the Palo Alto- based VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) as a design partner, before moving to Automattic in August.  "I was in education for 12 years," says Maeda, "and I decided to leave because I began to question it all … And by spending three years in VC, it has changed my whole perspective. But it's kept me feeling, knowing, what I had cared about all along." By sheRmakaye Bass

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