John Maeda is an American executive, designer, technologist. His work explores the area where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technologist." He is EVP Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient where he helps established companies transform digitally by bridging business strategy and engineering-at-scale with computational design.
As an artist, Maeda’s early work redefined the use of electronic media as a tool for expression by combining computer programming with traditional artistic technique, laying the groundwork for the interactive motion graphics that are taken for granted on the web today. He has exhibited in one-man shows in London, New York and Paris. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. He is formerly Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic where he sought to address the diversity gap in tech by exploring how inclusion could be a key ingredient for success in the technology industry. Before that he was Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers where he advised startups on the business impact of design and continues as a Strategic Advisor. He also serves on the Board of Directors of consumer electronics company Sonos and global advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy. He was a Professor at the MIT Media Lab for 12 years where he fostered a community of designers who could code and engineers who could design called the Aesthetics + Computation Group, and then created the Physical Language Workshop with Henry Holtzman. Shortly after the launch of the Design By Numbers project to teach artists and designers how to code, he helped to accelerate the Scratch language project in an NSF proposal with outreach across the digital divide. He resigned from MIT in 2008 to become the President of the Rhode Island School of Design, just as the global financial crisis of 2007-09 took hold. In 2011, RISD's faculty majority passed a vote of no confidence in Maeda. He survived the vote, and subsequently led RISD to be recognized by the business community as number one in the world while shepherding the national STEAM movement, feeling that "art and design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century like science and technology did in the last century." For his work in advancing STEAM education, Maeda was recognized with a Tribeca Film Festival Disruptor Award and the Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts & Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy Center. Maeda resigned from his presidency at the end of 2013 and joined eBay Inc. as Chair of their Design Advisory Board and KPCB to advance design in Silicon Valley as chronicled by Stanford's Barry Katz. In 2014 and 2015, he guest curated and hosted PopTech: REBELLION and PopTech: HYBRID. In 2015 he published his first Design In Tech Report to connect the investing world with the world of design and technology. A 2nd Design in Tech Report was published in 2016 and later in 2017, a 3rd Design In Tech Report was published.
