Apa hubungannya Desain Grafis Indonesia dengan berita terpilihnya John Maeda sebagai presiden ke-16 Sekolah Desain AS ternama, Rhode Island School of Design mulai tahun 2008 ini? John Maeda adalah salah satu pelopor humanisasi komputer grafis dan aplikasinya pada desain grafis sehari-hari baik industri maupun eksperimental. John Maeda dari MIT Media Lab lebih dikenal sebagai “Paul Rand abad komputer grafis” berfokus terutama dengan inovasi, teknologi, eksperimen berkaitan dengan seni dan industri.

Sekolah Desain RISD adalah contoh atau prototype dari wajah sekolah desain yang established dan memiliki kurikulum yang teruji, cenderung statik atau biasa dikenal dengan sebutan OLD SCHOOL. Gebrakan RISD untuk berani meminang John Maeda dari MIT Media Lab untuk memimpin sekolah desain dengan reputasi konservatif adalah langkah dan keputusan yang sangat berani, mengejutkan dan revolusioner!

Mungkin kita bisa menebak bahwa berita ini sangat mungkin terjadi di negara-negara maju. Tetapi RISD mengambil resiko besar untuk memberi kemudi masa depan institusi pendidikan yang sudah established kepada Maeda dengan tradisi Bauhaus Weimar, Swiss International Typographic Style sebagai fondasi dan membuka peluang baru akan inovasi-inovasi seni dan desain yang bisa dan mungkin saja terjadi di abad 21 seiring dengan shocking therapy pemanasan global di seluruh dunia.

Bagaimana dengan sekolah desain di Indonesia? Adakah kesempatan bagi generasi muda untuk berkolaborasi atau mengambil alih tongkat estafet generasi pendahulu. Sudah siapkah kita menerima dan terbuka dengan para John Maeda-Indonesia?? Atau justru industri telah diam-diam menyetir dan membelit kreativitas pendidikan desain? Masihkah kita bergelut dengan politik, tradisi senioritas yang kaku atau komunikasi yang tidak berjalan mulus, kesalahpahaman terjadi dalam alih generasi. Mari kita tinggalkan dan maju menyusul yang lain!

Henricus Kusbiantoro
Kontributor DGI
26 Maret 2008

 

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http://www.risd.edu/president/

The Board of Trustees of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) announced on December 21, 2007 that John Maeda, Associate Director of Research at the MIT Media Lab, has accepted the offer to become the 16th president of RISD.

RISD Board Chair Merrill Sherman said, “We are delighted to name John Maeda as successor to Roger Mandle. RISD has a special obligation to play a leadership role in the world of art and design, nationally and internationally. Creativity and innovation are more important than ever. We believe John will be a bold, innovative and exciting president and will enhance RISD’s role in helping to shape and inform art and design in this century.”

 

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ABOUT JOHN MAEDA

John Maeda is a world-renowned designer, innovator, and academic whose distinguished career has expressed in many ways his philosophy of “humanizing technology.” For more than a decade Maeda has sustained three parallel careers in which the fine arts, design, and technology interrelate. Perhaps more than any other contemporary thinker, his work transcends the “two cultures” mindset that has been debated so hotly over the past half century, ever since C. P. Snow first posited a breakdown in communication between the sciences and the humanities. Maeda’s work and career are testaments to a 21st century synthesis that changes how we think about art, technology, and education.

Maeda is a highly regarded digital artist. His one-man shows in London, New York, and Paris have met with wide acclaim. Maeda’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. Maeda has also focused on applying his analytical and creative impulses in the design of useful objects for the world in which we live. Since 1990 he has developed advanced projects for a wide array of corporations, spanning the range of Cartier, Google, Philips, Reebok, and Samsung, among others. His stature in the design world is widely acknowledged. He is a Trustee of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

As a public intellectual and academic, Maeda has held university positions, has written prolifically, and gained a wide following at the world’s most influential venues. He has been on the faculty at MIT since 1996 and in addition holds the position of Associate Director of Research at the MIT Media Lab where he has been responsible for managing research relationships with more than seventy industrial organizations. He has published four books, the most recent, The Laws of Simplicity, has been translated into fourteen languages and has become the reference work for discussions on the highly elusive theme of “simplicity” in the complex digital world. Maeda has lectured at numerous universities and institutions including Harvard, TED, Princeton, the Royal College of Art, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, Centre Pompidou, Stanford, San Francisco MoMA, UCLA, Walker Art Center and for corporations that include Herman Miller, Oxygen Media, Philips, Sony, Steelcase, Toshiba, Victoria’s Secret, and Yahoo!.

In 1999 Maeda was named one of the twenty-one most important people for the twenty-first century by Esquire magazine. In 2001 he received the National Design Award; in 2002 he received the Mainichi Design Prize in Japan; and in 2005 he was awarded the Raymond Loewy Foundation Prize in Germany. A native of Seattle, Washington, Maeda earned a Bachelors and Masters degree from MIT in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He then received a Ph.D. in Design Science from the University of Tsukuba Institute of Art and Design in Japan. In May 2003, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art. Maeda also holds an MBA from Arizona State University.