John Maeda on why good design takes decades
This week Marketplace Tech is exploring South by Southwest Interactive, the tech-oriented event that draws tens of thousands of people to Austin, Texas every year.
We spoke with designer John Maeda, who is at SXSW to talk about designing for the tech industry. A graduate of MIT and former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, Maeda is now a design partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. He talked with us about his first Macintosh, the tech industry’s diversity problem, and how design can make technology more accessible.
The year you started at MIT — 1984 — is the year that the Apple Macintosh came out and your parents got you one?
Sure did. Brought a Macintosh to MIT and people made fun of me.
Did they?
Oh yeah.
Because you were a weirdo?
At MIT we are all weirdos so that’s okay. It’s the fact that the Mac didn’t look like a computer. It had pictures on it.
How did that piece of technology influence your approach to design?
I remember the time I first touched a Mac and it was so much faster at graphics processing. I could draw an ellipse. Drawing ellipse used to take like … sitting there [saying] “Ahh, draw that ellipse!” And the Mac was flowing with you.
In your role at Kleiner Perkins, you work with companies to build and design from the beginning. At what point in that process do people start to notice good design?
People’s first notion of design is … pretty stuff. And if you’re there, I have to get them out of that. It’s about taking an idea and giving it a system behind it because design doesn’t happen by buying a part. It happens by having people who can design.
Is there a design solution for the tech industry’s diversity problem?
Well, it’s a systems problem, really. The question is how do you design the system to enable people from different backgrounds to participate?
How do you do that?
Let me give an example. When you recruit for a more diverse student base, you forget that a diverse population will not stay on your campus if there aren’t more role models like themselves. I would argue often at MIT, even at RISD, we need more people, more faculty around to role model for. So that’s a systems approach.
What’s a piece of technology that you really enjoy using, that you interact with and you just really appreciate the design of, that’s not a laptop, a smartphone, [and so on]?
Anything we use with our hands is going to feel good. Like a spoon or chopsticks or our glasses. Why do they feel so good? We’ve spent hundreds of year improving those … So when we think technology is hard to use we have to remember, it’s like a decades worth of experimentation. So it’s going to get better. It’ll take time.
What role do you think design plays in getting people to adopt new technology? Something that people might even be a little bit skeptical of?
Technology, by nature, we fear because it’s hard to do something new. It’s easier for younger people because they don’t know they are going to die. Older people are like “I am so done with that, I’d rather have fun instead of figuring that new thing out,” right? Young people [are like] “Who cares,” right? So design helps to bridge that gap. It makes it more interesting. But I want to caution, because design that’s just about desire — the “wow” — is not enough. My friend who designs for Muji — the brand Muji in Japan — talks about how he designs for what’s called the “after-wow” effect. The “after-wow” is: You’ve bought it, you bring it home, you’ve had it for a month, you’re sitting there and saying, “Wow, that’s really awesome.”
How does one create that? What’s he doing?
I am glad you asked that question. It takes time. Taking time is what is so difficult in the tech industry, which moves so fast.
What are the the tensions of that working in a VC firm?
A lot of my role is to create time for people, to be able to advocate for: “Hey, you know, this design needs more time or this design team is really getting there, so let’s support that,” which I find is important.
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