Video: John Maeda on the simple life

The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated.

Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working — but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.

About John Maeda

John Maeda is a programmer and an artist — and is committed to blurring the lines between the two disciplines. As a student at MIT, studying computer programming, the legendary Muriel Cooper persuaded him to follow his parallel passion for fine art and design. And when computer-aided design began to explode in the mid-1990s, Maeda was in a perfect position to influence and shape the form, helping typographers and page designers explore the freedom of the web.

He jokes about himself as “the guy who makes the flying letters.” But behind this joke is a deep insight into the way good programming can create new forms of good design — the guiding principle of Web 2.0, where type and images can behave in brand-new ways to communicate and amuse.

He’s the author of several books, including his latest, The Laws of Simplicity, and the retrospective MAEDA@MEDIA.