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John Maeda

@johnmaeda.bsky.social
960 followers 9 following 57 posts

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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
#DesignInTech Report 2026 youtu.be/dry_rIRsDl8?...
youtu.be
Design in Tech Report SXSW 2026: UX to AX
YouTube video by UsefulMBA by John Maeda
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
13th #DesignInTech Report at @sxsw arrives in March schedule.sxsw.com/events/PP114...
schedule.sxsw.com
SXSW 2026 Schedule
Browse events, build your schedule, and get personalized recommendations for the 2026 SXSW Conference & Festivals from March 12–18, 2026 in Austin, TX.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣6️⃣🐴 editor.p5js.org/johnmaeda/fu...
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
“Design is the method of putting form and content together.” —Paul Rand The form will follow. Start with the content.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Ref designobserver.com/thoughts-on-...
designobserver.com
Thoughts on Paul Rand - DesignObserver
Twenty years after the event, John Maeda reflects on inviting Paul Rand to speak at MIT.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Design puts form and content together. But content comes first. Good content enables meaningful design. Bad content enables malicious design. Designers with a moral compass must fight for good content to exist. You can’t design meaning from garbage.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
“You can’t change how you feel. But you can change what you do.” —a friend --- Emotions can overwhelm in hard moments, no matter your experience. But actions are always a choice, even when feelings aren’t.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
Success is hard to repeat because what got you there tends to go away once you achieve it.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
Ego turns opportunities into actions, while egolessness helps you pick the right ones.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
And to realize that my perception of that which is not my daily jam, is not necessarily so different. Not alien. Just me being too dumb to listen or to understand. Note to self.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
I find that going to different places and exposing oneself to “alien” environments is the only thing to force, at least me, to switch to thinking hard.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Why does history repeat itself? Perhaps thinking hard is not our second nature.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
When someone becomes some-thing, dehumanization is doing its unfortunate magic. Alienization is presto. Complete.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
The word “alienation” comes to mind, which is different than the state of being alien. It means making someone who might be really no different than you … into some “thing.”
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
The history of the rise of propaganda positioned against the Japanese Americans in the US was an effective tactic to alienate other people, not unlike similar tactics we know throughout history and the world.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Visited the Japanese American Museum in Portland today, and got a vocabulary lesson thru the various historical artifacts and writings there about a v recent past here in the US.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
“New (hu)man must have the courage to be new.” —Apollinaire designintech.report/wp-content/u...
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
But human opinion, even when guided/controlled by media technologies still requires many interactions for behavior changes to stick. The RL loop for humanity can still get disrupted by humans outside of the loop. I choose to believe this.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
The way? Let’s just say it took a while to get to where “modern” design brought us today. A good marination takes a good deal of time. I think we’d like to think that the marinating process can be accelerated with GPUs.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
The Bauhaus era was about reconciling new industry-grade technologies and their specific habits of form-making. The goal? To find a way to meld humanistic thinking with the new mechanistic outputs.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
Because writing wrong can be a path to not being “right.” But even better. Being new.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
To remain yourself, it is important to write by yourself. At least if you care to be. Yourself. And not just. Others.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
The LLM can write better than you, by a standard which others are measured. But you write better than the LLM, by a standard which you measure yourself.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
This situation can’t be faked, however. And fortunately it doesn’t get called to bear more than a few times during one’s run at a challenging goal.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Constraint-heavy creativity lives in the need-to-figure-out-or-consequences-are-dire. I think in LLM terms this might be when you are ALL CAPS-ING yourself to ensure success in the face of extermination-style concerns.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
It’s a high-risk space to live in that doesn’t have a goal. That is what makes it very uncomfortable for every reason.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Constraint-zero creativity lives in the space of likely being wrong if it is coming at a time where you are slightly desperate. It’s when you don’t care about anything else and only care about the work.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
It is when you have nothing at stake or everything at stake when you are the most creative. It’s a different kind of creativity on either end.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Whether we value that difference or not will depend on how critical thinking evolves in the mediascape. And also whether or not you appreciate the true randomness implicit to a life that is lived IRL.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
The chaos of that process still beats the pseudo-stochasticism of the GenAI approach.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
How do we define the value of creative effort during a time when “effortless creative” is becoming the norm? I think we need to appreciate the slow marination of ideas that become subject to many random forces.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
Having a place to think without subjecting oneself to extreme noise is a positive direction for me.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
Daily life is mostly waiting for good news or bad news. With time, you realize no bad news is the good news you were desperate for.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Fixed vs Variable Costs useful.mba/lessons/fixe...
useful.mba
Fixed vs Variable Costs
Understanding how costs behave with scale and finding the path to profitability
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 27/04/2025
Tools will keep changing, but our job is to shape the work with humanity and purpose. maeda.pm/2025/04/27/f...
maeda.pm
From Reactive Graphics to the Agent Era: Reflections on the Evolution of Design and Code | John Maeda’s Blog
https://vimeo.com/198494483 Looking back at my path through design and technology, I’m often struck by how much the landscape keeps shifting—and how much there is to learn at every turn. In the early ...
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Artists comfortably work within and with the many enigmas in life—sharing their research as concrete evidence of a different path taken. johnmaeda.medium.com/why-art-stil...
johnmaeda.medium.com
Why Art Still Matters (Especially Now)
Artists comfortably work within and with the many enigmas in life — sharing their research as concrete evidence of a different path taken.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Simplicity and Agentic Experience johnmaeda.medium.com/simplicity-a...
johnmaeda.medium.com
Simplicity and Agentic Experience (AX)
We find ourselves these days at a fascinating intersection where simplicity and agency are converging. As I’ve explored in my previous work…
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
The Art of Creative Leadership johnmaeda.medium.com/the-art-of-c...
johnmaeda.medium.com
The Art of Creative Leadership
I remember standing in my father’s tofu factory as a child, watching him transform simple ingredients into something nourishing through…
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
95% AI-ONLY: I wanted to find a way to compress the info in my ultra-long form video so I tried the new gpt-4o to see what it would create as infographics, and then went down a rabbit hole to create a short video. It definitely got the general "information shape" correct youtube.com/shorts/RfYVk...
youtube.com
2025 Design in Tech Report 95% AI Video 1
YouTube video by John Maeda: Design & AI
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
🪩🏆 youtu.be/tW-XnKjykuQ?...
youtu.be
Alysa Liu brings the house down in Boston, wins figure skating world championship | NBC Sports
YouTube video by NBC Sports
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
Tokens that span words versus just parts of them 👉 superbpe.github.io
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
2025 #DesignInTech Report in super long form is up on Tuesday: Autodesigners on Autopilot youtu.be/mMcVKWCQmv8
youtu.be
2025 Design in Tech Report (Unedited): Autodesigners on Autopilot
YouTube video by John Maeda: Design & AI
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
So I find solace, not jealousy, with GenAI keeps on genning away. I feel drawn to compete against the creative locomotives out there. I want to make better reruns for as long as I can.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
Pursuing originality is a wonderfully human endeavour. It is a useful form of hallucination that all creatives willingly subscribe to. Why? Because they feel like there is no other choice. The vibe, the Force, the feelz, the myth, the ego … there is warmth and fire there: the desire to survive.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
Most new, interesting design trends are reruns. Some improve on the original, others just have better FX. Originality is a wonderful delusion—sometimes it leads to a timely twist, sometimes to a successful remix (see Lessig).
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
Footnote: A tiny ounce of crafting can still matter a great deal to an observer. Or, a giant heap of crafting can matter nothing to an observer. It’s why people who make things tend to come to realize it is best to feel something about making just for themselves.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
- Note: "Handmade" has never meant just hands alone. Tools, power tools, and even teams of makers have always been part of the craft tradition. The human element remains central and remains as long as humans don’t give up and retire with 💯% auto-making …
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
- The 💯% match case leads to deepest empathy — painters naturally understand other painters' work. Today's AI builders are pioneers in a new craft domain that's v alien. - As long as humans make things, craft appreciation will endure. And yes, what we create with AI can absolutely qualify as craft.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 15/02/2025
- Earning the badge of high craft comes from the deep respect one maker has for another maker's work. - Appreciating crafted experiences and objects is about empathy. It requires understanding the creator's journey, especially when your own making experiences resonate with or match their process.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
I-assisted software dev can encourage laziness, but it can also push you to be more ambitious. Getting to a goal within the expected timeframe has become easier. At the same time, reaching for higher, riskier goals within the same timeframe has also become more achievable. The latter point is key.
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John Maeda @johnmaeda.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Hikaru Utada’s Science Fiction Tour is available on Prime and one of the most beautiful shows I have ever seen on many dimensions — esp the ending. youtu.be/jiJTBW6kGC4?...
youtu.be
宇多田ヒカル「traveling」(HIKARU UTADA SCIENCE FICTION TOUR 2024)
YouTube video by Hikaru Utada
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