MAEDA: It’s kind of a dream of mine to come back to arts school. I went to MIT, then to arts school in Japan, and it was a life-changing moment, because I realized that you don’t need technology to survive. At MIT, the T stands for technology, but at arts school I was able to connect with the human side – creativity and expression – then I came back to MIT, and I’ve been there for 11 years now. And I was starting to feel like I was “over-technologized.”...

...MAEDA: ...RISD is a global center of innovation… RISD is really a hotbed of creativity. So I would say that businesses today are thirsty and hungering for innovation, which means risk. And risk in business is not allowed. So how do you make risk less risky is the key question...I want to understand what the RISD community feels like. That’s my first test. How does this all work, how can it fit in?...

...MAEDA: My position is always about excellence. And if growth equals excellence then it makes sense. If staying the same means excellence, that’s great. It’s all about excellence in the end. I’d like RISD in 10 years to be seen as more important than a school like Yale or Stanford, and it doesn’t have to be that big to be that important.