At first blush, John Maeda doesn't seem all that intimidating. A slender, gentle man with a brilliant mind, quirky wit, vast wardrobe of T-shirts, and long fingers gone knobby from too many years at a keyboard, he looks like the geeky head of a computer-science lab. Which, until last winter, is exactly what he was.

Then, in December, in a decision that stunned the clubby academic design world, trustees of the 131-year-old Rhode Island School of Design unanimously picked Maeda (pronounced my-AY-da), the former associate research director of MIT's famed Media Lab, as its next president. "Early on, we decided to be open to somebody not in the normal path of college presidency," says Rosanne Somerson, the head of RISD's furniture department, who served on the search committee. "John certainly fell into that category."

Full Story: Digital Thinking at Rhode Island School of Design Source: Fast Company, October 1st, 2008 Author: Linda Tischler Added on December 1st, 2008 at 9:42 am, by Matt Mikula