John Maeda

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.

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.

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.

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.

When someone becomes some-thing, dehumanization is doing its unfortunate magic. Alienization is presto. Complete.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To remain yourself, it is important to write by yourself. At least if you care to be. Yourself. And not just. Others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The chaos of that process still beats the pseudo-stochasticism of the GenAI approach.

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).

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.

- 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.

- 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 …

- 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.