I did an interview with Rachel Been that posted over here. âJM
Rachel Been: Designers are often labeled as dreamers, and developers as pragmatists. Whatâs at the root of this shorthand?
John Maeda:Â I think the education system has created this dichotomy. While studying at MIT, I had the engineerâs problem of being able to build anything, but not knowing what to build. It was only after attending art schoolâand discovering what to buildâthat I could combine the two. It takes a developer whoâs gone to the design side to appreciate what engineering can be, and it takes a designer who understands that the âreligionâ they were taught is slightly incorrect, because it was conceived when there werenât high-end computational systems. If you think of designing a chair out of wood, that religion still works fine, because thatâs something that creates a great chair. However, if youâre making something on the computer, that religion has to adapt and change.
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