Name: 【TED】John Maeda: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders (John Maeda: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders)
Uploaded: 2013-03-10T15:05:48.000Z
Duration: 16 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

I have to say that I'm very glad to be here.

I understand we have over 80 countries here,

To-infinitive

so that's a whole new paradigm for me to speak

In each country, I'm sure you have this thing called

Do you know about the parent-teacher conference?

Not the ones for your kids, but the one you had as a child,

where your parents come to school and your teacher

talks to your parents, and it's a little bit awkward.

Well, I remember in third grade, I had this moment

where my father, who never takes off from work,

he's a classical blue collar, a working-class immigrant person,

going to school to see his son, how he's doing,

and the teacher said to him, he said, "You know,

The next day I saw him talking to a customer at our

tofu store, and he said, "You know, John's good at math."

And that always stuck with me all my life.

Why didn't Dad say art? Why wasn't it okay?

Why? It became a question my entire life, and

that's all right, because being good at math meant

he bought me a computer, and some of you remember

this computer, this was my first computer.

Who had an Apple II? Apple II users, very cool. (Applause)

As you remember, the Apple II did nothing at all. (Laughter)

You'd plug it in, you'd type in it and green text would come out.

It would say you're wrong most of the time.

That computer is a computer that I learned about

going to MIT, my father's dream. And at MIT, however,

I learned about the computer at all levels,

and after, I went to art school to get away from computers,

and I began to think about the computer as more of

And I was influenced by performance art --

so this is 20 years ago. I made a computer out of people.

It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment.

I have a power manager, mouse driver, memory, etc.,

and I built this in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan.

and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk

built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer.

And the floppy disk drive person wears it. (Laughter)

She finds the first sector on the disk, and

takes data off the disk and passes it off to, of course, the bus.

So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer

to the memory, to the CPU, the VRAM, etc.,

and it's an actual working computer. That's a bus, really. (Laughter)

And it looks kind of fast. That's a mouse driver,

It looks like it's happening kind of quickly, but it's actually

a very slow computer, and when I realized how slow

this computer was compared to how fast a computer is,

it made me wonder about computers and technology in general.

And so I'm going to talk today about four things, really.

The first three things are about how I've been curious

about technology, design and art, and how they intersect,

how they overlap, and also a topic that I've taken on

since four years ago I became the President

of Rhode Island School of Design: leadership.

And I'll talk about how I've looked to combine

these four areas into a kind of a synthesis, a kind of experiment.

When that Apple II came out, it really could do nothing.

after we waited a bit, we had these things called images.

Remember when images were first possible with a computer,

And then after a few years, we got CD-quality sound.

It was incredible. You could listen to sound on the computer.

And then movies, via CD-ROM. It was amazing.

And then the browser appeared. The browser was great,

but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth.

then movies over the Internet. Kind of incredible.

text, images, audio, video. And now we have iPhone,

iPad, Android, with text, video, audio, etc.

We're kind of stuck in a loop, perhaps, and this sense

of possibility from computing is something I've been

and have looked to design, as we understand most things,

and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine.

And I have a small experiment to give you a quick design lesson.

Designers talk about the relationship between form

and content, content and form. Now what does that mean?

Well, content is the word up there: fear.

It's a four-letter word. It's a kind of a bad feeling word, fear.

Fear is set in Light Helvetica, so it's not too stressful,

and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica,

it's like, "Oh, fear, who cares?" Right? (Laughter)

You take the same Ultra Light Helvetica and make it big,