As 2009 begins, President Maeda has been talking to the media about his thoughts, hopes and dreams for RISD’s future. In the video above, he chats about, among other things, how “RISD people and RISD things are everywhere!” with Marcus Fairs of dezeen.com, an online architecture and design magazine, at Design Miami 2008. The president also reveals that one of the things he’s learned in his six-plus official months at RISD is to “count in seconds [v. hours]…it’s the RISD way!”

A Christmas Day front-page article in The Boston Globe called our president “a captivating force […] uniquely qualified to lead one of the nation’s oldest art and design colleges into the future.” The article also refers to some of the more visible changes at RISD since his arrival - notably the creation of this blog, the partnership with Threadless to raise scholarship money and the installation of campus-wide digital bulletin boards (donated by Samsung), where “anyone in the RISD community can post events, artwork, musings, raves and rants.” And this week The Providence Sunday Journal declared that President Maeda is one of nine people to keep our eyes on in ’09. Here the president himself reaffirms his faith in RISD and beyond: “We have the opportunity to elevate the ideas of creativity here at RISD - past Providence, past Rhode Island - into the world, as a symbol of creativity.”

Also published recently on FLYP, the online magazine, is a video interview in which President Maeda talks about what inspires him (Malevich’s Black Square, serendipitous finds around the RISD campus, “everything from the high to the low to the medium”). Click on the image above to watch the video and see examples of the president’s own artwork.