START HERE
This is the transcripted text from my inauguration speech that I gave on September 12, 2008 to officially become the 16th President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). You can see it on YouTube, courtesy of my blogging mentor, Mike Lee. Visit the online guestbook if you haven’t already done so, and please keep your ideas and inspirations coming! -JM
HERE
Thank you to the members of our RISD who spoke today – William McLoughlin, Jessica Roundy, Candy Seel, and Joan Herron — and to Prof Nicole Merola, Hope Alswang, and Jessie Shefrin for welcoming me from their pillars of the RISD community. Thank you to Sister Anne Keefe, Senator Jack Reed, Congressman James Langevin, Mayor David Cicilline, and Dr. Ruth Simmons. All are our esteemed neighbors in Providence, Rhode Island — the great state that takes up half of RISD’s name.
Thank you to my wife, Kris, and my five daughters Mika, Rie, Saaya, Naoko, and Reina for your support, encouragement, and for putting up with me all these years. Thank you for the joy you’ve given me.
To the Presidential Search Committee who brought me forward as their candidate and to the Board of Trustees for their unanimous endorsement, thank you for this extraordinary opportunity. Finally, special thanks go to my predecessor, Roger Mandle, who left to me a community in a position of such strength, with two new campus treasures to celebrate – the Roger Mandle Living and Learning Center, and the Chace Center, bringing together the College and Museum.
We’ve gathered today in this beautiful church – one known for “reserving the right to accept everyone.” Like RISD, this Rhode Island treasure is being fortified for the next generation; old preserved for the new. It is truly symbolic, that we should Start (right) Here.
I’ve always been someone who hates labeling myself – I don’t feel like an artist, a designer, a technologist, an administrator, or any other one thing. I feel like me, someone who likes making things. When I was younger, people used to tell me, “maybe you should be a graphic designer.” I didn’t know what that meant until I stumbled upon a book by Paul Rand called A Designer’s Art, and I was humbled and changed. Paul Rand created the well-known IBM, ABC, UPS logos and many other lasting works. In Rand’s work, I saw an exquisite understanding of space combined with a deep, playful sense of what it means to be human. Later, I was fortunate to meet Rand at his studio in Connecticut and spend some time with him before the end of his life. He imparted to me not only wisdom about art and design, but also wisdom about life. He said to me, “You cannot play if you cannot earn.” I am grateful that in my life, I’ve found many ways to earn through play, and play through earning. It’s a life I wish for all RISD grads, and I’m sure their parents feel the same way.
I began at RISD officially in June, but when I was appointed last December I couldn’t wait to get started. A new challenge awaited me – a bigger, more important thing than I had ever done – and I couldn’t just let it sit over there, separate from me, waiting for it. I wanted to touch it, talk to it, see it, feel it. As many of you experienced, I started a blog inside RISD the day of my announcement. To say hello to everyone, to hear who they were and what was on their minds (parking, poetry, and holiday presents among other things…it was December). I wanted to let you see for yourselves a bit about the way I think and what I was thinking about.
I also came to campus and looked around a lot. I had breakfast with students in the cafeteria, I went on a 9 PM jog with them, I sniffed stinky specimens at the Nature Lab over there, I took a tour of the campus with Public Safety at midnight. What I was looking for was RISD, and it wasn’t hard to find. I wanted to know, “Where Are We Starting?” “Where is Here, Anyway?”
Today, I give you the results of my findings. We are Starting Here, in a place that’s different. Where students and faculty can be exactly who they want to be — often for the first time in their lives. Where passion for the pursuit of creating translates into hard work, and where it’s acknowledged that creativity is a rigorous process that takes true discipline. Where artistic pursuit is not dismissed as a frivolous add-on, a “time out” from real work, but where it is the real work. Where students push themselves to their limits, and RISD doesn’t just mean the Rhode Island School of Design, it means “Reason I’m Sleep Deprived.”
We’re Starting Here, in a place obsessed with materiality, physicality, and the primacy of hand-craft. From what I’ve seen at RISD, if you can’t touch it, you can’t believe it’s real, because it isn’t real. It’s a far cry from what I’ve seen all over the world at other art and design schools where many students can’t effectively use their hands due to over-reliance on computer-based tools. Here at RISD however, students learn to respect the grain of the wood, the way certain metals will bend under pressure and others won’t, how a piece of paper sounds when it crumples. At RISD we foster the ability to build without shortcuts, from the ground up, without pre-fabricated parts, and above all seek to give birth to that which is authentic, versus simply convenient.
So it’s not just making for the sake of production. We’re Starting Here, in a place where process always outweighs product. Where, in the words of our Provost Jessie Shefrin, “thinking is a kind of making and making is a kind of thinking.” Where teachers are the leaders, the academic programs are our core, and the curriculum instills students with a unique education in the VISUAL LIBERAL ARTS. RISD faculty teach expansively, showing students how to pick something up, examine it from all angles, and find their way in from any point. Our students are modern-day cultural hackers, helping us break through the noise and find meaning in it all.
So, we are Starting Here, in a fully human place where emotion is real, legitimate, and very public. Where our working hands and minds are never too far from our hearts, and where there is no better reason to do something than to get a feeling out, to express something that perhaps can’t be said. It all Starts Here.
But I haven’t always been here at RISD. We’re also Starting Here, in the world of 2008. It’s a world where technology has changed the notion of what it means to be an artist and a designer. For us here at RISD, it means faculty, curators, students, librarians, and staff must ask the core questions about honoring our analog makings and “being digital” at the same time. I’m talking about more than the impact of Photoshop and other stock tools that have homogenized the output of creative work worldwide. I’m talking about how it is now possible to produce jewelry in your home in Brooklyn, and have it bought seconds later on the Web by someone in Shanghai. How, as Museum Director Hope Alswang reminds us, Museums and the performing arts are more popular and more compelling than ever before simply because they are LIVE. Live, like we are here.
We are Starting Here, in a world that is smaller and flatter than it used to be. Students know more country names than ever before, and have an awareness of problems on a global scale far more than they used to. Despite this, the power of personal, face-to-face interactions is more real than ever before. Peer-to-peer, one on one interactions are still the way you make someone see your true viewpoint. They are still the place where true love is born, and there is still no believing like touching. Hugging. Kissing. Local still matters; and for this reason I often say the world is “glocal.” Global and local. Art and design has a powerful role in this expansive glocal universe – to take all of the complexity and make sense of it on a human scale. RISD must rise to this challenge, BECAUSE WE CAN.
If we were a company, these external forces would decide our reality. They would push us into a box and force us to operate out of that box. But we’re not. We’re a College, and we’re a Museum, and it’s our unique blessing to be able to pick and choose the changing realities that we want to learn from. Once we choose them, we can stretch them, and play with them, and ultimately, shape reality for the better. That’s how we do it at RISD.
Most importantly, we are starting in a society where “achieving measurable results” has become the world’s rallying cry. Where kids who tell their parents that they want to be artists are too often met with quizzical glances, worried sighs, or dismissive reproaches. It’s not that parents think artists are bad people, it’s that they think becoming one is somehow dangerous for their children’s future livelihood. Dangerous? I don’t think so. Do you?
What’s missing today is the notion that artists and designers are among the most passionate people about what they do; and this world needs more passion. There’s too much logic, too much systematic thinking, too many soulless business processes dominating peoples’ lives. But we here at RISD have always known that humanity is about doing crazy, unexpected, wonderfully impossible things. As Steve Jobs says, “Here’s to the crazy ones – the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.” That’s us. And together, we need to assume our responsibility as an advocate for the inspired, as a champion of the beautiful, as a collective voice that will build a justifiable case for creativity in our world.
Let me tell you a story. 75 years ago, MIT, my previous home, was just another technology trade school among others. Then World War II happened, and the government needed to create more effective weaponry and systems to win the war. MIT was given a purpose, and that purpose was to save America. Suddenly, resources that scientists could never have dreamed of began to be thrown their way, and MIT became the pre-eminent research institute that it is today. Even with THAT war long over, the conventional wisdom that science and engineering are critical to American invention still lingers. But there’s something missing.
What if we are at a similar stage in the world’s development? What if there’s one art and design school out there that can elevate a new set of skills that are crucial to our continued livelihood? Global conflict still embattles us, but separately, our civilian lives are being swallowed by a sea of complexity and overload. I feel it. What if the new form of American invention that will solve these problems isn’t a machine anymore, but is the invention of a feeling? The right feeling. An emotional experience articulated in the principles of art and design. What if RISD is the one institution that will rise above all other art and design schools in the world to place creativity at the core, central to the global agenda, the way that MIT did for technology? The way that MIT did for technology; RISD will do for creativity.
The world is at a turning point, and the passionate, emotional invention that happens here every day – from the graduate studios downtown to South Main Street up to Woods-Gerry – is what is needed to keep today’s America thriving. The new conventional wisdom must recognize the essential nature of right-brained innovation, and policy makers and employers should take note. It’s up to us to make the case to the world of the power of the visual, the tactile, the non-linear – of artful, open-minded thinking.
So, Starting Here, all together, we will create the educational foundations that will make America’s economy a truly creative economy. We will consider the questions that are being asked of us – about technology, about rising economies and worldwide innovation, about the role of higher education in this world – and we will answer them in RISD’s own way. How will we do that? By tapping into the passions that already exist in our RISD, and ensuring that our doors are wide open to gifted students around the world.
Each of us sees RISD from our own perspective, and came here with our own aspirations. However, what we share is the desire to live successful, creative lives of all sorts, leaving our mark on the world and on others around us. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” To achieve this, let’s take strength from all that is around us, and exploit all of the glorious natural diversity that lives right here at RISD. Let’s take strength from the studio and the classroom, from fine arts and design, from liberal arts and foundational studies, from the museum and the college, from the students who live here, and faculty who teach here, and staff who work here, and trustees who honor here, and alumni who love here, from our dual mission of creating new work and preserving old work. Let’s work across all of these lines for a common purpose. Let’s Start Here and show the world what our passion can do.
We can Start. And Finish. Here. The creative mind is not limited to black and white. It is comfortable with ambiguity, and “doing both,” as I like to say. You can be both a designer and an artist, a humanist and a technologist, a student and a teacher, a hand craftsman and a Photoshop guru, a global and local thinker, a leader and a servant, a president and a citizen. And we can start as many times as we like when we are open to the spirit and rigor of the creative way of being.
So … here’s my question for you. Will you all open your minds and your hearts and your hands … and Start Here … with me? THANK YOU!
-John Maeda, September 12, 2008
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