Design Better
Design Better
John Maeda: AI + Design
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John Maeda: AI + Design

Episode 75 of the Design Better Podcast

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Today we welcome back John Maeda, who is currently Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. You’re probably familiar with John’s work, but if not, take a listen to Episode 42 of this show, where he talks about the arc of his remarkable career.

In today’s episode, we talk with John about his role at Microsoft, what’s most misunderstood about AI, and his optimistic take on what the future holds for designers who embrace these new tools. 

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Bio

John Maeda is an American technologist, designer, engineer, artist, investor, author, and teacher. He is currently the VP of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He’s the author of five books including a gentle intro to AI/ML "How To Speak Machine (Penguin)" and the "Laws of Simplicity (MIT Press)."

John is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, and the Cartier Foundation, Paris. He’s the first recipient of the White House’s National Design Award for algorithmically-generated visualizations informed by data. Maeda serves on the Board of Sonos and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. 

He has held positions with Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com; the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins; served as president of the Rhode Island School of Design; and began his early career at the MIT Media Lab at the intersection of computer science and visual art. Named as one of the “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century” by Esquire, Maeda draws on his diverse background as an MIT-trained engineer, award-winning designer, and MBA-community translator to bring people and ideas together at scale. 

Bonus content: Post-show debrief

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Links

One Useful Thing
A guide to prompting AI (for what it is worth)
Whenever I open up Twitter, I am exposed to a new breed of hustle — the “prompt influencer” — promising me that 99% of people use GPT wrong and that they will provide the secret prompts that, if I use them in ChatGPT, will vanquish evil and make me a million dollars…
Read more

Cooking with semantic kernel course on LinkedIn

Fortyfifty.co

Design in Tech Report SXSW

MailChimp monkey finger article

Spline.design

Design Better
Design Better
Design Better co-hosts Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter explore the intersection of design, technology, and the creative process through conversations with inspiring guests across many creative fields. Whether you’re design curious or a design pro, Design Better is guaranteed to inspire and inform. Episodes are released semi-weekly for free subscribers, weekly for premium subscribers. Vanity Fair calls Design Better, “sharp, to the point, and full of incredibly valuable information for anyone looking to better understand how to build a more innovative world.”