For John Maeda, learning to love computers meant learning to live without them. In the 1980s, as a graduate student in computer design at MIT, Maeda was quickly gaining notice for his work in designing computer iconography. An encounter with a book by the legendary Paul Rand, A Designer's Art, however, prompted a revelation: "It was like I was doing computer tricks and didn't know anything about design." Maeda departed MIT for Japan's Tsukuba University where he studied traditional graphic design, executing award-winning commissions for Sony and other clients.

In 1996 Maeda was summoned back to MIT to succeed the late Muriel Cooper as director of the Media Lab's aesthetics and computation group. His respect for the computer as a tool is now tempered by the caveat that designers' imaginations are restrained by an over-reliance on tools, which seem to offer infinite creative ability. In his book Design by Numbers, Maeda created a simple programming language in the hopes of getting designers beyond the mouse and into their machines. He maintains that, "simple codes are as elegant as any modern sculpture."

Work such as "Human Powered Computer Experiment" continues to probe the nature of the digital medium. His Tap, Type, Write, an interactive book that explores the medium of typography in a digital environment won a Gold Award in I.D. Magazine's Interactive Design Awards. In addition to his design work, Maeda was featured in a solo exhibition, "Paper and Computer," at Tokyo's Ginza Graphic Gallery. In inaugurating his tenure at MIT, Maeda invited the 82-year-old Paul Rand to give a lecture, symbolic of the way Maeda is helping to keep Rand's sensibility alive in a digital age.