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

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I understand we have over 80 countries here,

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

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to all of these countries.

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

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the parent-teacher conference.

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Do you know about the parent-teacher conference?

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

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where your parents come to school and your teacher

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

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

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where my father, who never takes off from work,

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

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

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

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John is good at math and art."

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And he kind of nodded, you know?

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

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

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(Laughter)

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And that always stuck with me all my life.

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

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Why? It became a question my entire life, and

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

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he bought me a computer, and some of you remember

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this computer, this was my first computer.

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

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

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

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

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That was the computer we knew.

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That computer is a computer that I learned about

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

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I learned about the computer at all levels,

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

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and I began to think about the computer as more of

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a spiritual space of thinking.

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And I was influenced by performance art --

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

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It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment.

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

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

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It's a room broken in two halves.

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I've turned the computer on,

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and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk

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

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

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She finds the first sector on the disk, and

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

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So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer

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

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

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

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where it's XY. (Laughter)

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

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a very slow computer, and when I realized how slow

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this computer was compared to how fast a computer is,

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it made me wonder about computers and technology in general.

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

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

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

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

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since four years ago I became the President

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of Rhode Island School of Design: leadership.

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

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

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So starting from technology,

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technology is a wonderful thing.

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

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It could show text and

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

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Remember when images were first possible with a computer,

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those gorgeous, full-color images?

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

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

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

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Remember that excitement?

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And then the browser appeared. The browser was great,

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but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth.

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Text first, then images, we waited,

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CD-quality sound over the Net,

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then movies over the Internet. Kind of incredible.

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And then the mobile phone occurred,

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

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

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You see this little pattern here?

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

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of possibility from computing is something I've been

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questioning for the last 10 or so years,

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

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

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

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Designers talk about the relationship between form

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

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Well, content is the word up there: fear.

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

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

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and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica,

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

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

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and like, whoa, that hurts. Fear.

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So you can see how you change the scale, you change

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the form. Content is the same, but you feel differently.

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You change the typeface to, like, this typeface,

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and it's kind of funny. It's like pirate typeface,

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like Captain Jack Sparrow typeface. Arr! Fear!

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Like, aww, that's not fearful. That's actually funny.

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Or fear like this, kind of a nightclub typeface. (Laughter)

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Like, we gotta go to Fear. (Laughter)

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It's, like, amazing, right? (Laughter) (Applause)

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It just changes the same content.

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Or you make it -- The letters are separated apart,

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they're huddled together like on the deck of the Titanic,

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and you feel sorry for the letters, like, I feel the fear.

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You feel for them.

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Or you change the typeface to something like this.

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It's very classy. It's like that expensive restaurant, Fear.

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I can never get in there. (Laughter)

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It's just amazing, Fear. But that's form, content.

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If you just change one letter in that content,

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you get a much better word, much better content: free.

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"Free" is a great word. You can serve it almost any way.

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Free bold feels like Mandela free.

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It's like, yes, I can be free.

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Free even light feels kind of like, ah, I can breathe in free.

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It feels great. Or even free spread out,

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it's like, ah, I can breathe in free, so easily.

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And I can add in a blue gradient and a dove,

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and I have, like, Don Draper free. (Laughter)

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So you see that -- form, content, design, it works that way.

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It's a powerful thing. It's like magic, almost,

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like the magicians we've seen at TED. It's magic.

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Design does that.

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And I've been curious about how design and technology intersect,

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and I'm going to show you some old work I never really

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show anymore, to give you a sense of what I used to do.

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So -- yeah.

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So I made a lot of work in the '90s.

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This was a square that responds to sound.

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People ask me why I made that. It's not clear. (Laughter)

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But I thought it'd be neat for the square

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to respond to me, and my kids were small then,

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and my kids would play with these things, like, "Aaah,"

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you know, they would say, "Daddy, aaah, aaah." You know, like that.

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We'd go to a computer store, and they'd do the same thing.

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And they'd say, "Daddy, why doesn't the computer respond to sound?"

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And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn't the computer respond to sound?

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So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time.

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And then I spent a lot of time in the space of

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interactive graphics and things like this, and I stopped doing it because

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my students at MIT got so much better than myself,

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so I had to hang up my mouse.

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But in '96, I made my last piece. It was in black and white,

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monochrome, fully monochrome, all in integer mathematics.

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It's called "Tap, Type, Write."

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It's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter

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that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary.

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It has 10 variations. (Typing noise)

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(Typing noise)

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There's a shift.

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Ten variations. This is, like, spin the letter around.

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(Typing noises)

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This is, like, a ring of letters. (Typing noises)

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This is 20 years old, so it's kind of a --

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Let's see, this is —

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I love the French film "The Red Balloon."

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Great movie, right? I love that movie. So,

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this is sort of like a play on that. (Typing noises) (Typewriter bell)

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It's peaceful, like that. (Laughter)

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I'll show this last one. This is about balance, you know.

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It's kind of stressful typing out, so if you

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type on this keyboard, you can, like, balance it out.

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(Laughter)

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If you hit G, life's okay, so I always say,

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"Hit G, and it's going to be all right.

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Thank you. (Applause)

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Thank you.

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So that was 20 years ago, and

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I was always on the periphery of art.

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By being President of RISD I've gone deep into art,

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and art is a wonderful thing, fine art, pure art.

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You know, when people say, "I don't get art.

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I don't get it at all." That means art is working, you know?

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It's like, art is supposed to be enigmatic, so when you say,

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like, "I don't get it," like, oh, that's great. (Laughter)

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Art does that, because art is about asking questions,

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questions that may not be answerable.

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At RISD, we have this amazing facility called

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the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. It has 80,000 samples

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of animal, bone, mineral, plants.

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You know, in Rhode Island, if an animal gets hit on the road,

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they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it.

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And why do we have this facility?

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Because at RISD, you have to look at the actual animal,

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the object, to understand its volume, to perceive it.

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At RISD, you're not allowed to draw from an image.

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And many people ask me, John, couldn't you just

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digitize all this? Make it all digital? Wouldn't it be better?

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And I often say, well, there's something good to how things

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used to be done. There's something very different about it,

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something we should figure out what is good about

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how we did it, even in this new era.

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And I have a good friend, he's a new media artist named

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Tota Hasegawa. He's based in London, no, actually it's in Tokyo,

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but when he was based in London, he had a game

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with his wife. He would go to antique shops,

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and the game was as such:

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When we look at an antique we want,

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we'll ask the shopkeeper for the story behind the antique,

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and if it's a good story, we'll buy it.

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So they'd go to an antique shop, and they'd look at this cup,

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and they'd say, "Tell us about this cup."

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And the shopkeeper would say, "It's old." (Laughter)

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"Tell us more."
"Oh, it's really old." (Laughter)

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And he saw, over and over, the antique's value

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was all about it being old.

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And as a new media artist, he reflected, and said,

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you know, I've spent my whole career making new media art.

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People say, "Wow, your art, what is it?"
It's new media.

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And he realized, it isn't about old or new.

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It's about something in between.

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It isn't about "old," the dirt, "new," the cloud. It's about what is good.

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A combination of the cloud and the dirt is where the action is at.

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You see it in all interesting art today, in all

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interesting businesses today. How we combine

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those two together to make good is very interesting.

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So art makes questions, and

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leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions.

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We aren't functioning so easily anymore.

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We aren't a simple authoritarian regime anymore.

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As an example of authoritarianism, I was in Russia one time

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traveling in St. Petersburg, at a national monument,

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and I saw this sign that says, "Do Not Walk On The Grass,"

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and I thought, oh, I mean, I speak English,

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and you're trying to single me out. That's not fair.

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But I found a sign for Russian-speaking people,

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and it was the best sign ever to say no.

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It was like, "No swimming, no hiking, no anything."

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My favorite ones are "no plants." Why would you bring a plant to a national monument? I'm not sure.

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And also "no love." (Laughter)

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So that is authoritarianism.

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And what is that, structurally?

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It's a hierarchy. We all know that a hierarchy is how we run

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many systems today, but as we know, it's been disrupted.

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It is now a network instead of a perfect tree.

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It's a heterarchy instead of a hierarchy. And that's kind of awkward.

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And so today, leaders are faced

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with how to lead differently, I believe.

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This is work I did with my colleague Becky Bermont

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on creative leadership. What can we learn

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from artists and designers for how to lead?

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Because in many senses, a regular leader loves to avoid mistakes.

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Someone who's creative actually loves to learn from mistakes.

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A traditional leader is always wanting to be right,

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whereas a creative leader hopes to be right.

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And this frame is important today, in this complex,

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ambiguous space, and artists and designers have a lot to teach us, I believe.

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And I had a show in London recently where my friends

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invited me to come to London for four days

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to sit in a sandbox, and I said great.

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And so I sat in a sandbox for four days straight,

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six hours every day, six-minute appointments with anyone in London,

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and that was really bad.

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But I would listen to people, hear their issues,

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draw in the sand, try to figure things out,

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and it was kind of hard to figure out what I was doing.

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You know? It's all these one-on-one meetings for like four days.

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And it felt kind of like being president, actually.

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I was like, "Oh, this my job. President. I do a lot of meetings, you know?"

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And by the end of the experience,

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I realized why I was doing this.

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It's because leaders, what we do is we connect

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improbable connections and hope something will happen,

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and in that room I found so many connections

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between people across all of London, and so leadership,

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connecting people, is the great question today.

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Whether you're in the hierarchy or the heterarchy,

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it's a wonderful design challenge.

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And one thing I've been doing is doing some research

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on systems that can combine technology and leadership

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with an art and design perspective.

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Let me show you something I haven't shown anywhere, actually.

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So what this is, is a kind of a sketch, an application sketch

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I wrote in Python. You know how there's Photoshop?

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This is called Powershop, and the way it works is

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imagine an organization. You know, the CEO isn't ever

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at the top. The CEO's at the center of the organization.

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There may be different subdivisions in the organization,

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and you might want to look into different areas. For instance,

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green are areas doing well, red are areas doing poorly.

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You know, how do you, as the leader, scan, connect,

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make things happen? So for instance, you might open up

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a distribution here and find the different subdivisions in there,

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and know that you know someone in Eco, over here,

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and

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these people here are in Eco, the people you might

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engage with as CEO, people going across the hierarchy.

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And part of the challenge of the CEO is to find

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connections across areas, and so you might look in R&D,

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and here you see one person who crosses the two areas

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of interest, and it's a person important to engage.

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So you might want to, for instance, get a heads-up display

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on how you're interacting with them.

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How many coffees do you have?

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How often are you calling them, emailing them?

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What is the tenor of their email? How is it working out?

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Leaders might be able to use these systems to

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better regulate how they work inside the heterarchy.

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You can also imagine using technology like from Luminoso,

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the guys from Cambridge who were looking at deep

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text analysis. What is the tenor of your communications?

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So these kind of systems, I believe, are important.

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They're targeted social media systems around leaders.

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And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin

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to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design,

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because art and design lets you think like this,

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find different systems like this,

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and I've just begun thinking like this,

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so I'm glad to share that with you.

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So in closing, I want to thank all of you

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for your attention. Thanks very much. (Applause)

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(Applause)