Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Clothing For The Mind

The other night I was speaking to a teenage friend of my daughter's about her aspirations to become a fashion designer. Another friend quickly jumped in and said, "You've got to apply to Parsons!" I don't think that Parsons could ever have paid enough for the kind of publicity they have gained in the US from Project Runway. Forget about vastly distributing admissions materials and pouring money into a boring .edu website -- get your Faculty on a reality TV show, now! Well ... of course that does skew your potential market of students to Fox viewers and the likes ... which isn't a problem for me really as I don't have a single savvy friend that doesn't watch Project Runway. Anyways, I think you get my drift.

Prof Judith Donath here at the Media Lab was the first person I know of that articulated the power of the combination of graphics, social context, and the notion of one's planned, or sometimes accidental, notion of personal identity in the online world. I recall one of her students, David Chiou, almost a decade ago working on a thesis that posited the coming of online identity as "fashion." At the time I really didn't get what David and Prof Donath were trying to say with this work. Today it all makes sense.

From the "away messages" that hang like earrings as an accessory, to the MySpace or LinkedIn pages that constitute one's casual or business "mental attire," and most importantly to the DIY fashion companies like Facebook/MySpace alike that create the tools to realize each and everyone's personal masterpieces if themselves ... we live in a world where we put as much time into the clothing that we wear as we do our own online identities.

"Does this Twitter post make me look fat?" "Will I get fired for the way I'm dressed in my recent Flickr entry?" Our personas online and offline are indistinguishable today. Thus my one advice to the aspiring fashion designer was simple: By all means pursue fashion design, but add onto it the notion of becoming a fashion designer for people's minds and not just their bodies. And if you're thinking of Parsons, don't forget to add RISD as another excellent option.

W for Wesleyan

When I was young, my classic-immigrant-working-class-father only knew of two universities: MIT and Harvard. We were to attend either of them as part of his dream for us to achieve success in the US.

In later life I learned of more schools like Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley and so forth. Regarding Berkeley, when first arriving at MIT as an undergraduate I remember I had the hardest time figuring out why people said that Berkeley was "just down the street" from MIT. I kept wondering whether I got the "University of California" part of Berkeley perfectly straight in my mind. Soon after I learned they were referring to Berklee which is another fine school indeed.

Now, being uneligible to apply to college anymore (at least an undergraduate program), I am thinking that Wesleyan is a school that should have been in my father's higher-ed vocabulary. I have never been to Wesleyan before, but I have enjoyed its "products" here at the Media Lab who include Amber Frid-Jimenez, Joe Dahmen, and Becky Bermont. If you are in high school right now, I suggest you seriously consider this school Wesleyan in addition to the others you are currently exploring. Happy learning!