OFFF 2007 aproaches to its end. The OFFF finale has a great line-up: James Victore, John Maeda and Takagi Masakatsu. Now, the conference hall is completely full.

James Victore is a very communicative person and a great speaker. He starts to giveaway stickers with the headline “Advertisers think that you’re stupid”. James is very concerned about his work and its message. He has been actively working in campaigns against racism and making very critic illustrations for newspapers and magazines.

James Victore’s conference

He talks with passion about his son Luca and his collaboration to the “Dirty Dishes” exhibition, something that Victore started after painting spontaneously some plates. Victore’s speech is great and achieves an excellent atmosphere.

It is probably the greatest OFFF moment ever. John Maeda is about to start his conference and the organization’s staff introduces that moment making special mention to Maeda’s influence on the top modern artists and researchers such as Ben Fry, Casey Reas, Golan Levin or Zachary Lieberman.

Yes, I am also very excited; the godfather of the computational art, the man who created “Design by Numbers” and the responsible of the aesthetics + computation group at the MIT Media Lab is about to start his speech.

Maeda is behind “Simplicity“, an experimental research program focused on developing technologies for design — designs that are simpler to understand, easier to use, and, ultimately, more enjoyable. He recently published a new book called “The Laws of Simplicity” which he introduces first. John Maeda has some special words for Muriel Cooper while he starts to introduce the simplicity VS complexity subject.

Maeda soon catches the audience attention when he jokes about how scaring complexity might look while showing a very complicated traffic sign. He takes us back on time where he grew up, in the Tofu factory of his father. “Tofu looks very simple but it’s obtained through a very complex process”, he says.

He points to the fact that nature is full of very complex structures that look beautiful, and he admits that humans generally like complexity indeed. But complexity might be formed by different simple things too.

Maeda goes through his past exhibitions and projects and makes some references to other researchers and designers such as April Greiman – “The computer is nothing more than a pencil”.

John Maeda talks about computers being used not as a tool but a material while showing an art installation with a PowerMac G3 hitting a mouse hanging in front of a monitor and making it crash against the screen by opening the computer’s CD tray (an automated process that repeats every minute).

John Maeda and his “Manifesto”

Maeda shows a set of curves that illustrate the loss of almost all faculties when getting older and older, but he remarks that actually the wisdom curve grows non-stop together with ourselves 🙂

He delights the audience with a great example: give a kid two chocolate cookies to choose and he’ll sure take the biggest one; but give the same kid two piles of dirty clothes to clean and he’ll sure take the smallest one. “If we Enjoy, we want more; but if it’s painful we want less”.

Maeda finally concludes with a statement that resumes his speech: Think, create, educate and, very important, enjoy!