A technology whiz strives to make life simpler

John Maeda is a man with a lot on his mind. The MIT professor of media arts and sciences thinks about how to make technology simpler; he thinks about using the computer as a mode of expression rather than simply as a tool; he thinks about making digital art from Cheetos and sugar crystals.

Something the man Esquire magazine deemed one of the "21 most important people of the 21st century" doesn't think much about is decorating his home. And yet his house, on a shady corner lot in Lexington, has a style all its own.

Maeda, 38, puts the things that interest him where he can see them, many of them on the crowded mantel in the front room, where his computer is. There's a green plastic fork from a Swiss airline, a blue-jay feather in a plastic bag, a beetlelike seed pod he found floating in the water on Nantucket. A pit from a nectarine given to him 10 years ago by the late graphic-design pioneer Paul Rand made it home with Maeda to the mantel, as did a circular red-and-green "do not disturb" sign from a London hotel. "I just thought it was a beautiful circle," he says.

Drawings by his four daughters -- Mika, 12; Rie, 10; Saaya, 9; and Naoko, 2, who all share one bedroom -- are taped up around the two-story, three-bedroom house. Family photos lean against the wall under the mantel, framed in dry pasta wheels, beads, and shiny rocks. The plant on his desk is plastic and solar-powered, with leaves that flap like wings. In some places, function tops form, as with the lamp that has a shade fashioned from a Cool Whip container.

"This is more like a place to sleep," says Maeda, who nevertheless asks those who enter to take off their shoes, "Japanese style," before they walk on the hardwood floors. One day recently, three plates of cookies rested on the kitchen counter, waiting to be delivered to the children's soccer coaches. In the basement, near clothes drying on a line, Maeda makes LED sculptures with tiny, handmade computers inside that actually work. "It's kind of like digital electronics meets weekend carpentry," he says.

Maeda grew up in Seattle, the second of four children who helped his father, a Japanese immigrant, run a tofu factory. "Family business means child labor," Maeda says. "That's why I love school." He studied engineering at MIT but always loved art, and his PhD, in design, is from the Tsukuba University Institute of Art & Design in Japan.

He and his wife, Kris, whom he met at MIT, were living in Japan with their daughters when Maeda was hired to teach at the MIT Media Lab eight years ago. Maeda flew to Massachusetts to buy a house and quickly settled on one with tall birch, maple, and oak trees forming a shady canopy over the yard. "I was a real estate agent's dream," he says. One of the things he likes about the neighborhood is its openness: Few if any of the houses have fences.

Landscaping is about as high on the Maeda family's list of priorities as remodeling. "Raising four children gives us barely enough time to breathe," says Maeda, who, on top of all his other duties, is designing an LED display for a university in Denmark and earning an MBA online. The lawn surrounding the pale yellowy-green house -- a color Maeda calls "Dr. Seuss green" -- is pocked with several sizable holes from chipmunks and other forest creatures; a woodchuck family has taken up residence in the wooded backyard.

Maeda's work with computers and design, much of it created with his children in mind, has had a big influence on the world. "A lot of the stuff you see flying around on the Web these days, it's partially my fault," he says, though the flying-toaster screen savers weren't his. His contribution, he says, was connecting human interaction to motion, as with the game he developed in which typing a letter on a computer keyboard creates a flowing design out of the letter on-screen.

His interest now lies in making technology simpler, which is the focus of his new MIT research consortium called SIMPLICITY.

"We're in a world that unless you're getting more, you don't feel like you're getting anything," he says. "At the same time, we're drowning in the functionality."