Marketplace: In your role at Kleiner Perkins, you work with companies to build and design from the beginning. At what point in that process do people start to notice good design?
Maeda: People’s first notion of design is … pretty stuff. And if you’re there, I have to get them out of that. It’s about taking an idea and giving it a system behind it because design doesn’t happen by buying a part. It happens by having people who can design.
Marketplace: Is there a design solution for the tech industry’s diversity problem?
Maeda: Well, it’s a systems problem, really. The question is how do you design the system to enable people from different backgrounds to participate?
Marketplace: How do you do that?
Maeda: Let me give an example. When you recruit for a more diverse student base, you forget that a diverse population will not stay on your campus if there aren’t more role models like themselves. I would argue often at MIT, even at RISD, we need more people, more faculty around to role model for. So that’s a systems approach.