Delivered by  Marian Steinbach.

Dear John Maeda, dear ladies and gentlemen,

design awards are all about honoring a person's achievements and motivating that person for further accomplishments.

Not quite.

Design Awards are all about getting attention from press and media, caring neither about the person being awarded, nor about the work the person is awarded for.

While this might be true for some of the thousands of the design awards out there, it is certainly not true for the Kölner Klopfer.

Let me explain to you what I think this award really is about, and why we are very pleased to be able to give it to John Maeda today.

The greatest value of the Kölner Klopfer in my eyes is that it helps us students to get in touch with some of the greatest designers out there. It is a reason to reflect the own position and become inspired, to open ourselves for new influences and discuss some of our vision.

There are lots of designers throughout the world, and there are definitely a lot of computer scientists. But how many are there who can claim to be both designer and computer scientist?

This is actually not even a big surprise, as the two professions traditionally require different capabilities and strengths from their practitioners.

John Maeda, however, took the opportunity to do both. He studied Computer Science at the MIT and later, attended art school in Japan. As a consequence he found how much these disciplines are seperated from each other in real life.

Nowadayas, where probably 90% of the design work is done using computers, you would think that this should be different. And in fact if it starts to become different it is also John Maedas achievement by having connected the two areas to each other through his work.

John Maeda points the direction for a whole generation of visual designers and defines their rhethorics, because he doesn«™t wait for software companies to come up with tools, like most other designers more or less consciously do.

He writes: »Creators are often unaware or uninterested in the basic nature of the technologies they are using as tools«.

Instead, he creates the tools himself. His capabilities make him see clearer and think further than most others, because they are busy, struggling with learning how to handle the latest photoshop version.

With this temporal advantage, John Maeda advances further and also takes the time to reflect about design, as published in his book »MAEDA @ MEDIA«.

He recognizes that design has recently become a lot more complex task than ever before. Simple paradigms like »form follows function« (and let me add Hartmut Esslingers take on this, »form follows emotion«) are no longer applicable in a realm where functions, purposes and expectations become uncountable.

Maeda states: »It is inevitable that there will soon be a large number of hybrid designer-engineers that shall radically reconstruct the visual landscape«.

If we as students award John Maeda, it is also due to his dedication to teaching.

In 1996, John Maeda returns to MIT where his mission is to bring back design education to the MIT Media Lab. The Aestetics + Computation Group is founded and Maeda becomes director.

He seems to love his job as a professor. Allow me to quote from a mail we received from him: »...i feel the students are the most important aspects of the art and design world. they are the future.«

When Maeda assumes the rise of a new breed of designers, it is no big risk to take for him any more. The outcome of his research group prooves him right already. I am amazed every time I open up their web site and see a new video about a new project showing a new, unexpected and appealing application of high technology.

This is what I would like to see as the vision and the inspiration that I was talking about earlier.

We know that complex design tasks can only be accomplished by interdisciplinary teams. The cologne school of design has probably one of the most open and interdisciplinary programs of all design schools. Great concepts are developed in different areas. The question is: Do we go far enough in this? How can we allow ourselves to not cooperate on a daily basis with the engineering specialists in the same university, doing architecture, computer science or electrical engineering?

There is definitely a vast variety of forms for this school and every single person to grow into. John Maedas to me seems like a fertilizer for that.

I am very happy that the students of our school have joined me in the perception of John Maeda being the person to invite to come and talk to and be inspired by this year.

Dear John Maeda, thank you for beeing here and honouring us through your presence, and, off course, congratulations for winning the »Kölner Klopfer«.