John Maeda gave the opening talk at the ACH in Georgia. His work on small interactive art works, so of which play with type, seems to have been some of the earliest stuff of its kind.
His art toys were written often for earlier versions of the Mac OS.
He has a book “Design by Numbers” which looks good. He works at MIT and in his talk he went from his parents Tofu making store (white box shaped slabs of tofu) to the white box of the MIT Media Lab. He said something about being a co-director for a while – it sounded like a not-so-good experience. Hmmm, I wonder where the Media Lab is going if they can’t be led by someone with his sense of humor and art.