Before Processing: Design by Numbers
Before there was Processing, there was Design By Numbers. Created by the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Library, and part of a project initiated by John Maeda, the mission was not to create a particular technology or even teach technology, but to teach computational thought as a window into design and art.
Design by Numbers Site [note that the project is largely inactive, and some of the documentation links are sadly broken]
Design By Numbers was created for visual designers and artists as an introduction to computational design. It is the result of a continuing endeavor by Professor John Maeda to teach the “idea” of computation to designers and artists. It is his belief that the quality of media art and design can only improve through establishing educational infrastructure in arts and technology schools that create strong, cross-disciplinary individuals.
DBN is both a programming environment and language. The environment provides a unified space for writing and running programs and the language introduces the basic ideas of computer programming within the context of drawing. Visual elements such as dot, line, and field are combined with the computational ideas of variables and conditional statements to generate images.
Processing is really the savvy, sophisticated daughter of Design by Numbers. After Tom White’s initial version, Ben Fry – working with Maeda and influenced by his design ideas – created the significant overhaul of the software and editor. Processing co-initiator Casey Reas wrote the courseware. And other names (Golan Levin, Josh Nimoy) associated with Processing’s development were involved, as well. You can see that the visual design of the Processing editor comes directly from Design by Numbers. I think the stroke of genius is the “Play” button. It embeds in Processing as in DBN the idea that your work will do something active, that you should try something and see if it works.
It’s worth paging through Maeda’s Design by Numbers book because, more than any of the Processing books, the visual focus is on almost extreme simplicity. A simple set of variations on patterns of one-pixel lines can take up a number of pages. Also, I think it’s impossible to understand Processing’s roots without understanding the genesis of Design By Numbers, which was intended to be:
- Minimal (at a time when computer art was already becoming increasingly complex)
- Pedagogical (intended as a teaching tool – for young or old)
- Multi-platform (not tied to any single technology)
It’s also significant to consider how different this is from tools like Flash, which grew out of a scripting language added to an animation program, and is intended to tie users to a specific playback technology.
I believe there’s a lot to learn from the aesthetic of Design By Numbers – not just the visual aesthetic, but the aesthetic of thought and design, the concern about minimalism, the focus on the most elemental components of pattern and intention. That’s a theme to which I’ll be returning on this blog.
It’s also a reminder that no matter how many times you teach a Processing 101 or Code 101 course – whether it’s a semester, a day, an hour, or a few minutes – there’s something more to learn. The more fundamental the skill, the more fundamental its application is in your creative work, and the more likely it is you’ve begun to take it for granted.
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