As Far As I Can Tell

I went to a lecture tonight by Ben Fry, a designer from the MIT Media Lab and former graduate of CMU. He’s currently working on visualizing information gathered by the genome project, mapping mind-boggling amounts of DNA data in a way that scientists can make sense of it. He spoke about his work and his view of a unified field of computational information design. Currently the necessarily skills are split between graphic designers, computer scientists, statisticians, and HCI. It’s true that an integrated approach would be valuable, though I think it’s hard to find people who are actually good at all the necessary levels.

Earlier in the day he stopped by the grad studio to have lunch with us for well over an hour. I got to ask him a bit about Processing, which he co-created with his Media Lab colleague Casey Reas. There’s a book in the works and I’m glad to hear that more print output features are being considered. Using Processing as an way to computationally generate PDFs for print really changes my perspective of the tool. It moves from an interactive applet creator to a more general purpose computational design tool. You could quickly lay out 1000s of elements in a manner that would be virtually impossible in Illustrator.

He calls for increased programming education early in design curriculum, partially due to of the lack of diversity in the design software world. Adobe has a stranglehold on the market and their pending assimilation of Macromedia eliminates any competition that might have existed. Designers are stuck creating only what these programs will allows us to. Knowing how to talk more directly to the computer and write our own programs can help us break free from this corporate software homogeny.