Processing: Merging code and design

Last week the local software developers group that I am a member of hosted a talk by Ben Fry, the co-creator of Processing. Ben holds a doctorate from the MIT Media Lab where he was a part of the Aesthetics + Computation Group. ACG’s purpose is to “…work toward the design of advanced system architectures and thought processes to enable the creation of (as yet) unimaginable forms and spaces”. In other words, very cool stuff.

Ben is a unique mix of designer and developer. Along with developing Processing his own personal design work (taken from his about page) has been shown at “the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003. Other pieces have appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and in the films Minority Report and The Hulk. His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM.”

The talk itself lasted about an hour and a half and was a high level review of how Processing tries to integrate the worlds of programming and design. Ben walked us through the work he did as a postdoc creating interesting and interactive visualizations of complex genetic data. The most impressive visualization was a series of charts showing the relationships of single letter changes in the human genome, available here (warning: this loads a Java applet).

By definition pictures speak louder that words when talking about visulatization. I encourage you to check out the “curated exhibition” at processing.org. There is some amazing stuff there.

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