Dr Kevin Walker describes being part of a new breed of designers that came of age at end of the millennium while learning to speak an unfamiliar language. To be both a designer and a coder was a rarity in 2001. I, like a lot of graduates from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), had come to coding through design thanks to programs like Hypercard, Director and Flash, all of which provided graphical interfaces but with powerful functionality underneath – if you knew the code, as it were.

As the open source movement gathered steam, we heard about something called Processing – a free, open source environment built by and for artists and designers. Creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas were students up at MIT Media Lab, where John Maeda was teaching ‘Design by Numbers.’ He in turn was inspired by Muriel Cooper’s work at MIT in the 1980s, and the roots of algorithmic art date back to Sol Lewitt, Yoko Ono and earlier.

Processing still has no drag-and-drop design, just a little window with flashing cursor. As with so much brilliant design, everything is stripped back to its essence. As a programming language it's easy to learn – because Ben and Casey are designers, they showed, through elegant examples, how to create things of great beauty, usefulness and complexity with just a few lines of code.

Even better, what they created was not a product but a tool that anyone could use, extend or contribute to, for free. It wasn't aimed just at kids or coders. Much experimentation ensued, people from schoolchildren to research scientists learned to code, and it became the basis for Arduino, what is now one of the preeminent open source hardware platforms.

(Image Credit: Route permutations for 11 locations on a Paris smell map, generated in Processing by Kevin Walker for research by Kate McLean.)

twitter.com/Kevin7

Dr Kevin Walker


…is a designer, researcher and writer working at the interstice between the physical and the digital. He runs the new Information Experience Design programme at the Royal College of Art and is also a Visiting Fellow at the London Knowledge Lab, an institution which explores the future of learning with digital technologies. Walker was author of Hackers and Slackers (2012), and co-editor of Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience (2008).


Design by Numbers

…or DBN, was a massively influential experiment run by graphic designer and computer scientist John Maeda as part of his research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its aim was to create software that was accessible to artists and designer who had little to no understanding of computer programming. Maeda has said of DBN: “I spent most of the earlier half of the 1990's espousing the importance of getting beyond the tools, and into the medium of programming itself. Working on Design By Numbers was a kind of revelation for me. I realized how uninteresting it is to program… [DNB tried] to re-imagine, re-envision, and realize a superior form of programming for the non-mathematically inclined.”

















The link has been copied!