Benjamin Fry is an American

designer A designer is a person who plans the form or structure of something before it is made, by preparing drawings or plans. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, products, processes, laws, games, graphics, services, or exp ...

who has expertise in

data visualization Data and information visualization (data viz or info viz) is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is num ...

Early life and education

Fry was born in 1975 in

Ann Arbor Anne, alternatively spelled Ann, is a form of the Latin female given name Anna (name), Anna. This in turn is a representation of the Hebrew Hannah (given name), Hannah, which means 'favour' or 'grace'. Related names include Annie (given name), ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

(born 1975)."Inside design now: National Design Triennial", by Ellen Lupton, Cooper-Hewitt Museum
"Benjamin Fry"
/ref> Fry received his BFA in Communication Design, minor in Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University. He received Master and Ph.D. degrees from the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

, under the direction of

John Maeda John Maeda (born 1966) is a Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He is an American technologist and designer whose work explores where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technolo ...

. His doctoral dissertation, "Computational Information Design" introduces the seven stages of visualizing data: acquiring, parsing, filtering, mining, representing, refining and interacting.

Career

During his time at MIT Media Lab, Fry co-developed

Processing Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming ...

, an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

and

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

(IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the basics of

computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as ana ...

in a visual context.Ben Fry
author's profile at the

O'Reilly O'Reilly ( ga, Ó Raghallaigh) is a group of families, ultimately all of Irish Gaels, Gaelic origin, who were historically the kings of East Bréifne in what is today County Cavan. The clan were part of the Connachta's Uí Briúin Bréifne kin ...

website The Processing design environment developed together with

Casey Reas Casey Edwin Barker Reas (born 1972), also known as C. E. B. Reas or Casey Reas, is an American artist whose conceptual, procedural and minimal artworks explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas is perhaps best known for having ...

won a Golden Nica from the

Prix Ars Electronica The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the best known and longest running yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) ...

in 2005. During 2006–2007, Fry was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He is a principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy in Boston, Massachusetts. Fry's artwork has been featured in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial (2003, 2006) and the Whitney Biennial (2002), and at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

in New York (2001, 2008),

Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in the ...

in Linz, Austria (2000, 2002, 2005) and in the films ''

Minority Report Minority Report may refer to: * Minority report (Poor Law), published by the UK Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress 1905–09 * "Minority Report", a 1949 science fiction short story by Theodore Sturgeon * "The Minority Report ...

'' and ''

The Hulk The Hulk is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, the character first appeared in the debut issue of ''The Incredible Hulk'' (May 1962). In his comic book ...

''. He is the winner of the 2011

National Design Award The American National Design Awards, founded in 2000, are funded and awarded by Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New Y ...

in category "Interaction Design.""National Design Awards: Ben Fry’s ‘Odd Route’ Through Design World Pays Off"
, by Stephanie Murg, June 15, 2011

Books

*2007: (with

) ''Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists'',

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

*2007: ''Visualizing Data'',

*2010: (with Casey Reas) ''Getting Started with Processing'',

*2015: (with Casey Reas and

Lauren McCarthy Lauren McCarthy is a Chinese-American artist and computer programmer based in Los Angeles. McCarthy creates artworks that use a variety of media and techniques, including performance, artificial intelligence and programmed computer-based interact ...

) ''Getting Started with p5.js,''

References

External links

* * 1975 births Living people People from Massachusetts Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni American computer scientists American designers American digital artists Carnegie Mellon University faculty Information graphic designers MIT Media Lab people {{US-compu-bio-stub

Early life and education

Career

Books

See also

References

External links