John Maeda publishes Design By Numbers

In surely one of generative art’s most legendary moments, John Maeda published Design By Numbers, with the aim of simplifying programming for artists and designers at the MIT Media Lab’s Aesthetics and Computation Group. Its minimalist interface and intuitive design enabled users to experiment with computational creativity, inspiring a new generation of digital artists and toolmakers to further fine tune and expand. The system’s simplified distribution and user-friendly syntax enabled workshops and courses at MIT and elsewhere. Benjamin Fry built DBN 2 and 3 and Casey Reas the courseware, gathering invaluable feedback, laying the groundwork for future improvements, eventually evolving into Processing. Golan Levin, an ACG student around this time, spoke to me about DBN:

“Processing grew out of Design by Numbers (DBN), which Zach’s current graduate student, Lingdong Huang, who was also my former student, just got working online. You can actually now play with DBN in the browser. This was announced only in October 2023. Now you can actually see projects that Casey Reas, Ben Fry and I made some twenty-odd years ago. DBN was John Maeda’s concept. And it allowed you to do interactive, computational and generative form on a canvas that had very specific limitations. And John is like the ultimate Bauhaus guy in terms of really liking simplicity and stark limitations. With DBN, you were limited to grayscale; you were limited to a canvas that was 100 x 100 pixels. It was kind of like a no-fun zone because you couldn’t make stuff that’s full of sexy colors. That’s because it was specifically a pedagogical tool.

‍‍Casey and Ben were like, “Yeah, this is great but we actually want to make art bigger than 100 pixels.” And John was like, “Well, that’s your business. If you want to make things that are colorful, artsy, big and whatever, go ahead.” Casey and Ben wanted to make an actually useful tool and not just a conceptual learning environment. They started working on it close to the time that I was graduating so I didn’t have a lot of direct involvement in it. But Yellowtail, for example, has been a demo in Processing since 2000. They looked to me to provide examples like that sometimes. I was probably one of the very first people to teach with it, other than Casey and Ben themselves.”