Ben Fry lecture (Computational Information Design) November 14, 2005

Computational Information Design

The ability to collect, store, and manage data is increasing quickly, yet our ability to understand it remains constant. In an attempt to gain better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization, data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated part of the specific problem, but failing in a broader sense: there are too many unsolved problems in the visualization of complex data. As a solution, I propose that the individual fields be brought together as part of a single process which I call Computational Information Design.

Ben Fry received doctoral degree at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on methods of visualizing large amounts of data from dynamic information sources. His current research involves the visualization of genetic data at the Eli & Edyth Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard.

His work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003. Other work has 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?. With Casey Reas of UCLA, he is currently developing Processing, an environment for teaching
computational design and sketching interactive media software.