Seed Media Group: Visualization Lab

Ben Fry
Director

Ben Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory under John Maeda, and completed postdoctoral work with Eric Lander at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard where he focused on developing tools for visualizing genetic data. During the 2006-2007 academic year, he was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design.

With Casey Reas of UCLA, he developed Processing, an open source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software that won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. The project also received the 2005 Interactive Design prize from the Tokyo Type Director's Club. In 2006, Fry received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the project. In 2007, Reas and Fry published Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists with MIT Press. Processing 1.0 was released in November 2008, and is used by tens of thousands of people every week.

His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney Biennial and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. Other pieces have appeared at Ars Electronica and in the film Minority Report.