2.1. Processing origins

Processing was born in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at MIT Media Laboratory led by John Maeda. This group is formed by an hybrid mix of designers and engineers that explore computing and aesthetics worlds, apparently very different, building bridges between them.

John Maeda always thought that the best way of using a computer as an expression element was talking to it in its own language. But that implied for artists and designers to learn programming, and that was something hard for what everybody was not prepared. It was necessary to build bridges between this space that separated designers and technicians.

In 1999 John Maeda created Design by Numbers, a programming language with an easy syntax which he used to teach. Design by numbers had something very interesting. Maeda's students could see in every moment the graphical results of what they were programming. That reduced significantly the learning curve because the human brain has innate capacity for spacial recognition.

But Design by numbers was very limited so three years later, Casey Reas and Ben Fry, two students of Maeda, initiated Processing, a language to create graphics so easy as Design by Numbers but at the same time so powerful as any general purpose programming language.