Design By Numbers (DBN) was an influential experiment in teaching programming initiated at the MIT Media Lab during the 1990s. Led by John Maeda and his students they created software aimed at allowing designers, artists and other non-programmers to easily start computer programming.

The software itself can be run in a browser and published alongside the software was a book and courseware.

Design By Numbers is no longer an active project but has gone on to influence many other projects aimed at making computer programming more accessible to non-technical people. Its most public result is Processing, created by Maeda's students Casey Reas and Ben Fry, who built on the work of DBN and has gone on to international success.

History

Design By Numbers was developed by Aesthetics and Computation Group (1996-2003) at the MIT Media Lab.

The first version of DNB was created by John Maeda in 1999. DNB 1.0.1 was developed by Tom White. DBN 2 and 3 by Ben Fry. In late 2002, John Maeda took over the further development of DNB.

Prof. Warren Sack provided a toolkit for doing LOGO-style graphics in January 22, 2003.

The last version of DNB (3.0.1) was released in 2003. Beta version of DNB 4, developed by Jessica Rosenkrantz, was scheduled for release in August 2003, but ultimately never came out. For a time, DNB 4 was intended to be the final version of the language.

In 2005, John Maeda announced that he would continue developing DNB as part of the MIT Physical Language Workshop (PLW) research group. The status of the new version of DNB or its derivatives is unknown. PLW remained active until 2008.

Features

DNB consists of an IDE and a programming language.

DNB program can be written four languages: English (default), Spanish, French, and Japanese. Each command has been translated into the appropriate language, e.g. the equivalents of the command paper are: papel (es), papier (fr), かみ (jp).

See also

Further reading

External links