John Maeda is an American artist, designer and technologist whose early digital works treated the computer as a living graphical system, generating real-time changes in color, shape and composition that he called “reactive” rather than “interactive”. He founded the Aesthetics and Computation Group at MIT and created Design By Numbers, a deliberately minimal, 100-by-100-pixel, grayscale programming language built to make coding approachable for visual artists and designers.
Two of the graduate students who passed through that MIT group, Casey Reas and Ben Fry, built on Design By Numbers to create the open-source language Processing in 2001, extending its minimalist approach beyond the fixed canvas and grayscale limits of Maeda's tool and influencing a generation of generative artists. Maeda named the Processing project's later leaders — Casey Reas, Ben Fry, Dan Shiffman and Lauren Lee McCarthy — as the people who carried computational design and art forward into the current century. He served as the sixteenth president of the Rhode Island School of Design from 2008 to 2014, having previously been associate director of research at the MIT Media Lab.
