Ivan Specht

Frank Y.C. Liu

Olivia Jacks

Ben Fry is a designer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the founder of Fathom Information Design, a Boston-based design firm. Fry completed his doctoral degree at the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, his postdoctoral fellowship with Eric S. Lander at the Broad Institute, and was the Nierenberg Chair of Design at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He has authored 

Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists

. His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Museum of Modern Art, 

. In recognition of his achievements, Fry was honored with the National Design Award for Interaction Design in 2011.

One October evening, Fry met with a dozen members and friends of 

 over fajitas and PowerPoints in our sanctum. The event had been billed as a dinner, but soon morphed into a talk and Q&A, led by Design Editor Ivan Specht and former Fathom intern Olivia Jacks. Over two hours, as he weaved together some of his most emblematic design work, Fry’s clarity of expression, of thought, came in full swing. He barely had any time to eat.

Near the end, Fry made a comment about all the parents he’s disappointed by convincing their Computer Science-graduate children to pursue graphic design—the horror! We may just be halfway there.

The interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Advocate: What are the opportunities and challenges of interactive, web-based representations versus traditional print mediums?

Ben Fry: Print is amazing, as far as the fidelity that you can get out of it. Screens are getting better and better, but you can still put a whole lot of detail into print that you can't really on a screen. The big difference, obviously, though, is that within the screen, you also have this sort of infinite space, where you can just keep adding and navigating around in.

One of the reasons it's still interesting to think about print is that no matter how much more data we have, we have not evolved at that same rate. As you know, even if a computer can process twice as much information every 18 months, we as humans can't process twice as much information every 18 months. There's something about that, that sort of speaks to the limitations and expectations of what humans can kind of teach a computer, you know? This is on a different axis, but thinking of the level of disinformation being spread right now—we have never been in an era where we have had more access to more information more quickly, and what has happened is rampant disinformation. It's like, “Oh, I see facts in front of me, and I refuse to believe them.” That's just kind of a bitter irony.

How did you shift from your physical design background to computer-based design work?

I was interested in both, in parallel tracks. Since I was younger, I had been very interested in coding, and knew that it was an interesting way of problem-solving, pulling things apart, and understanding them. But at the same time, I loved design, type, and so on. I didn't like to mix them because my dad had always hoped I would be a computer scientist, yet I was more comfortable with people in the design space. And so I went through undergrad doing design as a parallel thing. For a while, I thought, “Maybe I could do something around UI [User Interface],” but I did a bunch of internships around that and it was kind of unfulfilling. I was very lucky to find a group of people at MIT who were trying to figure out how to put these fields together in some interesting way.

Who are your biggest inspirations in terms of historical designers?

Generally, I have been most inspired by people outside of the immediate field. There are a bunch of typographers whose work I'm really into. Photography, film, writing, and other creative fields contain a lot of the inspiration that designers should learn from. There’s also a reminder that while all the computer-based work is new, it relies so much on previous things. I think there's a certain humility that is required when thinking about other fields that are much further along in their history and have a base of work to draw from. Even cartography, which we often draw on, is just a few thousand-year-old tradition, as opposed to the charts and graphs that are familiar today, which only go back a couple hundred years. I think within visualization, there’s still a general lack of awareness of the history beyond the last decade or two.

What are your thoughts on the upcoming role of generative AI in design?

So how many of you are thinking about this?

Every ten or twenty years, we have another round of this. It’s gonna take our jobs! For instance, there was a push in the nineties to build software to automatically do layout, and then you won't need graphic designers! It's been 25 or 30 years, and that obviously hasn't happened. Over the course of my interest in technology and computing, this is the third major wave of interest in AI specifically, and this idea of building systems that will magically solve everything. So I’m a little bit more cynical, a bit more suspicious having watched the other iterations play out.

I'm not a good futurist, and I can't speak to what the future will look like. I'm somewhat less interested in AI, because it takes out a lot of the things that I love about design: if my inspiration is coming from books, movies, type, and all this other stuff, the things that are wonderful about that process are not the things that AI is generally good at. But I’m also not willing to write it off, like “this will never work,” because ultimately it’s a tool like any other, and it only matters what the result is.

It's easy for AI to generate garbage and lots of semi-plausible things. I’d be a lot more excited if AI was better at doing the opposite––of identifying the garbage. Wake me up when it can clean up search results on Google, versus generate a lot of plausibly clickable sort of links and things like that.

Computer type-setting might be a similar development.

One of the odd things about design trends over the last 25 years, or really the last ten, is that our phones can now produce images that are so hyper-real, radically better than anything I might have imagined twenty years ago. Having reached that level of seeing in ridiculous detail on our phones, design trends have turned to pixel art and the mashing up of undesigned sorts of things. So I think insofar as where the generative stuff might go, it will carve out its own territory. I’m very interested in what the human response to that is going to be.

Let’s wrap up with a few quick questions we like to ask everyone we interview for the 

. What's something you've always been bad at?

I mentioned predicting the future. I'm also terrible at volleyball.

What books were important to you in your college years?

 by John Holland that talks about distributed and complex adaptive systems, which was very influential for me in thinking about these things. But since outside of the studio I was just taking science courses, I didn't have time to take any English or literature courses. And so basically I tried to work backward and sort of, you know, read as much as I could. I read a lot of Mark Twain—he was my favorite from that period. The name “Fathom” for the company is a reference. Also, Kurt Vonnegut, he had a lot of good stuff.

I like baking and don't get to do it enough.

Any parting words of advice or wisdom for future designers?

That's a big responsibility. One of the things I like to do as sort of a parting thing with my class at MIT—and I think it applies here at Harvard as well—is that you are all super smart. You have all these abilities, and I encourage you to find interesting paths for yourselves: you can come out of here and do pretty much anything you want. That’s incredible. You hear about privilege and stuff like that, and I don’t mean in the sense of financial privilege, but it’s a pretty amazing opportunity to just say, ‘I want to do this, I want to do this, I'm going to try and match these two ideas together.’

Especially coming out of undergrad, you could fit in that round hole and be the square peg or instead, you can try and lean into yourself and find places that are going to help you nurture your ability to find a different track. You have this good starting point, with all these amazing things you study and all these amazing people you spend time with; the best thing for me in graduate school was my peers. So yeah, take that into your work.

Ivan Specht

Ivan Specht

Archived Notes

Fall / Winter 2023

An Interview with Ben Fry

Notes