DBN tutorial: Introduction

DBN (Design by Numbers) is a very simple language to program small, non-trivial, interactive, and animated computer art works. DBN can also be used as a language to introduce fundamental computing concepts (like variable, iteration, selection) because the immediate visual feedback obtained by executing a DBN program helps one to understand the program’s instructions and structure (e.g. how nested loops are executed). The DBN website explains in more detail what DBN is.

Here’s a simple example of what can be done with a handful of lines of DBN code. Click within the white square to start running the program, and then move the mouse around. To be able to scroll further down the page, click again outside the square.

DBN was initially developed by John Maeda and then further improved by his team of the Aesthetics + Computation group at MIT, in particular by PhD student Ben Fry, who then went on to create Processing.

DBN is described in Maeda’s book Design by Numbers, which is a 260 page long, very gentle introduction to computation for absolute beginners. It contains hundreds of examples of what one can do with DBN and it explains Maeda’s rationale for creating DBN and some of his ideas about design. There is a short introduction to the language available on the DBN website, but it omits all the interactive features and doesn’t contain any real examples. Furthermore, the language has evolved since the book was published. New constructs were added and existing ones behave differently: for example, variables have now to be explicitly initialized and command names can be used as identifiers.

This tutorial therefore aims to be the first complete and up-to-date, yet brief, introduction to DBN. In the next post we’ll have a look at the DBN programming environment.