Can Visual Arts Save the World? (ft. Ben Fry) | Ep. 54

Ben Fry is principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy located in Boston. He received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. Fathom’s projects span from arenas of social justice like an affordability calculator for Farmers to the computer graphics built inside of Minority Report. Independent of his work with Fathom, he’s garnered degrees + accolades from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cooper Hewitt, + the MOMA.  For roughly an hour, we talk about the many applications of cross-disciplinary visual art + we work hard to try and identify a reasonable answer to the question “can visual art help save the world?”  Tune in.