Bran Ferren (born January 16, 1953) is an American technologist, artist, architectural designer, vehicle designer, engineer, lighting and sound designer, visual effects artist, scientist, lecturer, photographer, entrepreneur, and inventor. Ferren is the former President of Research and Development of Walt Disney Imagineering as well as founder of Associates & Ferren, a multidisciplinary engineering and design firm acquired in 1993 by Disney. He is Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds, which he co-founded in 2000 with Danny Hillis. Apple's "pinch-to-zoom" patent, which features prominently in its legal battle with Samsung, was invalidated by the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2013 based on a 2005 patent by Ferren and Hillis for multi-touch gestures.
Early life
Bran Ferren was the only child of artists John Ferren and Rae Tonkel Ferren. He grew up surrounded by art, artists, and technology. His father, whose work is part of the permanent collections of many American art museums, mixed with painters including Picasso, Miró, and Mondrian before becoming an integral member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. His father was also personal friends with Alfred Hitchcock and created paintings for The Trouble with Harry and designed the nightmare sequence in Vertigo. Ferren's uncles came from the worlds of engineering and technology: Roy Ferren served as director of flight test for North American Aviation (later North American Rockwell) and worked on the B-25 Mitchell bomber, X-15 rocket plane, XB-70 Valkyrie, and B-1 Lancer bombers. Stanley Tonkel was a noted senior recording engineer for Columbia Records, who engineered recordings for artists such as Miles Davis, Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan.
He first attended Hunter College Elementary School for gifted students in New York City, followed by a year at the American Community School, in Beirut Lebanon (1963-1964) while his father served as the first artist-in-residence for a U.S. Department of State cultural exchange program to introduce American abstract art to the Middle East. After returning from overseas, he spent three years at the McBurney School in New York City, and then the last three years of high school at East Hampton High School, in East Hampton, New York.
Ferren started his first design and engineering company, Synchronetics while in high school. He left high school at age 16 to attend MIT, but departed in 1970 to continue entrepreneurial pursuits. Despite his short stay at MIT, he was invited back by then school president Charles M. Vest to be a keynote speaker for MIT Technology Day 1996. Before his 21st birthday, Ferren had worked on TV commercials, films, and regional theater. He had also pioneered visual effects for arena concerts for groups such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Laurie Anderson, Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, David Bowie, Paul McCartney. R.E.M., Depeche Mode, and Foreigner, using pyrotechnics, audio, projection, and novel lighting techniques.
Career
Associates & Ferren
Ferren founded Associates & Ferren at the age of 25 to do work at the "crossroads of design and science and entertainment." One of the first projects was for Broadway play The Crucifer of Blood, a Sherlock Holmes mystery that starred Glenn Close and won Ferren a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award. The production featured a "shattering display of thunder and lightning", which got the attention of director Ken Russell, leading to Ferren's first prominent assignment as special visual effects director on a major Hollywood science-fiction film, Altered States.