Rhino Meetups (BER + CPH '24)

I feel very lucky to have been able to attend the Rhino User Meeting Berlin (18.10.24) and the Rhino Developer Meeting in Copenhagen (27.09.24) to learn from some seriously talented people. Events like this don't just bring like-minded computational designers together to nerd out; they also broaden horizons for each of us in attendance. I met architects, engineers, artists, mathematicians, students, educators, software developers, and filmmakers—all creatively innovating within the Rhino/Grasshopper ecosystem. Here are a few of my very general thoughts on what I saw at those two events.

1. Grasshopper 2 is going to be fantastic (and an interesting learning curve). David Rutten very kindly attended both conferences and demonstrated many of the fundamental changes to Grasshopper that will bring our beloved visual scripting interface much more in line with computer science paradigms. Mathias Fuchs also demonstrated how GH2 will empower designers to finally break free of the Cartesian coordinate system (if they so choose).
2. Rhino and Grasshopper are going online. Many presenters showed projects that implemented web interfaces to interact with Rhino. There are tools like ShapeDiver and Packhunt that can greatly simplify this, but some are going all-in and creating web apps from scratch using Rhino Compute. I've been seeing this trend for awhile now, and it's inspired me to learn web development myself.
3. Learning C# is empowering. So many projects leveraged written code to achieve their goals. Learning to write code is empowering because it affords more (and different) outlets for creativity when trying to solve design problems. It also lets you see the functionality of software in an entirely different light and builds confidence that you can achieve whatever you set your mind to. It's not so bad, I promise 😈