Hi I'm Duane. I am based in the American South. I came after 20 years in LA to teach architecture at a University here, and I'm going up for tenure next year. As part of my creative / research activities my partner and I run a small jewelry company (www.Xover0.com). To produce our pieces I use a visual programming language called Grasshoper which runs in the Rhino3d 3d modeling program, which is popular within architecture. If you know of Grasshoper you see what drew me to the Future of Coding community once I found the podcast on Spotify. I also write C# to make Grasshopper component libraries. I am the first person to write a program for the description of the Space Groups (3d symmetries) in architectural computation. (https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/horta) I also write a proprietary library used in the pre-processing of concrete 3d printing. I am also slowly learning APL (Dyalog). While I haven't implemented the Space Group library in APL yet, I got into it because it is trivial to generate the 3d matrices for the library with APL. I have since fallen in love with the other aspects of the language. I'm really excited to be part of the FoC community - I think it's one of the most interesting and creative spaces in computation today.

Hello! Welcome! Yeah, Grasshopper looks super interesting. I've never had the chance to use it, but I've admired some of the design details that I've seen in screenshots. I have a background in 3d, including a lot of experience with NURBS. Rhino is NURBS-based, right? Is that why you chose to use it for jewelry?

Hi Ivan, thanks for the message! Big fan of your work. Yes, Rhino is a NURBS program - in fact their geometry engine OpenNURBS is open source. (https://github.com/mcneel/opennurbs with documentation on the McNeel site) I haven't played with it, but I know some companies outside McNeel base their software on it too. Anyway... Grasshopper is indeed really amazing. Its introduction led to a HUGE democratization of computational design in architecture. I mean - a really, really big shift. Most people treat it as just an engine for creating more and crazier geometries, but I approach it as a language and that's extremely rewarding. You're correct that a lot of people do jewelry with Rhino because it's NURBS based and they can do the nice flowing surfaces that look good in jewelry. (It's also big in transport design because of this) For Katherine and I it was mostly that we picked jewelry as a good domain in which to use the tools. That is - I was deep into Grasshopper and getting going with home 3d printing which was still a rare thing at this point a decade ago. I was finding that to do computational design and advanced fabrication at architectural scale you either had to work for a big firm and got some small discrete chunk of the project - a reception desk or something - or you were on your own and nothing ever actually got built because the costs were too high for your typical client who turns to a small office. Katherine's background is in fashion and costume design. And she's always been working toward having her own company. So between my Rhino / Grasshopper and obsession with geometry and her knowledge of the human body as a landscape and digital sculpting skills we decided jewelry was a good outlet. Which it's been. I'd love to continue chatting about it too - as you can tell I have a lot to say (lol). It's great to be here, great to meet you all, and thanks for the warm welcome!!!

Really beautiful jewelry, thank you for sharing! I love that it sits at an intersection between you and your partners passions. That makes for something really special/unique 🥰 One of my first forays into 3d modeling was trying to better visualize the symmetrically unique regions of different crystalline lattices, so it was a really pleasant surprise to see your visual programming implementation of similar ideas! I haven't tried Grasshopper, but it looks very interesting. At a glance I love the sliders you have for constants, they look like they have nice sensible bounds. In blender I feel like I often fall into a really frustrating area of configuration space when I move one slider a bit to far, move into the negative range, etc. Everything starts behaving unintuitively and I'm left feeling confused 😅