I recently started to mess around with Grasshopper, the famous plugin for Rhino which kinda revolutionized the way we deal with parametric design. Revolutionized, in my opinion, mainly because of its ease of use, as in a matter of minutes you can see something “amazing” coming on the screen. But I still think GH still has a long way to go before it reaches maturity.

When seeing the current GH production on the web, I am constantly reminded of the times when Flash was introduced and started to become very popular among web-designers. It was so easy to animate something and put on the web, that it didn’t take long for tons of animated websites to start appearing. But most of them were clearly produced without any critical thinking about them. To produce something really interesting, one had to learn the hard part of Flash, which involved Actionscript.

I feel the same with GH: to really dive deep in it and do interesting stuff, you cannot escape from scripting, either in VB.net inside GH, or by complementing GH definitions with Rhinoscripts run in parallel. Coming from a scripting background (namely Python/Mel in Maya), I see this as a natural and good thing to happen. No nice and easy to use interface will provide deep and complex results.

I do recognize the importance of GH for those starting to think design in a parametric way. It is straight-forward and easy to use, and a great tool to introduce scripting and programming concepts for the novice, and to perform quick and dirty tasks on the fly. And it only makes you hungry for more, which will eventually lead to interesting future developments. I am just afraid that the lack of real understanding about what is happening in the background of all those nice interconnected components will end up producing superficial, eye-candy results, instead of critical parametric architecture.