You build things. Not renders — real things. You've wired Grasshopper or Rhino into machines it was never designed to talk to. You've written the glue code between parametric models and production lines that nobody else in your company understands. Welcome home.
What & Why
// THE PAIN YOU KNOW
Computational Design workflows are powerful and elegant so long as you stay in one self-contained system. But the moment you push a parametric workflow into actual production — CNC, robotics, 3D printing, laser welding — you're on your own. Bridging file formats, fighting legacy CAD, feeding ERP and PDM systems, writing custom interfaces, duct-taping together systems that were never meant to be connected.
And even when everything works, the tools stay locked to whoever built them. Colleagues can't touch your Grasshopper definitions without a steep learning curve, so the expert becomes the bottleneck. Rolling these workflows out via UIs and RhinoCompute sounds great — until you hit GDPR, IP protection, server setup and user management. More glue, more problems.
AI is changing what's possible in this pipeline — generative design for manufacturing constraints, synthetic training data for robotics workflows, automated code generation from design intent. But the moment you involve models, questions surface: how do you maintain design intent across the pipeline? How do you ensure your proprietary geometry, tolerances, and process parameters stay protected and aren't leaking into training sets or competing against you?
If this sounds familiar, you're probably alone or in a very small team. A misfit — an oddball, admired or more likely despised for their strange spaghetti tools. The knowledge stays siloed, the problems stay unsolved, everyone reinvents the same workarounds. Meanwhile, someone in a completely different industry has maybe already solved the problem you're stuck on. Architecture, mechanical engineering, product design — different fields, same tools, same pain.
Cross-industry exchange doesn't happen by itself — so we're making it happen.
Who
// PEOPLE WHO SHIP
Makers, engineers, roboticists, programmers, designers who ship. Anyone working at the intersection of computational design and physical production. Industrial company or garage maker — doesn't matter. What matters is that something real comes out at the end. English language. We want everyone in the sessions to talk, not just listen.
When
// TWO DAYS
25–26 August 2026 · OTH Regensburg. Two days for the people who push parametric design into real production — CNC, robotics, additive, laser. We trade the workflows, the dead-ends, and the workarounds that shouldn't exist but ship anyway. Bring the file that broke the machine.
DAY 1 · TUE 25 AUG
Show & Tell
Show what works. Show what doesn't. We're especially interested in the gaps — the interfaces that break, the data that gets lost, the workarounds that shouldn't exist. Day 1 maps the pain points and sets the agenda for Day 2.
DAY 2 · WED 26 AUG
Hackathon
Hands on the problems from Day 1. Workshop tracks so far:
- Open Source Robotics
- CyberCraft Lab
- Painpoint Hackathon
Where
// THE LAB
CyberCraft Lab at OTH Regensburg, Building L. Prof. Barlieb and his team are opening their lab and showing what they've built. Good place for this.
