Talking shop with the people who build creative tools.
Getting Simple has Nono Martínez Alonso in conversation with people behind design tools such as Rhino Compute, Dynamo and Hypar, and with guests from machine learning and art. Talk runs from Grasshopper 2's rebuilt graphics pipeline to learning attention from toy transformers to why one fixed drawing size made the work easier.
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Getting Simple is an interview podcast built on long conversations between Nono Martínez Alonso and people working where design, software and creative practice meet. The guests talk shop. That means specifics: which framework a product had to move to, how a plugin reads a sensor, why a drawing is a certain size. Andy Payne appears twice, in '#73: Andy Payne — Grasshopper, Rhino Compute, Teaching, Learning to Code & Gen AI' and '#74: Andy Payne — Grasshopper 2'. In the first, the host notes they are both licensed architects, asks about Andy's Harvard thesis and his time at Autodesk after the Monolith acquisition, and hears about a plugin connecting microcontrollers, sensors and servos to Grasshopper. The example Andy gives is a facade louver system that reacts to light: a sensor on the table changes the 3D geometry live, and the resulting angles can be sent back out to drive a servo in a physical model. The second is recorded live just after a premiere of their earlier talk. It catches up on what has changed, from Grasshopper 2's rebuilt, faster graphics pipeline to the work of getting Rhino Compute running on Rhino 8's .NET Core foundation. Andy also names Plasticity and Blender as tools he is watching. Ian Keough, introduced as the father of Dynamo and founder of Hypar, is back for a second visit. That conversation covers Hypar, visual programming, open source and authorship, and subscription pricing, and makes a case for platforms that default to sharing, set against an architecture culture that used to guard its ideas in a field that runs on precedent. It closes with a joke about the two of them looking like sportscasters on a couch. Alex O'Connor, a senior manager of data science and machine learning at Autodesk, brings the machine learning view. His conversation covers transformers and generative AI, and he recommends minimal toy transformer libraries for understanding attention, since closed models give little sense of what happens to a query. The show steps outside software too. Zach Kron, the podcast's second guest in late 2017, returns for an in-person conversation in Somerville, Massachusetts, about valuing art, productivity and the obsessiveness of cleaning things up, or not. In one exchange the host argues that once the microphones, camera and editing are under control, the job becomes making good radio, and Zach answers with his own version: settling on 12 by 18 drawings made the work easier. Craft gets a whole episode in '#69: Q&A with Nono — Podcasting Tips', where a friend named Steve puts the questions to the host. He explains his preference for the long format popularized by people like Tim Ferriss: it lets an interview get past the generic first twenty minutes toward how someone runs a day, what success means to them and what they tinker with at home. Several sessions are filmed, with YouTube and live streams part of the setup. Episode notes are posted at gettingsimple.com, and the host invites questions by form, voice note or short video, to be answered on a stream or an episode.
Made for: Suits a listener who uses or follows computational design tools like Grasshopper, Rhino and Dynamo and wants the people around them talking specifics, with room left for AI, art and how a podcast gets made.
What sets it apart: Several conversations pick up an earlier thread: returning guests like Ian Keough and Zach Kron, and a live follow-up with Andy Payne on what changed since their first talk. The tool talk gets very specific, down to .NET Core ports and sensor-driven facade models.
Conversations on simple living, lifestyle design, creativity, technology, and culture. Nono is a creative technologist and AI researcher.
A light sensor makes a facade model move, and your design software rabbit hole gets a motor.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at Grasshopper's split evolution, from graphics pipelines to Rhino Compute and richer model objects.
Grasshopper 2 is framed as a question of software lineage: why a new version needs a ground-up design while Grasshopper 1 is still moving forward.
A clear, grounded look at computational design as sensors, geometry, and motors start talking to each other.
Getting Simple's conversation with Andy Payne follows computational design back to a practical question: how can digital geometry respond to the physical world?
Ian Keogh connects Hypar, open source authorship, and software pricing to the culture of sharing.
Ian Keogh returns to Getting Simple for a conversation that keeps circling the practical meaning of sharing. Hypar, visual programming, open source, authorship, and subscription pricing all sit inside that frame, with Keogh making the case for tools and platforms where sharing…
A clear, grounded bridge from transformer basics to the strange craft of prompting DALL-E.
Getting Simple tracks Alex O'Connor's path from an early undergraduate encounter with machine learning as a curious software idea to a present shaped by transformer models, attention, GPT-3, and DALL-E.
A thoughtful conversation about how control of the medium can make more room for the work.
Getting Simple's conversation with Zach Krohn frames creative evolution as a negotiation with constraint. The episode moves from an early kitchen recording in a large, hard-surfaced room to the point where technical fluency lets production get out of the way.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Nono Martínez Alonso and Andy Payne frame Getting Simple #74 around Grasshopper 2, Grasshopper 1 updates, and Rhino compute changes tied to Rhino 8 and .NET Core.
Andy Payne describes moving from architecture at SOM and Columbia into computational design, starting with 3D Max experiments, explicit history, and the first version of Grasshopper.
Ian Keough says Hypar has moved from trying to sell to architects and computational designers toward building product manufacturers like Aliaxis and contractors doing “buildings as a product.” He explains that Hypar’s space-planning tools are mostly “plain automation” based on room-type rules, area mixes, circulation, and cores, not AI or ML.
Alex O'Connor, a senior manager of data science and machine learning at Autodesk, traces machine learning from late-1990s novelty to a central software method by 2008–2009.
Zach Krohn says Getting Simple began with simplicity and design, then expanded into coaching, art, programming, AI, ML, and even a freediving episode with Jose Luis.
The host shares his podcasting process and tools in a Q&A with a friend, offering insights for aspiring creators.
In Getting Simple #68, Leire Asensio Villoria and David Mah explain how their book Systems Upgrade studies Erwin Hauer’s sculptures through digital reconstruction.
Frank Harmon says he writes to find out what he thinks, using Chicago's Crown Hall as a current example.
Nono interviews Mike Gabor about his peaceful worldview, mindfulness practices, and simple living tips.
Interview with Roberto Molinos on remaking his consultancy by focusing on robustness, client closeness, and the power of saying no.
An interview with Tatiana Jambasova about simple living, lifestyle design, and creativity, set in Mill Valley, California.