Julian Raabe builds the tools he needs. A computational designer, media theorist, and unrepentant bricoleur, he tinkers with processes and techniques until they bend to his purpose. He is responsible for Additive Manufacturing & Innovation at Herding Filtertechnik GmbH, an industrial filtration company in Bavaria. He builds parametric design workflows and develops in-house Plugins for construction- and production-automation. He also teaches Grasshopper as a lecturer at OTH Amberg-Weiden.
Raabe studied Comparative Literature, International Literatures, and Art Education at the University of Augsburg, where he completed his doctorate on the media aesthetics of the archive in the age of digitization. He is the author of Hyperarchiv: Prolegomena medienästhetischer Archivologie (Brill | Fink, 2022) and has taught and published on the aesthetics of violence, media anthropology of the archive, and the theory of photography. He previously headed the analogue photography lab of the Art Education faculty at the University of Augsburg for nearly a decade. It was in the darkroom that he learned to think in parameters — exposure, chemistry, time — long before he opened Grasshopper for the first time; the move from the enlarger to the digital workbench only changed the variables.
His current work sits at the seam between geometry, automation, and the machine. He develops tooling around Rhino Compute for cloud- and web-based parametric applications, works on constraint-based modelling and industrial robotics integration for Grasshopper. He is the initiator and organizer of Misfits of Manufacturing 2026, a symposium for his own kind — the people who wire parametric models into machines they were never meant to talk to — first held in August 2026 at OTH Regensburg.