Through the Interface

Yesterday marked the first day of a very special 2-week event being held in the spiritual home of Generative Design for AEC – at least from Autodesk's perspective – our new office in the MaRS district of Toronto. (In fairness the spiritual home is probably where The Living work in New York, but the MaRS office is at the very least an important temple. 😉

Over the next fortnight 7 teams from 3 continents – from both industry and academia – will be using Dynamo and Refinery to implement generative workflows at various architectural scales. We're expecting the participants and the Autodesk team to learn a lot throughout this intensive process.

While I'm not attending the event in person, I will be holding a remote workshop on using Capturefinery on Monday of next week. (The first week is more about "generative thinking" and getting started with implementing Dynamo graphs that work with Refinery, by the second week the teams will hopefully be ready to start thinking about storytelling and capturing presentation graphics.)

Here are a few images from Day 1 of the residency:

Here's a shot of Hali Larsen presenting some of the GD projects Autodesk Research has worked on in recent years. It's a fun shot as we can see on the right that Simon Breslav is working on a Dynamo graph while on the left the PM for Refinery, Lilli Smith, is posting on the residency's Slack channel.

Judging by all the sticky notes, Ellen Hlozan is running some kind of LUMA session, below. The first day was very much focused on the process of thinking about and designing GD projects, so this makes a lot of sense.

Ellen and Matt Spremulli run the Technology Centre at Autodesk Toronto, and have – along with Merry Wang from the Systems Research team – spent several months setting up this event.

There are project teams from DAR, Arup, Parsons, Hone Construction, UoT, Ryerson and MIT.

Rhys Goldstein and Simon – who I work with very closely on the Space Analysis package, among other projects in the Systems team – are on-hand to provide technology advice.

Hali is a great ambassador for our work, and is giving a tour of the various GD-related exhibits in the Toronto office. It all started, of course, with the Airbus Bionic Partition project.

But there are also artifacts from other projects in the office, including the office itself, of course!

Watching from a distance, it certainly seems the event has kicked off really well. I'm looking forward to hearing (and sharing) more as things unfold further. For instance, Day 2 will already be getting more technical, with Sol Amour giving a Dynamo refresher and Lilli Smith diving into Refinery.