AU
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My second day at this year's Autodesk University started with another lovely sunrise.After breakfast I spent an hour or so writing my Day 1 blog post in the Community Zone before I realised a queue was forming to enter the general session. I wandered over and joined it - quite near the front - and chatted with a number of people who were clearly very excited about listening to the day's guest speaker. Here are the people waiting in the Community Zone for the general session to open its doors. I found a single seat free in the third row…
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After a great trip to Stanford on Friday, we had some last-minute preparation to do for our AU exhibit at Pier 9 on Saturday morning. We headed into the office - after having to explain our way through a security cordon along the waterfront due to APEC 2023 - and printed out a bunch of legal waivers for study participants to sign. It seems APEC will be impacting our SF employees, with the offices being closed during the AU week.Enough people had warned me about craziness at SFO that I ended up at the airport well ahead of my flight…
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On Wednesday I headed back across to Zurich airport to fly to San Francisco for a few days ahead of Autodesk University 2023 in Las Vegas.The flight was direct and largely uneventful: I didn't sleep but did feel moderately sane when I arrived in SF. I hopped on BART from the airport to Embarcadero - it's really the best mode of transport if you arrive around 5pm.My room in the Hyatt has a view across SF's financial district. Here's a picture I snapped before sleeping... … and one on waking. I always like seeing the view towards The Bay,…
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On Wednesday I'll be flying out to San Francisco for some meetings ahead of Autodesk University 2023 in Las Vegas. It'll actually be quite nice not to be completely jet-lagged for the first two days of the conference - although as my first class is at 8am on Monday morning it wouldn't be the worst thing to be a bit jet-lagged, honestly. Things are coming together, although there's still some work to be done: From Steps to Stories is debuting tonight in Toronto, so we'll have a good sense of any issues with the larger-scale exhibit ahead of it coming…
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I was sure this series was finished - as indicated in the last post which talked about both VASA's pathfinding and visibility from a point inside Forma, after having talked about a manual approach for connecting the two tools - but I did leave the door ajar to me finding something else to talk about on this topic. Sure enough, I got thinking about the missing "big ticket" item that VASA is able to implement with relatively low effort: visibility from a direction (as opposed to from a point) which can simulate things like shadows cast by direct sunlight. It…
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In a recent post I talked about "From Steps to Stories", the exhibit we're showing in Toronto, hosted by our partners at The Bentway. In that post I promised I'd share more details, nearer the event, and, well, here we are. We recently published a video showing more details about the project. There will be a longer video produced, once we've captured footage of the exhibit in Toronto, but this one tells the story behind the project quite nicely in just 2 minutes. Beyond that, I thought I'd share a couple of shots that give a sense of…
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While preparing for one of my upcoming AU classes, I decided to explore how someone could use VASA - our Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis toolkit - with Forma. Right now Forma is largely focused on conceptual design - taking into account the surrounding urban context - so this thinking was largely focused on how VASA might be used at the urban scale. This is something we've looked at before in the context of FormIt and Dynamo. While a tighter integration is likely to be possible at some point - I'll talk a little more about our work on a WebAssembly…
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I received an email from Rick Webb - whom I've met a few times on trips to Amsterdam, and mentioned in this previous post - telling me some news about the project. Rick was walking through the city on his usual route and came across the MX3D bridge being removed from its location in the heart of Amsterdam. It will presumably be replaced by a more traditional bridge at some point over the coming months. I mentioned after my last visit that this day was coming: the bridge was only ever intended to be in place for two years as…
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It has been a really busy but important week for our team. We had a fantastic virtual offsite where we spent a significant amount of time using LEGO to conceptualise some of our planning for the coming year. A friend of mine was all set to become a LEGO practitioner - to assist with team-building events - before the plans were de-railed by the pandemic… independently my colleague Dagmara suggested we try "Serious Play" for this offsite and I said yes before she'd finished her sentence. We've made great strides for our upcoming exhibition in Toronto (formal announcement coming soon)…
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As mentioned in the last post, it's now possible for people to sign up for their AU classes. And it's really worth taking the time to do so, as some classes are filling up quickly. Despite being held at a ridiculously early time on the first day of the conference, my first class is already 88% full, for instance (there are 141 registered and the capacity of the room it's currently assigned to is 160). I see that 300+ people have this session in their list of favourites, so if you do want to attend then I recommend signing up…