Autodesk Research
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It's time: the full, interactive schedule for this year's all-digital Autodesk University is now online. You can go ahead and start bookmarking your favourite classes today. Assuming you're one of the 85,000 (and counting!) people who have registered for the event. If you haven't already registered, don't worry: you can still do so for free. (There are still plenty of tickets left. π So to get things rolling, here's a link to my AU 2020 class for you to bookmark and watch from November 17th. You can expect some interesting news to be announced (or at least repeated) in this…
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This year's Halloween was destined to disappoint: we'd held out some hope until the 30th that the kids (which just means our youngest, at this point) would end up being able to go trick-or-treating in our village. Understandably β but disappointingly β the announcement came that any kind of trick-or-treating was off the cards for this Halloween. Stricter rules about groups of people were also announced, but with effect from today. From today onwards any kind of public or private event can have a maximum of 5 people present. Given the acceleration of cases in Switzerland, this is completely appropriate.…
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After having talked about Autodesk Research's collaboration with Philippe Starck and Kartell to create the world's first mass-produced, generatively-designed (and made from 100% recycled material!) chair, I decided to buy one. Well, two. As I mentioned in the talk I gave at the SDSC-Connect event, I didn't find a way to get an employee discount, but I'm proud enough of the work done by my colleagues in Research to put more money than I would normally into a couple of plastic chairs. This almost certainly makes my presentation for the SDSC-Connect event the most expensive I've ever given, at least…
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This year has been strange at so many levels that it seems a bit petty to highlight one particular area. But preparing material for Autodesk University 2020 has certainly been one such area, and it's very fresh in the mind of AU speakers around the world. With this year's event being all digital, it's clear that the AU team had to find a way to get classes delivered remotely: one option would have been to live-stream them all, but at some point the decision was made to get everything pre-recorded for on-demand delivery. (On-demand classes are not the only way…
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Over the last month or so we've been focused on the benefits brought to Project Dasher by combining 2D heatmaps with our traditionally 3D view of the world. We started by creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level, before introducing the idea of overlaying building systems information, too. Most recently we took a sneak peek at the topic of today's post, a new UI that simplifies access to these 2D (and 3D) heatmaps. The idea came up during a team meeting: as we realised we had this combinatorial explosion…
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From one online conference to another. Here's the recording published by the Swiss Data Science Center for last week's SDSC-Connect event. I've set it to start at the beginning of my session β which in 30 minutes takes a whirlwind look at four generative design projects run by Autodesk Research β but the other sessions are also likely to be of interest to people, so feel free to scrub backwards! Next week I'll be busy recording my AU 2020 session and finishing up the handout. Here's a teaser for this year's all-digital event: I'm supposed to be on holiday, this…
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This week has been a little crazy in terms of presentations. On Monday it kicked off with an internal project review followed by a presentation to a class of Masters students from the University of Southern California (it was a lunchtime session for them, so it was a late evening one for me). It wrapped up yesterday with the generative design session for the Swiss Data Science Center, which despite a few technical hitches (not on my side, thankfully) seemed to go pretty well. I was told there were upwards of 400 attendees registered for the event, but I have…
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Earlier this year, the Swiss Data Science Center kindly invited me to deliver a session on generative design at their October 1st SDSC-Connect event, entitled "Enhancing discovery and creativity with AI". A perfect umbrella topic for a session on GD! The event was originally going to be held in-person in Zurich, but with recent developments it became clear that it would have to be held online. This is bad and good, of course: it's bad because I won't get to meet attendees in person β and they sound like a really interesting group of people β and it's good because…
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As a recap, so far in this series we've looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Project Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level. There are two main tasks left for the completed feature β which will form the core of my upcoming class for AU2020 β which are to add information on building systems and to implement a UI to make these new views easier to access. Today we're focusing on adding building system information. Let's first step back and talk about why this is importantβ¦ One of the key insights we've derived…
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It's been a crazy year, but there's comfort to be had in certain things going ahead despite the craziness. For me Autodesk University is one of these things: my first AU was back in the year 2000, and I've probably only missed a few in the last two decades. This year's AU experience will be 100% virtual but also 100% free, so I'm really excited that so many more people will be able to experience AU! As of Wednesday, registration is now open for this year's AU. It's quick and easy β no need to fill out credit card details…