Autodesk
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This week I had a quick trip to attend this year's Barcelona Forge Accelerator. This year the event started on Tuesday – on Monday it was the festival of San Juan – so I arrived "fashionably late" at the end of Tuesday morning. Just in time to pop down to the beach to have lunch with current and former colleagues. For some reason I end up staying in a different hotel every time I come to Barcelona. This time it was the SB Diagonal Zero, which is just across the street from the Princess (where I stayed for OTx). This…
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It's been a crazy (but very cool) few days here in the UK and Ireland. It started with the pre-event (or perhaps the pre-pre-event) of the annual Autodesk football tournament in Dublin. We didn't win, but we had an absolute blast. I'm definitely looking forward to next year's event in Barcelona! On Sunday a group of us flew from Dublin into Heathrow: the others headed directly into town, while I stopped at a friend's for dinner in Windsor. Heading into town, later on, I saw a message from Jaime Rosales: the Circle & District lines were completely closed, so getting…
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It's been a relatively busy week, and yet very much "the calm before the storm" of AU London. I've been receiving lots of meeting requests over the last few days, filling up my AU London schedule nicely, as well as a request to be part of a "technology trends" panel session on the second day, just after the class Lorenzo and I will be giving. That should be interesting… despite my role, I definitely don't consider myself a futurist or visionary. But anyway – perhaps that will make for a more interesting discussion… we'll see! I've also iterated a few…
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There are some very interesting events scheduled for the coming weeks. Just prior to next week's AU London 2019 – itself an event that will be heavy on content for computational and generative design, this year, including a talk by Lorenzo Villaggi and myself – there's a Dynamo Day being hosted in London by the UK Dynamo User Group (or #UKDynUG) on Monday June 17th. There are four day-long workshop streams tailored for various needs… Dynamo Intro plus Geometry Dynamo Intro plus Data Dynamo Power Up Dynamo Dev Day … followed by an evening user group session with a number…
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(If you're asking yourself "what's Capturefinery?" then I suggest reading these posts first. TL;DR: Capturefinery is a tool for capturing screenshots of the various runs in a Refinery study and compiling them into animated GIFs for sharing via social media or including in customer presentations.) Firstly, a huge thank you to my partner in crime – and the first (so far only?) user of Capturefinery – Simon Breslav. He's been kicking the tyres and giving very helpful feedback that has steered the development of this package. He very kindly tells me he likes it a lot – I hope you…
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I mentioned recently that I had the chance to meet with three of my mentees at TechX in New Orleans, two of them for the first time. In this post I'd like to introduce you to my current mentees, and explain why I participate in Autodesk's mentoring program. I've been mentoring – and mentored – since long before Autodesk had a formal program in place. I was lucky enough to have Jeff Kowalski accept me as a mentee, way back when, and I definitely learned a lot from him (as you might expect). Prior to moving into Research, I also…
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I only managed to write a single blog post last week, as I spent the week at TechX 2019 attending interesting classes and networking with my Autodesk colleagues. It was an amazing week, so I do feel it's worth sharing a bit more of its goings-ons. I only really talked about the first day of TechX in my last post, so let's now see what the rest of the week had in store. Much like the first day, the second day at TechX started with a number of keynotes. The first two were by Autodesk executives, our CHRO (Chief Human…
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I'm in New Orleans for the first time in 15 years, this week, to attend our annual, Autodesk-internal TechX event. I flew out from Geneva to Heathrow on Sunday night. As there isn't an onwards flight to New Orleans on Sunday, I took the opportunity to catch up with Simon, an old friend from university. Simon dropped me at Terminal 5 on Monday morning, where I had a meeting with a local architecture and engineering firm to talk about opportunities for using generative design in their workflows. After they left, I went through security and had some lunch before catching…
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Our friend in Munich, Jacqueline Rohrmann, has recorded a fantastic 24-minute introduction to Project Refinery and posted it to her YouTube channel under her That BIM Girl pseudonym: I really like the way Jacqueline steps through how to get started with Refinery, but also "does the math" and validates the results generated by Refinery for a simple example. Very cool. I'm hoping Jacqueline will find the time to take a look at our Space Analysis package for Dynamo and post a video on getting started with it: I'd love to see Jacqueline's thoughts on the package, delivered in her own…
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What. A. Week. The first day of the world's UK Dynamo User Group's first Hackathon was an appropriate way to finish off a hectic but super-rewarding week. [Correction: it seems I misunderstood something… there have been other Dynamo Hackathons, apparently. Sorry about that.] I woke up early, this morning, and took a stroll around Hyde Park. I checked out from my hotel, picking up my cufflinks, on the way. (In a random episode during check-in, the afternoon before, I'd lent them to a fellow hotel guest – who was dressed to the nines for a charity event but had managed…