Conferences

  • I've been invited to talk about Project Dasher at the KEA BIM Café Talk on Wednesday of this week. Many thanks to Aske Strandberg for organising and moderating this event. It's being held online (of course) at 4pm CET on Wednesday September 16th. The session is primarily targeted at students from KEA – the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology – but guests are very welcome. If you'd like to join, feel free to sign up here. I'll be sharing a number of really cool enhancements I've been making to Dasher during the pandemic-related travel ban – only some of…

  • This has been a strange week, at least in terms of dreams. I mentioned earlier in the week (on Twitter and LinkedIn) that I'd had a dream about Autodesk University where I was only partially present: I was running between meetings while everyone else was having fun attending sessions and hanging out at social events. I also noted this wasn't so very different from reality (at least the way I perceive it), but that's just me playing the victim. I love AU even if it's always a bit hectic. I have a feeling this dream was probably triggered by last…

  • This post is a bit of a grab-bag of various event-related topics. The first one (chronologically, if not in terms of the title above) is the availability of session recordings from the recent CanBIM event: "The Future of Work: Designing Resiliency and Building Work Safety Post-COVID". My own session was entitled "Using Generative Design and Digital Twins to Improve Occupant Well Being". As it was the first session of the day – with a new web streaming platform – there were a few teething issues for the sponsor's introduction (and the session auto-closed a little too promptly, which meant no…

  • I've just realised that time is running out for people to submit their class proposals for AU 2020. The deadline is on June 22nd, which is this coming Monday. From my side I'm almost certainly going to submit a class to discuss the details of the work we've been doing on post-COVID return-to-workplace efforts. Essentially digging into how we've used the Space Analysis package to implement metrics that make sense for this type of analysis. If you're thinking of submitting something, but haven't yet put pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard), then I suggest giving it some thought…

  • I have the sense that I'm seeing my face too much at the moment (admittedly I'm very attached to it… haha). All I can say, in my defence, is that over the last few weeks I've started to receive more requests to participate in virtual activities. And I've mostly said yes, as it's a reasonable alternative to travelling to meet people, given the current circumstances we're all in. In case you haven't seen these various pieces of virtual content – and you're actually interested – here's a quick round-up of some current and future ones. Getting Simple When my friend…

  • As a follow-up to the last post which talked about SimAUD and it's going online, today I wanted to mention some other online resources that might also be of interest to people during these times. The Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at ETH Zurich is one of many institutions that have moved their public lectures online and have made them available for anyone to watch. So far I've watched a couple of them live, the second one being by my friend and former colleague, Matt Jezyk, who is now spearheading Tesla's efforts to streamline gigafactory design using techniques such…

  • Next week is the annual Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD, pronounced Sim-Odd). This conference was started a decade ago by my former manager Azam Khan, along with Gabriel Wainer and Ramtin Attar. I've only had the pleasure of attending one SimAUD event – the 2018 edition was held in the Netherlands at TUDelft – but I was hoping/planning to attend this year's in Vienna: a paper submitted by Rhys Goldstein – with Simon Breslav , myself and Azam as co-presenters – was accepted for the conference. Here's a quick photo from a dinner we had in…

  • Bright and early, yesterday morning, I hopped on a train (well, a couple of trains) to get across to Basel for this year's Swissbau, the bienniel construction-related trade show held in Switzerland, and apparently one of the largest in Europe. I'd never been before, but thanks to social media I'd compiled a list of people to see there, and had even coordinated to meet up with my friend and fellow blogger, Jeremy Tammik. There was quite a bit going on at Swissbau, even outside the exhibition  hall. At one point I saw some people performing while suspended from a building.…

  • Wednesday and Thursday were my busy days at this year's Autodesk University in Las Vegas. After a breakfast meeting with a colleague from Toronto, I had my first class of AU2019 to deliver. It was a live-streamed class that was focused on advanced visualization (primarily of IoT data) using the Forge viewer. Somewhat unfortunately the class was scheduled at the same time as the AEC mainstage (more on this later), but that basically just meant that the room wasn't completely full and that most of the attendees were Forge-focused. As it was live-streamed the class recording is already available: Since…

  • On Saturday I headed over to Las Vegas for Autodesk University 2019. The journey started with the train to Geneva. From there it was a short flight to London, which amazingly arrived 30 minutes ahead of schedule. I had a 3-hour connection at Heathrow, so my old friend Simon picked me up from T5 and we had a nice pub lunch at The Ostrich Inn in Colnbrook before he dropped me at T3. And people say that Heathrow airport transfers aren't enjoyable! It was a really strange onward flight to Las Vegas. I'm so used to this flight being full…