Conferences
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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…
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I'm currently putting the finishing touches on my material for Autodesk University 2019. To encourage a few last-minute sign-ups, here are a few teaser GIFs from my classes. The first is from the class on Project Rediscover (which is apparently now full at 109 sign-ups, so in quite a small room). I used Capturefinery to create a GIF of quite a large Refinery study, but this time highlighting the congestion in a more 3D context. The second is from the class on Project Dasher – and using Forge for advanced data visualization – which still has 36 spaces in the…
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Things have been quiet on this blog, since my return from Scotland. Mainly because I've been heads-down dealing with preparation for Autodesk University 2019, which I'd love to say was on the horizon, whereas it's – more accurately – coming at top speed around a nearby streetcorner. In less than 3 weeks many us us will be flying to Las Vegas for the latest installment of my favourite annual conference. Today was the deadline for AU speakers to submit class handouts: I managed to submit something for both my classes, so I can now switch focus to the various presentations…
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On Wednesday morning I headed off, bright and early, to the Generative Design Hackathon that had been organised by DBEI prior to this year's BILT Europe in Edinburgh. I wandered past the local church in Bruntsfield: The walk to the conference centre led me via the canal: I arrived at EICC, the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, which is also hosting this year's BILT Europe over the coming days. Proceedings were kicked off by Wesley Benn, Executive Chairman of DBEI: He introduced the teams: And the judges: While Hypar's Anthony Hauck introduced the expert users (myself included): As well as some…
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After returning from Paris on Friday afternoon, I came across with my family to the UK on Saturday. Our first stop was at Eton – where an old friend of mine lives. We used his home for a base to head up to Watford on Sunday to do the Harry Potter Studio Tour, something my kids had been asking to do for the longest time. We were on the tour starting at 11am: we'd ended up having to buy over-priced tickets from a secondary tour operator and throwing away the bus transfer from central London… these secondary operators tend to…
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The Digital Built Environment Institute (DBEI) has posted an announcement about the Hackathon preceding BILT Europe. The Hackathon will be a one-day event in Edinburgh on October 9th, 2019, just before the main conference on October 10th-12th. This will be my first BILT: I'll be there to help out with a class about Refinery and so I'll absolutely be present at the Hackathon, too. Image © DBEI The theme of the Hackathon is "Generative Design in Practice": it's going to be very interesting to see what the teams are able to put together and communicate (in a highly streamlined manner,…
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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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This post goes out to my blogging brethren (and sistren) around the world… I'm sure more than a few of you have tried this, yourselves, so hopefully it'll be of some help to people. I recently looked back at a post of mine embedding Autodesk University 2018 videos and noticed that they no longer worked: I was sure they did when I wrote the post, but it seemed that something had changed, probably with the viewer component being used. I gnashed my teeth for a while and then posted to the Ooyala developer forum to see if anyone there could…
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Today I'm back in the Swiss town of Brugg, to give a talk about Generative Design to a group of Masters students at the FHNW. (In case you don't recognise the reference, the title of today's post is a probably-overly-subtle nod to the Oscar-nominated, 2008 film "In Bruges": Brugge is the Flemish name for Bruges, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Brugg has a similar derivation in Swiss German.) I first visited Brugg as we cycled along the Aare river last summer, and was invited back after presenting about Generative Design and Digital Twins at the other…