Generative design
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We have our annual, internal Technical Summit coming up in a couple of weeks. I'll be heading across to Montreal with 700+ other Autodesk employees to learn more about the cool stuff going on within the company. As I've done in previous years, I'll do my best to report information that I think will be interesting to this blog's readers (and that is ready to be discussed publicly, of course). One of the event's activities is being hosted by my team: the IoT Hackday. We'll have 30+ participants spread across 8 different teams. Each team will get provided some sensors,…
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I've been spending more time looking at generative design in recent months (although this is a relative thing… I've still only posted once about Dynamo, for instance). So far a big chunk of my research has been understanding what's going on in different parts of the company with respect to generative design. As part of this effort, several months ago I chatted with Anthony Hauck who heads up a team focused on generative design in the AEC space. He talked to me about Project Akaba – an early generative tool for space planning – and its successor, Project Fractal. At…
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Regular readers of this blog will have heard mention of Project Dreamcatcher and how Autodesk Research is using it to explore the future of design. It's a generative design technology that goes beyond the current "state of the art" – which means combinations of tools such as Revit + Dynamo or Rhino + Grasshopper – as it works backwards from goals stated by the user, rather than expanding and evaluating options that have been programmed in. One great way for people with a programming background to "get their heads around this" is to relate it to the world of programming…
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It's been an interesting first week in Autodesk Research. I've had the opportunity to jump into a few projects that are really interesting. One involves the use of generative design tools to perform a number of different analyses on design alternatives for an architectural project, assessing criteria such as maximum team co-location and improving the circulation of people through corridors. One the tools being used for the analysis is Dynamo: something I've been meaning to spend some time with for ages, but finally have good reason to. (Some of you may remember my involvement/interest in the DesignScript project… DesignScript is…
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The last couple of weeks have been very interesting: partly for reasons that I'll go into in my next post, but also because I've had (or am having) the opportunity to visit three universities in Switzerland. My first visit, on Thursday of last week, was back to ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts – to have lunch with Max Rheiner (who you may remember from my post about Birdly, some months ago) and discuss the possibility of collaborating on some research into the use of VR for CAD. It was a great discussion, and I'm very much hoping it…
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One of the coolest news items to break during AU 2015 was the collaboration between Autodesk and Airbus to design and 3D print a groundbreaking new partition for the A320. Partitions are certainly not the sexiest part of a plane (not that I have a particular opinion on what that might be… the undercarriage, perhaps? 🙂 but even they can have a significant impact on its performance and therefore the environment. Each A320 currently sports a 65kg partition at the back – separating the passenger compartment from the galley – that supports two crew seats and can be opened in…