Human-centric building design
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I posted this today on LinkedIn. I'm having to rethink my approach to using this platform. Next week marks 20 years of my "Through the Interface" blog, but lately my standard approach of posting links to my content - with a few images - is leading to fewer and fewer people seeing my posts, at least those coming in from platforms such as this one. Part of me doesn't care all that much: I feel like I've grown out of my dopamine-hungry, engagement-measuring phase and I certainly find it a shame that I have to create "native" content to be…
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This is really exciting: for the first time, Autodesk Research - and specifically the Enlivened Design team - will be participating in the London Festival of Architecture, hosting a workshop at our office in Covent Garden on Friday June 26th, 2026. The LFA kicked off this week and runs through the month of June. This year's event has the theme of #Belonging, which is perfectly aligned with our research interests. Be sure to check out the programme! Here are some details about our workshop from the LFA website and the Autodesk Research LinkedIn post: Encoding Experience: Rethinking how software shapes…
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In a few weeks I'll be heading back across to Canada for several meetings. During the week of June 15th I'll be in Toronto for internal meetings, then I'll fly across to Calgary (somewhere I haven't been since the early 2000s) on my way to Banff to participate in the SocialSys'26 workshop ahead of the ACM BuildSys conference in Banff. For many old-time Autodeskers, the name Banff immediately brings back memories of AutoCAD, specifically the 2000i release, which had Banff as a codename. This will be my first time visiting Banff - and speaking at BuildSys - so I'm very…
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On Saturday I once again headed to my local railway station to start my journey to this year's annual technical conference for Autodesk employees, TechX 2026. It was, as ever a lovely train journey to Zurich. There were some engineering works, so I had to change trains in Zurich's main station. Not uncommon for a weekend. This year's event was in Seattle. There isn't a direct flight from Zurich, so my first flight was to San Francisco. The flight was uneventful. I had a middle seat but at a bulkhead, so I was actually really comfortable. I'd been warned by…
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Today marks the beginning of this year's Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK. We're collaborating with University College London in a number of areas - not least through our Visiting Scholar, Fiona Zisch - and one important project is being highlighted alongside other projects that have been funded via UCL's Grand Challenge relating to Mental Health & Wellbeing. The MINDS Living Lab - which stands for Mental Health, Interiors, Design & Sustainability - has been highlighted in this video, and I'm happy that my friend and close Autodesk Research collaborator Dagmara Szkurlat was featured alongside Fiona and another close partner…
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I haven't posted since DevCon - other than the excellent guest posts being contributed by Patrick Nadeau - as we've entered quite a busy time of year. My team has now delivered a couple of shareouts for our company's senior leadership, and we'll shortly be going into the Research organisation's mid-year review cycle for our various projects. Anyway, this week has given me a bit of a breather: while Friday was a holiday in Switzerland, today is a holiday in the UK and Canada, presumably for Star Wars Day. May The Fourth Be With You Always! At the weekend I'll…
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Wednesday marked the start of this year's DevCon, after the warm-up day on Tuesday. Things started with a breakfast in the Expo Hall. (These pictures are actually from later in the day, when I happened to be upstairs by the balcony.) Autodeskers were asked to attend the keynotes in the overflow room. The main takeaways for me from the Day 1 keynote were around the imminent public availability of official MCP servers for some of our products, as well as the fact that Autodesk Assistant will be able to call MCP servers that partners have certified in our Design &…
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My team's research focus is on "simulating the human experience of design" (with respect to the designed space or object, rather than the process of designing). We call this "Enlivened Design", which is intended to indicate our interest in simulating and predicting how design can support human flourishing and well-being. The Enlivened Design team is delighted to welcome our first Visiting Scholar to Autodesk Research. Dr Fiona Zisch, with whom we've been collaborating for quite some time, between the 100 Minds in Motion project and our Encoding Experience events, has joined the Enlivened Design team for a period of several…
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Registration for DevCon 2026 is now officially open. The event will be held from April 15th-16th 2026 in the historic Beurs van Berlage conference centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. There's an additional pre-conference day on the 14th, so make sure to plan on attending that, too. Register today to save your spot and take advantage of early-bird pricing until February 20th! I said some time ago that I wasn't planning on presenting at this year's DevCon, but, well, I changed my mind and submitted a talk just before the deadline. I'm happy to say it was accepted. I'll be presenting…
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Last week I was back in the UK this week to visit friends and family but also for a networking event hosted by UCL's International Centre for NeuroArchitecture and NeuroDesign. I landed on Tuesday evening and went straight to Cookham to catch up with my brother and and old friend. It was a nice evening - and meal - but on the way home - quite early, at around 9:30pm - we came around a bend in the road (one with a 30mph speed limit) to find a car speeding towards us, trying to overtake another car. The car hit…