Human-centric building design
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My last bit of travel for the year was to the UK, ostensibly to have internal discussions and a holiday meal, but it turned out to be a really good opportunity to build on our strong relationship with UCL. The weekend before - still in November! - I was able to kick off the snowboarding season with a sneaky trip up to the Alps. The slopes were really decent for this early in the season. I did get caught out at one point by the slopes having a different topology than usual: it's somewhere I go so regularly that I…
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Back in April we started a series of events called "Encoding Experience", to which we invited thought leaders across academia and industry to discuss issues relating to capturing the human experience of the built environment. We started in Boston on April 25th, then went to San Francisco on April 29th - here's a post talking about the two events - and finished the 2025 series with one in London on September 2nd. Here are the Encoding Experience invitees/attendees for this year's event series (we've skipped the Autodesk Research staff so it fills a grid nicely ;-). We've also been publishing…
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At the beginning of the week I highlighted an interesting internship position inside Autodesk Research and promised to follow-up once our team's internships were all posted. Well, here we are. If you're interested in the human experience of design, you might well find one of the internship opportunities in our team to be worth applying for. PhD Intern, Research - Embodied AI Agents (Toronto, Canada) Intern, Research Working Student - Environmental Psychology Datasets (Bonn, Germany) PhD Intern, HCI & Visualization Research (Toronto, Canada) This last one is a catch-all for a number of our Research organization's HCI-related intern positions, but…
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Last week I headed across to Barcelona for the annual offsite of our research team. As the dates of the meeting fell during my daughter's school holidays - a rare occurrence! - we were able to fly out together to Spain. Barcelona isn't Benidorm, but you do get the occasional hint of that very strange relationship that Spain has with the UK. We'd originally planned to fly to Barcelona on the Tuesday evening, but as Vueling decided to consolidate flights (at least I assume that's what happened - we were just notified that our flight time had changed to the…
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I mentioned some time ago that this announcement was coming: Autodesk Research has just posted our first two Visiting Scholar positions. People who have been around Autodesk Research for some time will remember us having had Visiting Fellows, in the past: the focus of that program was slightly different; tending towards industry rather than academia, even if at least one Fellow did join us from a university. So the fact this is a "new" program might feel like a nuance to some. Here's some context for the role: Visiting Scholar positions invite brilliant minds to work with us to collectively…
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On Friday I headed across to the Swiss Center for Design and Health in nearby Nidau (it's just a 30-minute drive from my home). I'd been invited by Michal Gath-Morad and Christoph Hölscher, who very kindly suggested I might find it interesting to join a meeting at the centre and tag along for a subsequent tour. I've been interested in visiting the SCDH for some time: in many ways it's similar to the UCL PEARL space, but it also has a very different focus and has made some really interesting choices because of it. A lot of things at the…
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I'm on the train back from Zurich airport after my whirlwind trip to Nashville and San Diego, so it's time for a wrap up post covering the rest of my time in the US. After a very interesting first day at ANFA 2025 in San Diego, we went back for more on the Friday and Saturday. During the opening it was great to see Autodesk Research being called out prominently as a sponsor. We're very happy to support a conference that's so well aligned with our research interests! The theme of Day 2 was "Designing for Human Flourishing" - with…
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In my last post I was heading from Nashville to San Diego for a conference organized by the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture - ANFA 2025. As mentioned at the end of the post, there was some uncertainty about whether I would be able to get to San Diego, given an incident at the airport that led to the main runway being shut, and lots of inbound flights being either diverted or cancelled. Mine ended up in the latter bucket, but only after I'd ordered my "dinner". I was told Delta would automatically rebook my flight for the following day…
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On Sunday I'll be heading to the US for a pretty full-on week, split between Autodesk University 2025 in Nashville, from Monday to Wednesday, and the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) 2025 conference in San Diego, from Thursday to Saturday. I asked AI to create an image morphing Nashville with San Diego and it came up with this. I know neither city well enough to recognize whether it succeeded, to be honest. There weren't any direct flights available between the various legs, so this is what I ended up with. It could always be worse, I suppose. On Monday…
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After holding a couple of fantastic Encoding Experience events in Boston and San Francisco, last week was our chance to see how well the format would work in the UK. On Monday I was back in Zurich airport to fly across to Heathrow. It was one of those rare flights where I opted for a window seat, so I made the most of it. Here's the view as we crossed the channel, the coastline being the south coast of England.As we approached London the weather was still lovely.And then we landed.Rather than inflicting the ever-increasing Heathrow pick-up fee on my…