Human-centric building design
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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…
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At the beginning of this week I recorded my class for Autodesk University 2025. It's largely a repeat from my session at DevCon 2025 in Amsterdam, so if you attended that class then this one won't be especially exciting (unless you're like me and a second watch of something is actually really helpful, these days!). Do you know my favourite thing so far about this year's conference? My "class ID" is 1980. For some reason this fills me with a great deal of satisfaction. Go figure. The in-person class will be held during the last session of Day 1 of…
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A few weeks ago - while I was on holiday, in fact - we posted a job description that I mentioned on LinkedIn: Interested in developing and applying novel AI-based human simulation to improve the built environment? Come and work in my research team at Autodesk! Candidates open to working in London or Toronto are preferred, but the role will be largely hybrid. We've already had several really interesting candidates apply for the job, but I did want to talk a bit more about this position and encourage more folks to apply. Here's the job description itself: Autodesk Research is…
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On Monday I hopped on an early train to Geneva to meet with Eve Edelstein. Eve is an Adjunct Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a board member of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). Eve and I had met in San Francisco at our Encoding Experience event there, and she had kindly reached out to let me know she'd be passing by my general vicinity on her trip to Europe. We met at the Cottage Café and over a couple of cappuccinos (cappuccini?) we had a really interesting discussion about the human experience of architecture,…
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Now that I'm back from Toronto I have the time to share some news that came our way last week. The production team at Frontiers in Sustainable Cities informed us that a paper we've been working on - Experiential space analysis: scoring tranquil, social, and explorative places in habitable buildings - has been published in their research topic on Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Building: Balancing IEQ with Energy Efficiency. The paper is the culmination of significant effort from the various authors - Rhys, Nastaran, Jeremy, Seba, Dianne, Frederik, Mike, Liviu, Tomas, Dagmara and myself - over a couple of years.…
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The recording from our panel discussion at the "100 Minds in Motion" event - held a few weeks ago at UCL PEARL - is now live on the Bartlett School of Architecture faculty webpag for the project. The least interesting piece of this recording is when I'm speaking, so really do please feel free to stop watching beforehand. It's quite near the end, so you have plenty to enjoy until then. Image courtesy of Hugo Spiers, UCL. We're very excited about the future of this collaboration with UCL: we have co-funded a PhD project for someone to work on analyzing…