Through the Interface

Venice Biennale 2025 - Giardini

I was up earlier than I needed to be on Saturday - even after the MIT party of the night before - so headed across to the Giardini della Biennale in very good time for the 11am opening. It was a very nice walk along the main waterfront. I decided to stop nearby for breakfast. If I'd known at the time that this would be the last thing that passed my lips until getting to the airport, I'd definitely have eaten more. I walked through a very nice park with an arts & craft market just being set up.... Read more →

Venice

This mini-series of posts relates to my trip over the weekend to Venice for the opening of the 2025 Biennale. I took so many photos that I’ve decided to split it into three parts. The first being about my trip across to Venice with the second two focusing on the Biennale itself. My main purpose for visiting Venice was to attend the last in-person session of the Neuroscience and Design class I've been attending. On Thursday afternoon of last week I took the train to Zurich, while doing my best to participate in the course’s last virtual session. I... Read more →

Encoding Experience in Boston and San Francisco

After posting several times about our recent trip to the US - with stops in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco - it’s time to talk about the broader purpose of the tour. My team has been organizing a series of evening events called “Encoding Experience”, with the primary goal of bringing together a community of interest around capturing the human experience of the built environment. We invited interesting people from academia and industry to come together and have a discussion about how we might start to quantify and simulate human experience. Our first event was in Boston on... Read more →

San Francisco

After posting about our time in Boston and Los Angeles, it’s now time to talk about San Francisco. Before finally (in the next post) getting around to the whole point of the trip. Let’s hope it’s not too much of an anti-climax. On Monday of last week, Dagmara and I arrived in San Francisco after a short hop from LA. Seeing the Marin Airporter brought back lots of memories from when I lived in San Rafael from 2000 to 2003, back before Uber and Lyft made airport drop-offs a breeze. I can’t count the number of times I took... Read more →

Los Angeles

In the last post I talked about arriving in Boston. I’ve deliberately skipped the reason we were in Boston - and in San Francisco afterwards, too - as I’ll cover those in an upcoming post. I do want to spend some time talking about what we did between Boston and SF, though. When I originally looked at the options for this trip, I first thought about spending the weekend in Baltimore with my son: it turns out he’s in full-on exam period, though, so it wouldn’t have been the best time to visit, to say the least. Besides that... Read more →

Boston

After a relaxing long Easter weekend, on Wednesday I was back on the train to Zurich airport. This trip is primarily for events we’re holding in Boston and San Francisco, but we decided to insert a stop in Los Angeles between the two, to catch up with a number of people there and and to visit venues for the LA28 Olympic Games. But first, I had to get to the E gates at Zurich airport. Not that this was particularly arduous, I just happened to snap a photo on the train that goes there. I’ve recently been granted frequent... Read more →

AU 2025 proposals, DevCon recording, Dynamo and Workshop XR updates

In Europe we’re about to celebrate the long Easter weekend, so things have been a little busy finishing up work in a number of areas, especially as soon after I’ll be heading across to the US for the rest of the month. I managed to submit two Autodesk University 2025 proposals - let’s hope that at least one of them gets accepted. I was also (apparently) the first DevCon presenter to record their session ahead of next month’s event. I’m very happy to have gotten that one out of the way before my travels. I haven’t had time to... Read more →

Neuroscience, getting roads from Forma and following them with VASA

After a relatively quiet winter season - I’ve had a few trips to the UK and Italy, but nothing too hectic - things are about to get much more busy. Looking at my calendar I see trips to Italy and the UK again, but also trips to Boston, L.A. and SF (thankfully all in one trip) and others to Amsterdam and Toronto. And it’s only going to get busier. I’m actually really lucky to have been able to attend the Neuroscience and Design class during this period: only one of the 12 sessions looks like it’s going to be... Read more →

Understanding how cognitive sciences can influence architectural design

I'm roughly halfway through a class on Neuroscience and Design, which has introduced me to many interesting new concepts and many interesting new people, too. It's through this class that I've connected with the Future Cities Lab - which has staff both at ETH Zurich and its satellite location in Singapore - who are performing some really valuable research. They’re currently running a survey to understand how cognitive sciences impact architectural design. Here’s a description of what they’re looking for in their own words: This research aims to explore how well knowledge from cognitive sciences is being integrated into... Read more →

Autodesk Research brings the vibe to coding

People are talking a lot about vibe coding, these days. What will this mean for people working as software engineers? My own personal sense is that productivity will be greatly improved with LLM tools - something we’re starting to see happen - but it’s premature to say large numbers of jobs will disappear. We'll see how things play out. An important factor around this trend is “getting the right vibe”. How can we be expected to vibe code when the vibe is off? We’ve been thinking about this a lot at Autodesk Research, where we’re looking at developing tools... Read more →

The Call for Proposals is open for Autodesk University 2025

The countdown is officially on for AU 2025, which is being held in Nashville, Tennessee, from September 16-18. Things kicked off properly on Thursday with the CFP opening. It’ll be possible to submit your class proposal from now until April 17. The big news for this year’s event is that there will be a new class length available to folks: in addition to a 50+10 (talk+Q&A, in minutes) session there will be the option of 20+10, also. It will also only be possible to submit a maximum of 3 proposals per person. This might not sound like a big... Read more →

Still here

It’s been a sobering few weeks at the ‘desk, as it seems everyone on the planet now knows. Seeing close friends being laid off - some of whom I’ve known for more than 20 years - is painful. I’ve so far avoided posting anything publicly - beyond the odd comment on others’ posts - because I’m one of the lucky ones to have kept my job and even posting messages of support has a LinkedIn-esque performative feel to it. That doesn’t mean I’m not here for anyone who needs help, of course, I just feel that posting about it... Read more →

Managing meshes with the Forma API

Last week I spent quite a bit of time on the slopes snowboarding, but mostly in the mornings: I was back working at my computer in the afternoons. And while the mornings weren’t meant to be spent working, I actually found that some of my best ideas came to me while sitting on a chair-lift. One such idea was around efficient mesh management inside Forma. We’ve been working on a prototype web-based multi-agent simulation system where the results are displayed in either Forma or Tandem. This will form much of what I'll talk about in my session at the... Read more →

A day in Milan for the Neuroscience and Design course kick-off

On Friday morning I was up before dawn to head across to Italy for the first of 12 lectures for a course I'm taking on Neuroscience and Design. The first of my trains arrived out of the fog to take me to the nearby town of Ins. The fast train from Neuchatel stops in Ins but not my local station, so from here you can get to Bern in about 20 minutes. I wasn’t thrilled about waiting in Ins for 15 minutes at this time of day, but honestly it was quite magical. Dawn was breaking by the time... Read more →

Learn about combining APS and WebAssembly at Autodesk DevCon Europe

While at the time of writing I’m not yet on the official speaker list, I’m happy to say that I will be presenting a session at the Autodesk DevCon that’s being held in Amsterdam from May 20th-21st, 2025. I’ll also be attending the Dynamo Hackathon on May 19th as a warm-up. My session is entitled “Supercharge your browser-based APS applications with WebAssembly” and will explore how you can take C++ libraries and build them into WebAssembly modules to bring impressive capabilities to your browser-based Autodesk Platform Services applications. Over the last few years I’ve spent quite a bit of... Read more →

Hackathons in Zurich and (soon) Amsterdam

On Friday I did my annual (well, it’s actually only the second time, but I get the feeling it’s becoming annual) trip to Winterthur for the Friday-night kick-off of this year’s AEC Hackathon Zürich. The focus of the first set of Friday afternoon talks was on the wood industry and its challenges - a fascinating topic to hear about first-hand. I was actually more interested by the second set of talks, which were focused on digitalization challenges, including a really nice session by Michael Drobnik from Herzog & de Meuron. As last year there were lots of hackers present,... Read more →

A course on Neuroscience and Design at POLI.design

I’m really excited to be starting a class later this month on Neuroscience and Design from POLI.design - the post-graduate school of design at the Politecnico di Milano. Most of the class is virtual - and in English, thankfully - but it’s book-ended by in-person seminars, first in Milan and then in Venice for the opening of this year’s biennale. I’ve never been to the biennale, so this is exciting in itself! Here’s a description from the website: Nowadays, the design of artificial spaces and industrial artifacts requires the integration of technical expertise with knowledge from social sciences, physiology,... Read more →

ResearchX in the UK (and beyond!)

Since missing out on all the great snow over Christmas and New Year, I’ve been doing my best to catch up. This weekend left me feeling quite a bit better. The skies were clear, and while it hadn’t snowed much before the weekend... ... it did snow overnight on Saturday. I was on the first lift up on Sunday and so got to make the most of the fresh snow accumulated on the pistes. Sheer joy. My flight on Sunday evening was at 6pm from Zurich, so I had to leave the slopes around noon to leave me enough... Read more →

Register today for the Autodesk DevCon 2025 in Amsterdam!

Well this is exciting: it’s now possible to register for this year’s Autodesk DevCon. It’s being held in Amsterdam from May 20th-21st and is the only Autodesk DevCon event being organized in 2025. (There will be APS-related content at Autodesk University 2025 in Nashville, of course.) I mentioned the DevCon - and the personal significance of it being held in Amsterdam - back during the CFP process. The venue is the historic Beurs van Berlage which dates from the end of the 19th century. Amsterdam is actually the cradle of modern securities trading, with the Dutch East India Company... Read more →

Work on a PhD project with Autodesk Research and The Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL

Autodesk Research is delighted to be sponsoring a PhD studentship at The Bartlett School of Architecture - part of University College London (UCL) - to research better, more equitable ways of modelling human navigation. Image courtesy of Hugo Spiers / UCL. The application deadline is short - it closes in just 2 weeks, on January 28th 2025 - so please do share this post with interested parties (or send them this LinkedIn posting). Information on applying can be found here. Here’s a summary of the project from the main UELA (which stands for UCL EPSRC Landscape Award, recently renamed... Read more →