It’s been a relatively busy week, and yet very much “the calm before the storm” of AU London. I’ve been receiving lots of meeting requests over the last few days, filling up my AU London schedule nicely, as well as a request to be part of a “technology trends” panel session on the second day, just after the class Lorenzo and I will be giving. That should be interesting… despite my role, I definitely don’t consider myself a futurist or visionary. But anyway – perhaps that will make for a more interesting discussion… we’ll see!
I’ve also iterated a few times on the Capturefinery tool, this week, although I only realised last night that most of my iterations weren’t being published: you need to use Dynamo for Revit to publish to the package manager – logically enough, as you need to be logged in via your Autodesk credentials for the package to have an author – but my DLL was being updated under “Dynamo Core” rather than “Dynamo Revit”. A complete newbie mistake, but anyway: if you’ve downloaded a version prior to 0.9.5 then you’re probably using the same broken version. Sorry for any frustration caused!
Something that’s worth noting – and this may already be obvious to some or all of you – is that most of the packages that Autodesk Research has posted in recent months – and I’m mainly thinking of Warnamo and Capturefinery, and to a lesser extent of Space Analysis – should be considered as near-term explorations of how generative design workflows may be implemented and streamlined. I fully expect something like Warnamo to be built into Dynamo, at some point, and Capturefinery is a Dynamo package that relies on behaviour of a tool that’s still in Beta (i.e. Refinery), so there’s a lot that might change there, too. The main purpose of these tools is to provide some relief for people desperate to solve particular near-term problems, as well as to get feedback on the kind of capabilities Dynamo and Refinery should have in the medium- to long-term.
Space Analysis is a little different, but also could end up being merged with or replaced by capabilities currently being developed. It’s still too early to say whether it’s something that will have merit and continue to be developed – we like to think so, of course, and I don’t see it “going away” anytime soon – but the purpose of the project was very much to enable us to complete workflows such as the one for Project Rediscover, which I’ll be publishing on Monday. (Drum roll…)
Between now and next week we have Autodesk’s annual football (yes, soccer) tournament in the fair city of Dublin. After last year’s Neuchatel office closure, I wasn’t sure I’d play this year, but my old friend and colleague Reginald De Visscher offered a spot in his team, the “CSO Chameleons”. A member of Regi’s team, Katerina Papadimitriou, created a fantastic logo for the team:
It’s a chameleon made out of the letters CSO (for Customer Success Organization) as well as having ADSK for the legs. Really creative work.
Anyway – having a great logo is of course at least half the battle (I’m kidding). Like many of the teams, this year, there have been a few people dropping out prior to the event… this has always happened, but with a new rule that has capped the squads at 12 members (the games are 7-a-side), the impact is more signficant.
A few additions from outside the Customer Success team have therefore been made: we have Lorenzo Villaggi from The Living and Jaime Rosales from the Forge team flying in from New York (also on their way to AU London, of course) as well as Nono Martinez from the Refinery engineering team coming in from Malaga. Oh, and our captain, Fabien Junod from Finance, and myself flying in from Switzerland. That’s in addition to Darryl Store, Elizabeth Grant, Roger Miquel, Tobias Orlow, Jacob Westergaard and Katerina: all members of the Customer Success team who are flying in from either Barcelona or the UK. Win or lose, this is going to be a lot of fun… I’m all for using the tournament as a way to meet more of my colleagues from around the world.
The New Yorkers have already arrived in Dublin and are nursing jetlag: I’ll be heading across with Fabien this afternoon to join them and the others. I’m really looking forward to it!
