Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #1

As promised at the beginning of the week, I’ve managed to record the first episode of Floppy Friday, where we sit down with my new old Commodore 64 and try to load whatever’s on a random floppy or two. This “show” is going to be very bare-bones in terms of editing and effects (I don’t expect it to go viral and so need to limit my time investment) and is very likely to be hit or miss: in this episode we managed to see a loading screen for Hollywood or Bust, a cracked preview of Trailblazer, and completely fail... Read more →

Getting started with Forge

For this week’s talk for 10,000 codeurs, my friend Jaime Rosales kindly put together some great slides that give a really succinct introduction to the Forge platform, including a number of helpful links to various online resources. I made a few edits to make sure people could use the links in the exported PDF along with a few cosmetic tweaks, but otherwise the content is all Jaime’s. At some point I may take the time to convert the content into native web elements (there are some cool animated GIFs for the various demos, for instance), but in the meantime... Read more →

Announcing Floppy Fridays!

The situation in Switzerland regarding the pandemic is looking bleak, at the moment (and no, yodelling isn’t helping). The number of cases per-capita is currently ahead of the US, and the critical infrastructure in my home canton is starting to get overwhelmed, hence us being put on “red alert”. I’m expecting our kids to be sent home any day now, but we’ll see what the authorities decide. Anyway, this has definitely been at the forefront of my thinking, of late, when it comes to what we’ll end up doing to keep busy during the upcoming confinement. People who follow... Read more →

My new AI chairs

After having talked about Autodesk Research’s collaboration with Philippe Starck and Kartell to create the world’s first mass-produced, generatively-designed (and made from 100% recycled material!) chair, I decided to buy one. Well, two. As I mentioned in the talk I gave at the SDSC-Connect event, I didn’t find a way to get an employee discount, but I’m proud enough of the work done by my colleagues in Research to put more money than I would normally into a couple of plastic chairs. This almost certainly makes my presentation for the SDSC-Connect event the most expensive I’ve ever given, at... Read more →

AU 2020 material is in the bag, a few upcoming talks

This year has been strange at so many levels that it seems a bit petty to highlight one particular area. But preparing material for Autodesk University 2020 has certainly been one such area, and it’s very fresh in the mind of AU speakers around the world. With this year’s event being all digital, it’s clear that the AU team had to find a way to get classes delivered remotely: one option would have been to live-stream them all, but at some point the decision was made to get everything pre-recorded for on-demand delivery. (On-demand classes are not the only... Read more →

Steep roads, waterfalls and outsider art

Our children have been off school for the last two weeks, so I’ve been alternating between preparing my Autodesk University 2020 material and going on excursions with the family. We had planned to visit Kosovo during this break, but as it was on Switzerland’s quarantine list we chose to cancel our flights. Somewhat frustratingly – just the week after – the Swiss Confederation added 15 new countries to the quarantine list and removed only one: Kosovo. So we could have gone, after all. Argh. That said, when we’d planned the trip back in July, I hadn’t realised the timeframe... Read more →

AEC and Forge Hackathons

If you enjoy hackathons – and have the time to spare – then you could spend the next month hacking, should you so desire! Last Friday the 2nd online AEC Hackathon kicked off with its lightning round. The event is about now a week in: it started officially on October 5th, but it really only started in earnest with Friday’s kick-off and lightning round. The event will run until October 25th, so you still have time to find or build a team and participate. It was fun listening to the recording of the lightning round – which was short... Read more →

The new Types By Level panel in Project Dasher

Over the last month or so we’ve been focused on the benefits brought to Project Dasher by combining 2D heatmaps with our traditionally 3D view of the world. We started by creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level, before introducing the idea of overlaying building systems information, too. Most recently we took a sneak peek at the topic of today’s post, a new UI that simplifies access to these 2D (and 3D) heatmaps. The idea came up during a team meeting: as we realised we had this combinatorial... Read more →

My generative design presentation from SDSC-Connect 2020 and a teaser for AU 2020

From one online conference to another. Here’s the recording published by the Swiss Data Science Center for last week’s SDSC-Connect event. I’ve set it to start at the beginning of my session – which in 30 minutes takes a whirlwind look at four generative design projects run by Autodesk Research – but the other sessions are also likely to be of interest to people, so feel free to scrub backwards! Next week I’ll be busy recording my AU 2020 session and finishing up the handout. Here’s a teaser for this year’s all-digital event: I’m supposed to be on holiday,... Read more →

A sneak peek at Dasher’s new Types By Level UI

This week has been a little crazy in terms of presentations. On Monday it kicked off with an internal project review followed by a presentation to a class of Masters students from the University of Southern California (it was a lunchtime session for them, so it was a late evening one for me). It wrapped up yesterday with the generative design session for the Swiss Data Science Center, which despite a few technical hitches (not on my side, thankfully) seemed to go pretty well. I was told there were upwards of 400 attendees registered for the event, but I... Read more →