Through the Interface

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 →