Through the Interface

Submit your Autodesk DevCon Europe 2025 class proposals

As I mentioned after the announcement at AU 2024, I was thrilled to see an Autodesk DevCon happening back in the fine city of Amsterdam. It’ll be held from May 20-21, 2025. The last one I attended was the week (maybe a few days more) after I joined Autodesk, back in August of 1995. I wasn’t actually presenting at that first one, if memory serves me right, I was assisting my colleague Jim Tinney with his presentation about the Autodesk WorkCenter API. The event was held in a super-fancy Japanese hotel in Amsterdam - at least it certainly seemed... Read more →

AU 2024 Days 2 and 3

After a great first day of Autodesk University - and it's preceding Dynamo Day - it was time for Days 2 and 3. After breakfast and an internal meeting, I headed to the Expo to watch the Day 2 General Session. It wasn’t quite as impressive as seeing it in the mainstage venue itself, but it was convenient being able to sit at a table and write up the last blog post. There’s something about the view from the escalators that made me want to continually snap this photo! I headed up the escalators to attend Ray Wang's Theater... Read more →

AU 2024 Days 0 and 1

On Sunday morning I headed across to Geneva Airport for my trip to Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego.The trip itself didn’t start very smoothly: I couldn't check in online - I suspect having two passports, only one of which has a valid US ESTA - meant that the airline flagged me for manual review. I really need to be more careful with my API (not the one I work with usually ;-) in future. Anyway, this check-in fail led to a cascade of irritations, from having to pay for a seat (to avoid being assigned a middle seat... Read more →

Gearing up for AU 2024

We’re once again in the craziness before the storm (hmm - wasn’t there meant to be some calm?!?) that is Autodesk University. Requests for meetings are gradually filling up calendars… from my side it’s looking like another busy (but very fun) event. As a reminder, here are the classes that I’ll be part of, in some capacity this year. The class on extending Forma - where I’m co-speaking - has the slides and handout posted, in case you want to check it out ahead of time. In anticipation of this year's event (and the chance to connect with academic... Read more →

Back in Baltimore

I mentioned last time that I was going to be busy preparing and delivering a number of presentations. I’m happy to say that crazy period has mostly come to a close. It was marked on Friday with the recording of the Autodesk University 2024 class that Håvard Høiby and I will be delivering again soon in San Diego. It was a lot of fun preparing and delivering this class with Håvard, I must say. And I think people are going to really engage with the content (especially the information about Forma’s extension framework and SDK). Be sure to check... Read more →

Transitioning from summer mode

Life seems to have shifted quite radically this week, as the summer here in Switzerland starts drawing to a close. A Sunday morning storm reset the temperature to something more autumnal (although these are looking to climb again gradually - we’re not completely done with warm days here, thankfully) and all of my three children started their respective schools again on Monday. The two youngest are once again in the same institution - they’re in the first and last years of our local “lycée” (the Denis-de-Rougement in Neuchâtel), which is the three years of post-mandatory schooling that often precedes... Read more →

5 awesome VASA project ideas for the AU2024 Dynamo Hackathon

[My apologies for the click-baity title. I do actually have a list of 5 cool project ideas, if you scroll down the post. So it’s not completely dishonest, at least.] In the last post I mentioned a few classes you can sign up for (and that I’m directly or indirectly involved in) from the Tuesday to Thursday of the AU2024 week (October 15th-17th) in San Diego. I now have something to recommend for the Monday of that week, too! In the past we’ve often had pre-events at AU2024: I wasn’t sure whether there would be one this year or... Read more →

Sign up for AU2024 classes today! Here are some suggestions.

The class catalog for Autodesk University 2024 has been live for a week or two already, with attendees being able to bookmark sessions ahead of the ability to enroll fully. Well, today’s the day that enrollment opens properly, so have at it! Classes often fill up quickly, so doing it sooner can certainly be better than waiting. I also have a few suggestions if you’re at a loss for what to choose. These are all classes that I or my research team are involved in, of course. That’s just how things work around here. :-) It turns out there’s... Read more →

Using web workers to run intensive browser-side analyses in Autodesk Forma

The topic for this post relates to a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks, now. We’ve taken a complex set of spatial analyses - that use our favourite voxel-based architectural space analysis Dynamo package, VASA - and have translated them to work directly in the browser. (This translation process isn’t really the subject of this series, but it’s pretty interesting, nonetheless, and it’s mostly what I was working on during the recent trip to Munich for the DevCon. Most of the Dynamo code was fairly easy to translate, although things like the automatic lacing of nodes... Read more →

Why I love my job

A quick post today to shamelessly plug the company I've spent so much of my life working for, and more specifically for the organization where I’ve worked most recently, Autodesk Research. This video was compiled from - among other footage - interviews done at Autodesk University 2023. It also happens to include quite a bit of footage for the From Steps to Stories exhibit we created in partnership with The Bentway. If you're interested in coming to work at Autodesk, you can search through the currently open job postings via our careers site. Thanks for watching. :-) Read more →

Last chance to submit your class proposal for AU 2024!

Tomorrow is April 30th, which brings to a close the Call for Proposals for Autodesk University 2024, which is being held in San Diego from October 15-17. To get you excited, here are a few images taken by one of the official AU photographers. And yes, it’s at least as cool as it looks in the photos, so do make sure you submit your proposal before tomorrow’s deadline. I’ve kindly been included as a co-speaker on one proposal, this year, which - if accepted - will talk about the Extension API to Autodesk Forma. Let’s see if it makes... Read more →

The AU 2024 Call for Proposals is open

It’s that time of year again: the Call for Proposals (CFP) for Autodesk University 2024 opened on April 2nd and will stay open until the end of the month (April 30th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time, to be precise). I’ll be proposing at least one class, all being well, with the hope of getting to travel to San Diego from October 15th-17th for this year’s event. It’d be interesting to see AU in a new city. Fingers crossed! If you’re a software developer who is thinking about submitting a proposal, then I recommend checking out this post on the Autodesk... Read more →

A tale of unconscious bias

This post is a bit different from my usual fare. Susanna Holt, a colleague I’ve known for more than two decades - and have a huge amount of respect for - recently posted on LinkedIn about an encounter we had soon after we first met. She was amazing throughout the process of sharing the information: she made it anonymous, was unnecessarily complimentary and even made sure I was fine with it being posted. So I have no idea why I feel the need to post something here. It’s just a bit of an itch I feel like scratching, I... Read more →

AU 2023 class materials: Monitoring and Visualizing Data from the MX3D and Dar Smart Bridges

After yesterday’s post pointing folks to the material for my first class at AU 2023, here’s the material for the second one, which I co-presented with Pete Storey. I only have this photo from outside the classroom for this session: But I did get to hang out with Pete before we flew back to our respective European ports on the Thursday after AU was over. Here's the summary without audio: Here’s the material posted for the class on the AU website: Class recording Presentation slides Handout Read more →

AU 2023 class materials: Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo

The recordings and other materials prepared for the two classes I helped present at AU 2023 are now available online. In today’s post I’ll point you to the first class, entitled "Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo". This one was one of the first sessions of AU 2023, and had a very good crowd in attendance. Here are a few photos from the live session. Thanks again to Fernando Malard for snapping them. I already posted a quick summary of the content (without audio) - here that is again. Here is the material posted for... Read more →

Capturing the human experience of the built environment

Now that the dust has settled on another Autodesk University (the best one ever?) it’s a good time to revisit what brought our team to AU, this year. I realize that I've posted a lot of pictures of people wearing helmets and high visibility vests without really explaining what it was all about. Our team at Autodesk Research has been very focused on understanding the human experience of the built environment, with the ultimate goal of making our software tools better at helping our customers design human-centric spaces. Spaces that emphasize occupant well-being in its various forms. Humans are... Read more →

AU 2023 Day 3

The last day of AU started, once again with me checking out the Sphere. I have to say that since the Las Vegas Grand Prix has been getting really close the quality of the content has become a bit meh, at least from my perspective. (I think I really like the AI-based art rather than endless commercials for brands I don't care about.) The expo opened earlier on Day 3 - at 10am - and with no general sessions to compete with the flow of people to the stand - and the participation in the study - was very... Read more →

AU 2023 Day 2

My second day at this year's Autodesk University started with another lovely sunrise. After breakfast I spent an hour or so writing my Day 1 blog post in the Community Zone before I realised a queue was forming to enter the general session. I wandered over and joined it - quite near the front - and chatted with a number of people who were clearly very excited about listening to the day's guest speaker. Here are the people waiting in the Community Zone for the general session to open its doors. I found a single seat free in the... Read more →

AU 2023 Day 1

After a great trip to Stanford on Friday, we had some last-minute preparation to do for our AU exhibit at Pier 9 on Saturday morning. We headed into the office - after having to explain our way through a security cordon along the waterfront due to APEC 2023 - and printed out a bunch of legal waivers for study participants to sign. It seems APEC will be impacting our SF employees, with the offices being closed during the AU week. Enough people had warned me about craziness at SFO that I ended up at the airport well ahead of... Read more →

In SF ahead of AU 2023

On Wednesday I headed back across to Zurich airport to fly to San Francisco for a few days ahead of Autodesk University 2023 in Las Vegas. The flight was direct and largely uneventful: I didn't sleep but did feel moderately sane when I arrived in SF. I hopped on BART from the airport to Embarcadero - it's really the best mode of transport if you arrive around 5pm. My room in the Hyatt has a view across SF’s financial district. Here’s a picture I snapped before sleeping... … and one on waking. I always like seeing the view towards... Read more →