Through the Interface

Geneva

On Monday I hopped on an early train to Geneva to meet with Eve Edelstein. Eve is an Adjunct Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a board member of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). Eve and I had met in San Francisco at our Encoding Experience event there, and she had kindly reached out to let me know she’d be passing by my general vicinity on her trip to Europe. We met at the Cottage Café and over a couple of cappuccinos (cappuccini?) we had a really interesting discussion about the human experience of... Read more →

A new paper on experiential space analysis

Now that I’m back from Toronto I have the time to share some news that came our way last week. The production team at Frontiers in Sustainable Cities informed us that a paper we’ve been working on - Experiential space analysis: scoring tranquil, social, and explorative places in habitable buildings - has been published in their research topic on Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Building: Balancing IEQ with Energy Efficiency. The paper is the culmination of significant effort from the various authors - Rhys, Nastaran, Jeremy, Seba, Dianne, Frederik, Mike, Liviu, Tomas, Dagmara and myself - over a couple of... Read more →

Toronto

This week I've been in Toronto for an internal summit of our Research Engineering team. On Monday I stopped at the SWISS lounge by the E gates at Zurich airport. It was nice to hang out on the balcony overlooking the planes... they even have binoculars you can borrow! Shortly before we left a quick rainstorm hit. As I boarded it was getting sunny again, though. The flight was largely uneventful. On arrival I zipped through customs and immigration and took the UP Express to Union Station. As it was a really quick trip, I'd planned on going straight... Read more →

Recording from the 100 Minds in Motion panel

The recording from our panel discussion at the “100 Minds in Motion” event - held a few weeks ago at UCL PEARL - is now live on the Bartlett School of Architecture faculty webpag for the project. The least interesting piece of this recording is when I’m speaking, so really do please feel free to stop watching beforehand. It’s quite near the end, so you have plenty to enjoy until then. Image courtesy of Hugo Spiers, UCL. We’re very excited about the future of this collaboration with UCL: we have co-funded a PhD project for someone to work on... Read more →

Coming to Nashville

Last week prospective speakers who submitted class proposals for AU 2025 - which is being held in Nashville from September 16-18 - were notified whether the sessions were accepted or not. For this year's AU I'd submitted two classes. One was a look at various technologies we've been exploring to capture the human experience of the built environment, going back to projects such as the one we did with The Bentway, but also looking at more recent efforts involving crowdsourcing, EEG and VR. Unfortunately this class was declined. My other proposal was to repeat the session I delivered at... Read more →

London - Heatherwick Studio and UCL PEARL

At the end of the last post I was waiting for my new flight from Schipol to Heathrow, the original having been cancelled for some reason. In the end I managed to fly out the same night: I was in a middle seat, but by that point I would have stowed away in the hold or in the toilet if I had to. Next time I need to do that journey I will take the train - I really don't know why it didn't occur to me this time. It was getting late when I got in: I was... Read more →

DevCon Europe 2025 in Amsterdam - Days 1 & 2

On Tuesday morning, the beginning of the first day proper of Autodesk’s DevCon Europe 2025 in Amsterdam, attendees started to arrive at the historic Beurs van Berlage. It’s really a beautiful conference venue. It wasn't long before I was catching up with old friends, including past and present Autodesk employees. The Piro brothers are regulars at Autodesk events, although they're now there with different companies. For the first day's general session employees were asked to use an overflow room with a large screen. I ended up standing at the back. I propped my machine on a table holding a... Read more →

DevCon Europe 2025 in Amsterdam - Day 0

This week I'm spending time in Amsterdam and London. On Sunday I headed across to Geneva airport and checked into a hotel that’s a gentle 10-minute walk from the terminal. It was the first time I’d stayed there, and I admit I was pleasantly surprised. The atrium was nice and I even had a cheeky sauna before sleeping. The alarm going off soon after 5am was a bit of a shock, but I felt rested enough. The walk across to the terminal was pleasant, considering the early hour. There weren't yet cars on the roads. Security was really quick,... Read more →

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 →

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 →