Through the Interface

COVID Office Occupancy: a Dynamo mega-graph and blog series

I posted, back in May, about the work we’d been doing to explore the possibility of using the Space Analysis package for Dynamo to plan for post-COVID office layouts. Soon after that post our research relating to the pandemic shifted focus towards a longer-term plan of creating a “living lab” that would allow us not only to explore how design decisions might impact viral transmission, but to have these decisions based on data measured from a functioning ventilation system. Expect to hear more about that research in a future post. We handed over the work that had been done... Read more →

’Tis the season to build Dasher

During the last week the kids have been opening their Advent calendars, we had a visit from St. Nicholas (I’ve talked before about this central European tradition), and the Candy Cane accelerator has kicked off. All-in-all things are starting to feel very festive! (And yes, Dasher is one of Santa’s reindeer, so there’s that, too.) The accelerator has upwards of 30 companies and academic partners in attendance, with 5 or so of these focused on “building their own Dasher” using the upcoming Data Visualization Extension for the Forge viewer (Project Hyperion). Yesterday I presented a session on Project Dasher... Read more →

The Digital World: BIM

Tomorrow (or today for some of you) marks the start of a 3-day event – the Built Environment Summit – being run by BSI in the UK. Here’s the agenda for Day 1 (December 1st 2020, all times UTC/GMT): 09:00 - 09:10 Chairman's Opening Remarks 09:10 - 10:30 DFMA and IoT: What are the possibilities? 10:30 - 10:50 Morning Break 10:50 - 12:00 Build-by-wire: the future 12:00 - 13:00 Asset Performance Management: Who benefits? What could we expect? 13:00 - 13:30 Lunch Break [13:30 - 15:45 Product Data and Standardization] 13:30 - 13:50 Construction Innovation Hub and LEXiCON 13:50... Read more →

Participate in Research at AU 2020

At our in-person Autodesk University events, it’s common for our R&D teams to interview customers and to brief them on ongoing research projects and upcoming product features. This is a really valuable part of our R&D process: this feedback helps us make sure that our products and services help the industry move forward by addressing real customer pain. This year is a bit different, of course: rather than hanging around the Idea Exchange – which I know many of us struggle to find time for – you can sign up for sessions via the AU website (or the links... 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 →

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 →

Register for Thursday’s SDSC-Connect event for free

Earlier this year, the Swiss Data Science Center kindly invited me to deliver a session on generative design at their October 1st SDSC-Connect event, entitled “Enhancing discovery and creativity with AI”. A perfect umbrella topic for a session on GD! The event was originally going to be held in-person in Zurich, but with recent developments it became clear that it would have to be held online. This is bad and good, of course: it’s bad because I won’t get to meet attendees in person – and they sound like a really interesting group of people – and it’s good... Read more →

Saving data for selected generative designs from Revit 2021

In the last post we saw how the Data.Gate node can be used to send geometry to Revit 2021 when the “Create Revit Elements” button gets pressed from the Explore Outcomes UI for a Generative Design study. Phew. In this post we’re going to dig into how this node can also be used to have other “side effects” such as storing the various input parameters to a text file. For the purpose of this workflow I’ve chosen to hack the standard Three Box Massing.dyn graph (which ships with Revit 2021 as a sample for the Generative Design feature). The... Read more →

Managing data flow to and from Generative Design studies in Revit 2021

I was inspired to write this post by a chat I had with Zachary Kron, earlier in the week. I’d been noodling on how best to support a workflow where users of the Generative Design feature in Revit 2021 can select specific solutions in a study and do something with them. The specific use-case was around some functionality I’d prototyped back during the days of Project Refinery, where while exploring the results created during a generative study you could double-click individual designs – whether in the scatterplot or the design grid – which would add them to a graphical... Read more →

Don’t worry – we must have finally reached "peak Kean"

I have the sense that I’m seeing my face too much at the moment (admittedly I’m very attached to it… haha). All I can say, in my defence, is that over the last few weeks I’ve started to receive more requests to participate in virtual activities. And I’ve mostly said yes, as it’s a reasonable alternative to travelling to meet people, given the current circumstances we’re all in. In case you haven’t seen these various pieces of virtual content – and you’re actually interested – here’s a quick round-up of some current and future ones. Getting Simple When my... Read more →

An update on our post-COVID office layout explorations

For the last few weeks I’ve once again been heads-down on Generative Design-related tasks after several months working almost exclusively on Dasher. I like switching context like this but it can certainly be a little disorientating, at first. Anyway, it’s been really interesting working once again with my friends in the AEC Industry Futures team (the rockstars formerly known as The Living), and with Rhys Goldstein – the designer of the algorithms driving the Space Analysis package – on imagining a tool to help with post-COVID office layouts. Something I speculated about a little while ago, although that was... Read more →

Online lectures from ITA and IAAC

As a follow-up to the last post which talked about SimAUD and it’s going online, today I wanted to mention some other online resources that might also be of interest to people during these times. The Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at ETH Zurich is one of many institutions that have moved their public lectures online and have made them available for anyone to watch. So far I’ve watched a couple of them live, the second one being by my friend and former colleague, Matt Jezyk, who is now spearheading Tesla’s efforts to streamline gigafactory design using techniques... Read more →

Attend SimAUD 2020 online next week for only $50 ($20 for students)

Next week is the annual Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD, pronounced Sim-Odd). This conference was started a decade ago by my former manager Azam Khan, along with Gabriel Wainer and Ramtin Attar. I’ve only had the pleasure of attending one SimAUD event – the 2018 edition was held in the Netherlands at TUDelft – but I was hoping/planning to attend this year’s in Vienna: a paper submitted by Rhys Goldstein – with Simon Breslav , myself and Azam as co-presenters – was accepted for the conference. Here’s a quick photo from a dinner we had... Read more →

Minor updates to Warnamo and Capturefinery

I’ve made some minor tweaks to a couple of my Dynamo packages, this week. One was to make sure Capturefinery – a tool that generates screenshots and animated GIFs for Refinery optimisation runs – works with the shipping release of Generative Design for Revit 2021 (it now does, but needed to look in a new directory structure). This is available from Capturefinery 0.9.11. The other was to add a feature to Warnamo – a tool that lists the warnings and errors in your Dynamo graph – to let you export the error list to Excel. This is available from... Read more →

Getting better-looking text in your Dynamo graph output

One of my pet peeves with Dynamo – as I typically use it standalone from Revit – is the quality of the text you can generate as graphics: the Dynamo Text package will generate curves (actually lots of little lines) that represent the outline of your characters, but they often look quite lame depending on your zoom level. Actually scratch that – they look lame irrespective of the zoom level. Sigh. Anyway – today I finally dug into what I needed to do to create better-looking text as output from your Dynamo graphs. My first attempt was to create... Read more →

A quick round-up of articles on Generative Design in Revit 2021

This week has been interesting: after speculating last week about how the COVID-19 pandemic might change our design criteria – especially as it might relate to Generative Design – this week I ended up diving into a project related to exactly that. I’ll share more on this in due course. In the meantime, I thought I’d post a quick round-up of some news that has been coming in on the new Generative Design feature (formerly known as Project Refinery) in Revit 2021. To start with, here’s a good article from Autodesk that announces the feature. Next up, here’s a... Read more →

An article in the RuMoer on Space Analysis and SyDEVS

Late last week I received the news that an article co-written by Rhys Goldstein, Divyae Mittal and myself has been published in the RuMoer, TU Delft’s periodical for the building technologist. Divyae – who is wrapping up his Master’s degree at TU Delft, in spite of the CORVID-19 pandemic – reached out as his thesis project makes use of both SyDEVS – a discrete event simulation framework Rhys has written and open sourced – and the Space Analysis Dynamo package. Divyae thought it worth covering both packages and his thesis in the RuMoer, and we wholeheartedly agreed! While my... Read more →

Generatively designing a post-COVID world

This post contains a “call to action” for the community and presents an opportunity for people to start using Generative Design in the context of a global pandemic. Please do read (or skip) through to the end! I’ve been really encouraged by the energy people have focused on helping others since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just inside Autodesk there have been a number of COVID-19-related projects proposed and started, and all four of our Technology Centers are cranking out personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. A special shout-out should go to our former Maker-in-Chief, Carl Bass,... Read more →

Generative Design is now available in Revit 2021

After many months of hard work, the Refinery team has delivered the first official release of their Generative Design feature as part of Revit 2021. Here’s the blog post describing the release. This marks the point at which generative design capabilities are first being made widely available to Revit users, directly from within the product. I know a number of customers have been waiting for this before engaging with the technology, so I’m impatient to see where things go from here. The feature comes with three pre-built sample studies for people to try: Three Box Massing, Workspace Layout and... Read more →