Through the Interface

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 →

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 →

Work on a PhD project with Autodesk Research and The Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL

Autodesk Research is delighted to be sponsoring a PhD studentship at The Bartlett School of Architecture - part of University College London (UCL) - to research better, more equitable ways of modelling human navigation. Image courtesy of Hugo Spiers / UCL. The application deadline is short - it closes in just 2 weeks, on January 28th 2025 - so please do share this post with interested parties (or send them this LinkedIn posting). Information on applying can be found here. Here’s a summary of the project from the main UELA (which stands for UCL EPSRC Landscape Award, recently renamed... Read more →

Measuring the feeling of architecture: an article about our collaboration with The Bentway

A year or so ago I posted about our collaboration with The Bentway, and how it kicked off some really interesting research into combining qualitative and quantitative data collected during efforts to measure the human experience of the built environment. Members of our team have been working hard with our talented research communications colleagues to create this interesting, in-depth article describing the collaboration. It complements the existing project page that has been up for a while now. Between these two pages we now have a couple of videos describing the project. The first shorter overview was from last year:... 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 →

Toronto

Last Monday I left my son in Baltimore and headed back to Dulles for a short flight to Toronto to attend internal meetings with our research team. I didn't feel like fighting public transport for 3+ hours to get from Baltimore to Dulles, so took the easy (and much more relaxing) path of taking an Uber. I was there in less than 90 minutes - a not insignificant time saving. I really wish it was more convenient to take public transport here. The flight to Pearson was short - a little over an hour in the air - and... 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 →

Read about our work on Experiential Views

Our Research team is interested in capturing data about people’s experience of the built environment, as hinted at in the last post (despite the fact it was actually for April 1st, as anyone who read it closely hopefully realized). One aspect of this work has been covered in a recent publication that has been accepted as “late breaking work” at CHI 2024 - the Human-Computer Interaction conference being held next month in Hawai'i. Here’s a brief video that describes the work: The project looked at whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs) could be used to help evaluate designs along human-centric dimensions.... Read more →

Announcing the Autodesk Vision Am

I’m excited to be pre-announcing a new experience capture platform from Autodesk Research: the Autodesk Vision Am. It’s the data capture system we used for our project with The Bentway and showcased at our From Steps to Stories exhibit both in Toronto and at AU 2023 in Las Vegas. The goal is to collect as much data as we can about the human experience of the built environment. You can think of it as a purposefully basic, Amateurish alternative to Apple’s Vision Pro, which we hope you’ll just want to put on first thing in the Am (i.e. the... Read more →

Left to My Own Devices: I join the TRXL podcast for episode 152

Some weeks ago I joined Evan Troxel for a couple of hours to chat about my journey and some of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve enjoyed the TRXL podcast for some time, so it was a real honour to be invited on. Our discussion has just been published as episode 152. If you prefer video, here’s the version from YouTube: Evan’s a great interviewer: I enjoyed the session a great deal and I hope you do, too. Listening back to it I realize there’s a lot more we could have talked about… hopefully Evan will invite me back... 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 →

More information on From Steps to Stories

In a recent post I talked about “From Steps to Stories”, the exhibit we’re showing in Toronto, hosted by our partners at The Bentway. In that post I promised I’d share more details, nearer the event, and, well, here we are. We recently published a video showing more details about the project. There will be a longer video produced, once we’ve captured footage of the exhibit in Toronto, but this one tells the story behind the project quite nicely in just 2 minutes. Beyond that, I thought I’d share a couple of shots that give a sense of what... Read more →

Come and see From Steps to Stories in Toronto and Las Vegas

I’m very excited that our partners at The Bentway have announced the upcoming exhibition they’re hosting that will showcase work being done by Autodesk Research. Here is some information on The Bentway from their web-site: Anchored under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway and guiding its complex future, The Bentway is a growing public space, and much more. We are a new type of civic organization: a not-for-profit, powered by vital partnerships with the City of Toronto, residents, supporters, artists, city-builders, and dreamers. The Bentway is a creative catalyst rooted in experimentation, leading a creative movement to re-imagine the opportunities of urban... Read more →

Getting to Know Autodesk Research

A number of colleagues from Autodesk Research have participated (as have I) in an activity to help people learn more about our organization, who we are are and what we do. Here’s the video about me: It’s part of a playlist on the Autodesk Research YouTube channel, so you can hopefully see the others once mine has played (or just skip mine to watch the others :-). If you’re interested in getting to know more about our work, then I also recommend visiting the Autodesk Research blog. There are posts on there highlighting work by interns who have recently... Read more →

Human-centric building design

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve been asked to help lead our efforts in a particular area of research. I was deliberately vague at the time. Now, with Autodesk University 2022 around the corner, it seems a good time to say more about this. I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions at the event. As a company, one of Autodesk’s core interests is to enable the design and creation of healthier, safer, more resilient spaces. We want to explore tools for designers and architects that help them create buildings with more attention to the occupants. In the... Read more →