Autodesk’s CTO, Jeff Kawalski, gave an impressive talk during the general session about “The Future of Design Innovation.” He lead off by speaking about digital cities for infrastructure design, and debuted an interesting interface that marries both 3D browsing and a 2D base map. The interface tilted the 2D view vertically all around the horizon in order to provide context for navigating toward far-off landmarks. The bubble effect provided a great point of reference, and an innovative experience that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Kowalski emphasized that digital city modeling for infrastructure design can effectively combat the pressures of climate change and address other sustainability challenges. Digital city modeling was touted as a technology whose time has come, and one of many advances that will usher in exponential change in how we design in the very near future.
Kowalski spoke about computers that proactively find what works best, rather than our current approach of starting from scratch with every design. In this example he showed the recently purchased Ecotect software. Instead of starting a building project in the heart of a city center with a number of different design ideas to see how to meet requirements, he entered in the requirements and had the software produce an optimal building envelope that could guide the subsequent design. This softwarwe is a service, and services are a key component to free up our minds to think outside of the limitations of design tools.
The seamless and easy capture of existing real-world information is another area of great productivity gain. In this realm, Kowalski spoke of LIDAR and their own Stitcher software that pulls together photos to create realistic models very quickly. Rapid prototyping of our environments is a means toward augmented reality to quickly and cheaply bring design ideas into the real world.
I was impressed by the number of innovations that were previewed on the main stage, including the culminating presentation of a full-size 3D model of a motorcycle that was output from a 3D printer. The idea throughout the presentation was for a more intuitive, easy and quick means of designing in order to unlock a higher level of design
