Autodesk University London 2017 Product Innovation

By Nick Harris

If you made it to the inaugural London Autodesk University I hope you stopped by at one of our stands to say hello and sign up for our free applications. It was a great event with plenty of good sessions, held in an interesting venue. Tobacco Dock and the surrounding areas are a testament to the ingenuity and industrious nature of Victorian Londoners. A combination of technological advances and sheer hard work transformed marshland into bustling docks. For more than a hundred years they received and distributed goods from all around the world. These advances were a necessity born out of commercial pressures generated from new world trade opportunities and ultimately what we now call globalisation.During the two keynote sessions, delivered at the start of each day, the consistent theme was one of changing market demand and global economic pressures driving technical innovation.  Of course, there was plenty of discussion on how Autodesk is continuously working to provide solutions that turn these challenges into opportunities for its customers. Senior Autodesk VP, Chris Bradshaw, hosted the first day’s session which was an engaging mixture of technology trends and customer success stories.     The second day’s keynote was more focused on the Autodesk portfolio with some significant announcements about new technology.

Scott Reese, Head of Product Development and Cloud Services, talked compellingly about the power of generative design and how it is a useable product now. Generative design is a different approach to designing optimised products and buildings.  It effectively removes the need for the designer to iterate through multiple detailed design options, manually changing dimensions and geometry, until they reach the optimum solution. Instead the designer describes the function and fit of the product and then uses the computational power of the cloud to iterate through hundreds of options automatically. Each option is tested and evaluated digitally with no further input from the designer until the end of the process, when the optimum solutions are presented back to them. Scott suggested that traditional parametric design would be replaced by generative design in the not too distant future.Following Scott there was a session on Fusion 360 and then BIM 360. In both of these sessions there were important announcements on the new tools available in those product streams. Fusion 360 has a lot of new functionality including sheet metal design and is now available on web browsers, independent of the host operating system. BIM 360 has also seen a huge amount of investment with new ways to collaborate and co-ordinate on the way. Tools for analysing construction data and concurrent design were also introduced.

Next time I will review these two sessions in more detail and discuss the significance of the new functionality that was announced in each of them.Take a look at the Autodesk University London 2017 Product Innovation session by following the link below. 

http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/classes-on-demand/class-catalog/classes/year-2017/class-detail/lo-key2#chapter=1