AU 2021 Theater Highlights: Human-Centered Transformation

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SPEAKER: As the pace of change gets faster, we find new ways to use our tools. But we're not using technology for its own sake, we're innovating to make the world better for people. The stories from these innovators show how when you keep people at the center of your work, you unlock new possibilities for yourself and your community. Discover new solutions to the challenges we all share in the theater at AU 2021.

Designers have always had creative partners. Now they have a new collaborator, there are computers. Nicholas Desbiens shares how KPF is using AI to meet the challenges of rapid urbanization with buildings that redefine the skyline while creating better experiences for people.

NICK DESBIENS: I've always been inspired by the potential of computation not just to help us build new things, but to help us think new thoughts. In the past, architects have confronted the intricacy of building at the urban scale by reducing complexity wherever possible. A typical architecture project consists of distinct phases. There's conceptual design, followed by design development, followed by construction documents, followed by-- if everything goes right --construction and occupation.

But of course, we know that the design process itself is not linear. It's a messy and sometimes beautiful undertaking. We're often defining the problem at the same time you're designing the solution. Good ideas can come from anywhere, from anyone, at any time. So we're focused on creating flexible workflows, allowing designers to work creatively in tandem with algorithms. We can explore endless design spaces without committing to a specific solution until we're confident it's the right one.

Heron is a recent project that shows how this type of approach can lead to inspiring results. This residential project in Tampa, well not as programmatically complex as most of our work, shows how competing project goals relating to solar exposure, daylight access, energy use, preferred views, building separation, and gross floor area can lead to an extremely expansive space of possible design outcomes to explore.

So rather than relying purely on intuition or basic assumptions, KPFUI, our in house urban think tank, built a generative masking strategy to create thousands of plausible iterations. These iterations were rated according to performance metrics. Just the range of possible building forms resulting from these simple rules is astounding. But in the end, we're not interested in letting the algorithm design the building, we're trying to use this technology to find insights, imaginative alternatives that would be difficult for even seasoned professionals to arrive at. But to do that well, we have to take a step beyond algorithms to create beautifully designed, easy to use dashboards and interfaces.

This allows us to bring designers and stakeholders together so they can solve their complex problems in clear and straightforward ways. For the Heron project, the generative design methodology was not the end of the creative process, it was the beginning. But ultimately, what we're discussing here isn't really about technology, it's about people. We can create thousands of design options in the time it used to take to produce a single sketch. But if that doesn't get us any closer to creating places that have real meaning in people's lives, then we haven't really done our job as architects.

In KPF we are invested in cities. We believe in the city as a place of community and interaction. A place where ideas can cross pollinate, and new ways of living can be created. We also understand the key role cities have to play in the efficient use of resources, allowing us to preserve natural spaces for generations to come. If 2/3 of us will soon be living in urban areas, we need to harness technology, to enhance creativity and improve communication, so we ensure that our future cities reflect the best of what makes us human.

SPEAKER: Designing cities for the future is one thing, building them is another. And because of the skilled labor shortage in construction, that's harder to do. One solution, more inclusive hiring. Creating greater diversity and equity isn't just the right thing to do, it's good for business. Doctor Giovanna Brasfield shares her insights.

GIOVANNA BRASFIELD: Data from McKinsey's diversity wins, how inclusion matters, 2020 report reveals that companies with diverse workforces are more likely financially to outperform their competitors, and even excel employee retention as well as innovation. In addition, the Bureau of Labor statistics data shows that construction industry is up against a workforce shortage. Let's think about DEI as a solution for construction workforce shortage as a way to address a dual industry pressures, an aging workforce retiring, and fewer younger workers pursuing careers in the trades or STEM related careers.

An effective DEI strategy can improve our workforce needs, serve as a corporate differentiator, and improve competitive advantage from one bid to the next. DEI is not just black and white. It is also diversity of thought and experience. As an industry, we need to lend a larger lens that includes a focus on diversity as a whole, including race, gender, culture, sexuality. We need programs and procedures that support accessibility for all. Over my career I've often heard people say, DEI is the right thing to do. So why hasn't enough been done when it's actually a fundamental for organizational success?

The 2021 US Chamber of Commerce, Commercial Construction Index found that in the midst of deepening workforce crisis, finding skilled labor continues to be a challenge for contractors. In this quarter alone, 88% of contractors reported moderate to high levels of difficulty finding skilled workers in the construction schedule. No one plans to miss a critical path or exceed a construction schedule or even blow through your construction budget. But because we as an industry are up against a workforce shortage, one thing is certain, inclusion is more important than ever before for innovation, technical solutions, and project execution.

Based on the current data and industry trends, inclusivity practices are no longer a nice to do, but a must do. Imagine if more organizations built projects intentionally and with inclusion to backfill those positions in the industry. We would see an increase in morale, innovation, and collaboration. As you know, real change in this space has been accelerated in the last two years. 2020 was a year of say something. It was the year of exploration, of listening to employees to determine what is needed and opportunities for improvement.

2021, the year of action, we're in it now. We are seeing the increase of organizations commitment statement, unconscious bias training, revisiting policies, launching DEI programs, and task force. 2022, as we look ahead, will be the year of assessment. That is when we will determine if the actions from 2021 actually affect and improve the way we do business. Some feel like we have to do it and others feel like we have to do it.

Well, here's how we're doing it at Flatiron. Our company's policy towards a greater level of DEI began about four years ago when we adopted a zero tolerance, anti-bullying, harassment, anti-discrimination, and retaliation policy. Flatiron officially launched its diversity inclusion growth group or DIG program in 2018. Then in 2020, like many other organizations across the world, we made a significant pivot, a heightened awareness, and a clearly outlined a four pronged approach to DEI.

Our four pillars were developed strategically and intentionally around the following areas, recruit and attract employees through more diverse inclusive efforts, growth and retention of employees through an array of programs and internal initiatives, developing a diverse and inclusive company culture, and influence our business strategy in a manner that elevates DEI, including community engagement, small business support and much, much more.

SPEAKER: We're asking a lot of the city of the future. More people closer together. How can we get everyone and everything where it needs to go without creating more traffic? James McClearen delivers a unique solution with his family of logistics drones.

JAMES MCCLEAREN: It started innocently enough, I just wanted to deliver a birthday present to my four-year-old daughter at her birthday party in our backyard by drone. The set up were to be, where's daddy? It's time to open presents. Then poof, right on time, a drone bearing her gift would appear out of nowhere, as if by magic. Well, that's what you get for your fourth birthday when your daddy is a nerd.

At first, it seem simple enough. Buying off the shelf drone and modify it to carry some cargo from one side of the house to the other. But quickly, the challenge of having some family fun morphed into a grander vision. I couldn't resist the opportunity to apply my stock in trade with advance tools for design, modeling and simulation, and computer aided manufacturing. I decided to design and build my own drone from scratch.

As I began to shop online for the bits and pieces that I would need, I started to ask basic questions about cargo drones. How fast? How far? How heavy? These questions define the spatial, functional, and technical design space of drones. It's a whole real cargo, our drone would need to be larger than the obvious models. Would it be small enough to avoid onerous certifications and liability insurance? Could we find a market niche that is light on regulations where serious venture could get started and grow?

I converged on a target product. A family of specialized drones for delivering like cargo. The marketplace was ready for rugged workhorse. One that could be easily optimized to meet the unique needs of businesses across many markets, climates, and regulations. I knew I had a way to design and build a scalable family of airborne cargo delivery vehicles. What started as a party gag turned into my personal life quest.

I quit my job and teamed up with some like minded people to start a company. As we will see in the next few minutes, the digital tools of Fusion 360 are the foundation blocks that gave me the confidence to launch our business, to produce and operate a transformative generation of airborne vehicles, the blueflite connected cargo platform. Like so many great projects, blueflite started with a sketch on a napkin. There's magic that happens when you put a pen to a clean sheet of paper, especially one smeared with frosting from a birthday cake. That's the moment when big ideas first come pouring out.

The next step was to move the embryo of an idea into the nurturing wonderland of Fusion 360 where my glimmering vision will gestate into something real and tangible. On the computer, the idea clamored into life as twins, one digital and one physical. The digital twin provided the optimization of structure, flight, control, and thermal. In this environment, the trade offs became obvious and clear, increased payload, reduce range, reduce weight, increase range, increased speed, reduce lift, and so on.

Taken together, these trade offs to find a sweet spot where blueflite could achieve a capability with just the right combination of speed, range, and payload done with the tools to provide reliability and value. Miraculously, just as the digital twin hit resonance, our first big business opportunity knocked on our door. One our clients in the Mideast recommended us to a major project in the desert kingdom. Their big idea is to create a new city from scratch with no cars, no streets, and no carbon emissions.

Designed around the unifying idea of building the city along a 100 mile swath or the distance from Manhattan to Philadelphia, for the residents, all essential services are just a five minute walk away. Below ground, our transportation layers, they include high speed rail running from end to end, above ground, there will be a high speed network of small industrial drones delivering goods on demand from nodes. This is an ideal application for blueflite.

The design is easily scaled up or down to be smaller or larger to meet the ideal trade off a speed distance and cargo load for the above ground cargo delivery. The proven maneuverability addresses the needs for operating in tight airspace, controlled by artificial intelligence that monitors and schedules daily life using predictive and data models to meet demand. As importantly, blueflite is a connected platform that feeds information into the digital infrastructure to provide near real time information for a digital age experience for the citizens of this brave new city.

The opportunities to be a part of this emerging new world are all around us. For blueflite, the power of Fusion 360 is the design ecosystem that supports our product from conception through to production. We can move from the digital twin to the physical prototype seamlessly. The cost efficiency is nice and valuable. Fusion 360 helps us get our dreams through our fingertips and into something real. Because we are engineers and dreamers at a little girl's birthday party, we are in it for the joy the thrill and the glory of doing something wonderful.

SPEAKER: At home and at work, our lives are a blend of the physical and the digital, creativity integrated with analytics. When we harness the power of technology to serve our communities, we can do remarkable things together. Hilda Espinal takes us behind the scenes and shares how CannonDesign created the University of Montreal health center, the largest project ever modeled in Revit.

HILDA ESPINAL: In this period of accelerated data growth, digital transformations and blurred distinctions, how does a leading design firm respond to the new challenges faced by our communities? How do we use technology to improve our design work? And when technology seems separating, how do we intentionally leverage it to close this gap? These are questions we as an industry struggle with, and the answers will define the future of how we work. And through it all, we believe it is crucial to recognize people are still at the center.

Our philosophy is that of living centered design, where our main goal is to create spaces which enhance life experiences and were all people can flourish. We are convinced the future of work is hybrid, where technologies are enabling better collaboration, enhancing relationships with our clients, and having a positive impact in our communities. The health care sector is one of the areas where our firm has had the most impact.

In fact, we had the great privilege in collaboration with NEUF architects to design the largest academic medical center built to date in North America, the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montreal. A unique opportunity to create an academic medical center, which beyond being a prime health care destination needed to become a cultural landmark in the heart of Montreal while are respecting and integrating with the surrounding environment. Architecturally, we achieve this by humanizing its massive scale into interconnected volumes and incorporating historic artifacts.

For example, a 145-year-old steeple from the former church of St. Savior was reconstructed and embedded into the state of the Art Complex. To further connect with the urban fabric, 13 works of public art are infused throughout the development, linking the structure to the local neighborhood. From a digital standpoint, the University of Montreal health center's massive size and complexity was echoed by managing enormous amounts of data while satisfying the need for fast, secure, and global access.

This project by the way was identified by Autodesk as the largest project ever built in Revit. Its uniqueness led us to approach the project differently than anything we've done before. A journey in which we redefine our approach to BIM, data workflows, project delivery, and staff. Collaboration became crucial as virtually all offices in our global firm worked closely together bringing the right talent to the team regardless of their physical location.

Our solution was to lease space from a data center to create our own private cloud and host all of our projects data, software, and computed power in it. A move which vaulted us ahead of the competition, introducing capabilities to work from anywhere. Another aspect of how we work today and will continue to in the foreseeable future. Embracing a path where technology facilitates our human relationships is at the core of our living center design values. A movement where we aim to digitally capture and share decades of experience and specialization to better approach all projects.

Where technology helps us quickly and accurately drop patterns between existing data, user demands, and the latest research. Where we can couple this data with computational modeling to uncover unprecedented efficiencies and functional solutions for our projects. Where best of all and in the spirit of embracing the opportunities of industry for that all, technology will free up more time to design, which ultimately will improve our human experience overall.

SPEAKER: Digital tools help us create our built world, imaginary worlds too. Hardie Tankersley takes us into new video production processes that reveal secrets for storytellers in every industry.

HARDIE TANKERSLEY: This is Pacoima, in suburban Los Angeles. This is also a converted warehouse in LA, so is this. These images were all captured directly by the camera. No green screen involved. They were produced using a new technique called virtual production. Newly enabled by recent innovations in GPUs, large format LED displays, game engines, as well as real time rendering, and accelerated by a worldwide pandemic driving all of us to stay home. We now see many Hollywood productions, movies and TV shows, commercials, music videos and even corporate presentations being captured with these new techniques.

At Silverdraft, we produce visualization tools and systems to drive high resolution photo realistic experiences for everything from product design, to entertainment, to AEC. We are all storytellers. Anyone creating 3D photo real imagery is trying to communicate a story about a product, a vehicle, a building, a factory. Autodesk customers are using their software tools to create images of imaginary things to display worlds, both real and imagined. So how do these innovations help us tell these stories?

Let's start with storytelling and the magic of illusion. Visual storytelling through the stage, film, and TV is all about creating magic, and the illusion of taking the audience to an imaginary place. This hasn't changed. The world of film has always been about figuring out how to use new technologies to create amazing images, to create magical worlds that look and feel convincingly real. Every frame of the picture has to be believable even when it's completely unbelievable.

And this brings us to the new era of virtual production. The advent of large format comparatively low cost and high quality LED panels, along with real time photo realistic rendering with motion capture, we can digitally create and interact with a simulation of a stage, a location, and an imaginary world all at the same time. Now we can use high performance computing to drive real time animation on a wall behind the camera.

The mat can move, and when the camera moves, the rendering tracks its point of view accurately. So everything in the background appears to stay where it belongs. Just as you have a digital twin in manufacturing or construction, the cinematic twin is a game engine based virtual environment that is an interactive, functional, virtual library of all the components of the production. It's analogous to the digital twin that we know from product design and manufacturing, but it's a digital twin of an imaginary world. It's a fully realized world turned into a digital stage for our action to take place.

Here, we actually capture a real truck via photogrammetry to create its digital twin. Then we can easily swap the real truck in the virtual truck in the image. And of course, the most important thing is the creative team. By having everything in a digital real time form, we can bring back analog filmmaking skills. The crew can actually see what the audience is seeing instead of just a big green wall. There are even more things you can do on a virtual set. You get endless magic hour. It's always 10 minutes to sunset in our virtual set. Infinite clock, infinite days, the weather is always perfect, or whatever you need it to be, but you never get rained out.

You get the flexibility to be creative on the fly, see what you're getting in the camera, and change it. Try it this way. Move the angle over here, try a different light. Move a mountain or a forest or just a tree that's in the way, or make your own traffic jam without shutting down the freeway. There's a whole new world of technology being developed for this that you can take advantage of in your work. We can bring location into a real time environment, match it to the set, the art, and the camera. So that when we shoot a scene that appears to be in a city that we can't go to or ancient pyramids or exotic forests or deserts that are impractical to visit.

So what does all this mean for you the community of Autodesk innovators? Well, you too can take advantage of the recent breakthroughs in technology and process. When you go back to your home or wherever, office, I want you to think about how you can use real time rendering to enhance your storytelling. We are all storytellers. Whether you're a filmmaker creating a virtual world to tell a story about some characters, or you're an automotive designer, or an architect creating a virtual world to tell a story about a product design, a customer experience, a maintenance process, a workflow, we are all using images to communicate. Real time photo real 3D enables all of us to have more impact to communicate ideas with more clarity and to tell better stories.

SPEAKER: These restless innovators are unleashing their creativity in partnership with technology to make a better world. You can dive deeper into these talks and others like them on demandinthetheater@au2021.

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