NOVEDGE blog

The Edge: The Sanchez Code

Novedge: Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do 

Jose Sanchez: Well, my name is Jose Sanchez, I’m a Chilean architect. I graduated from the Design Research Lab (DRL) at the Architectural Association. During that period, I started focusing on a generative design agenda, using coding as the main means for design. My research dealt with swarm systems and emergent tectonics in constant search for equilibrium. As soon as I graduated, I started teaching processing within the DRL and assisting Alisa Andrasek, who was my tutor during my Master's, in her practice Biothing. I spent 3 years working at the front of the computation within the practice, dealing with architectural projects of different scales. In 2012, I decided to leave the practice and start a collaboration with Alisa with the Bloom Project for the London Olympics. Since then, I have been conducting my own Research Unit in the Graduate Architectural Design (GAD) program of the Bartlett School of Architecture in UCL and developing my practice, The Plethora Project.

Plethora-Project from Jose Sanchez on Vimeo.

Novedge: What is The Plethora Project?

Jose Sanchez: Once I started teaching, I was surprised at the little amount of resources that Academia had to teach something like code, at least for architects. I had to spend a lot of time finding the right material and making sense of scattered pieces of information found on the internet. In this regard, initiatives like the open-source movement and video sites like the Khan Academy or Academic Earth were a big inspiration to start a teaching protocol that I continue to this day. I call this protocol the Plethora-Project, it documents every step of teaching that I have done through the years. A place to make accessible to other the sometimes laborious work of making sense of some material. In a way it was something that I wish I had when I was learning, so I decided to start building it myself. Today the Plethora Project has over 150 videos of computational knowledge, from programming tutorials, to modeling and rendering.

In 2010 I realized that the videos where not enough and that it was time to take the next step, which for me was writing a library of code. In a way, a library allows others to access some functionality and knowledge in a faster way.

PLIBS LIBRARY EXAMPLES from Jose Sanchez on Vimeo.

The Plethora Library for Processing has been growing slowly, but it sits within a larger framework of open source tools that many professionals like myself are sharing today over the internet. 

Novedge: What are some recent projects that you worked on? 

Jose Sanchez: In a way, the Bloom project has been a turning point in my career. It's with this project that I decided to pursue in a much stronger way an agenda that deals with architecture and games.

Bloom was an installation for the 2012 London Olympics competition that Alisa and I won over several stages of judging. The project suggests an interactive pavilion made out of thousands of identical units that could be assembled by people in order to create different formations.

Bloom was installed in 3 different locations during the London Olympics: Victoria Park, Greenwich and UCL main Quad. The initial formation invited people to play and participate altering and building new structures. Every user, including the Bloom team, had to learn how to ‘PLAY’, as no blueprints were present at the moment of construction. The rules of the structure become self-evident at the moment of iteration and improvisation. The formations were created live outside the realm of simulated forecasts, but within a notion of contingent adaptations.

Bloom became an educational game. Encouraging people to work together to create all sorts of structures. People soon realized that by following "recipes" or sequences, they could repeat formations and discover hidden patterns. Rhythmicity created loops, and logic allowed kids to create solid structures. The game mechanics designed into the project enabled the local adaptation of the piece, allowing for contingent formations in every site. In this context, Bloom became a social experiment on the use of game logics as a crowd-source medium of adaptation.

We designed the project using Processing and Rhino. The initial sketches where done in processing but we soon needed to strengthen the geometrical platform to deal with fabrication.

The Computation of Bloom from Jose Sanchez on Vimeo.

We scripted our tools in Python within Grasshopper to be able to see in real-time the potential variations of the unit, and at the same time see the result of the recursive aggregation unfolding. This workflow allowed us to determine the main angles that would be used for the piece. This was the moment in which we started collaborating with Manja van de Worp from Arup to define the structural capacities of the piece. We iterated many times that the unit as the whole project was dealing with only one design. Additionally, we designed the component to work as urban furniture arraying the unit through a helicoidally bent steel structure. This "bench" would work as the main support for the more intuitive formations done with the over 60.000 units we manufactured.

Credits: Bloom, Jose Sanchez and Alisa Andrasek. 

The project presents a central thesis of how game mechanics could become a tool for crowdsourcing design. It is in that context that the project allowed me to start the "gamescapes" research in the GAD in UCL. I have been working closely with a small group of students developing research on the connection between architecture and games. The studio suggests games as a design heuristics looking at how to create models of man-computer symbiosis where the designer, coupled with algorithmic intelligence, can "play" in order to design different outputs. The studio is reaching the end of its first iteration and all games and experiments can be accessed for free here.

 

 

Credits: Wireflies, research project by Iro Karantaki, Dimitra Angelopoulou and Vassia Diamanti within ‘Gamescapes’ at Bartlett UCL. Tutor: Jose Sanchez

Additionally, I’m developing an architectural video game soon to be released, but I cannot show any material yet as it’s still a work in progress.

Novedge: What software do you use? 

Jose Sanchez: I constantly migrate from one software to another, I feel that most platforms offer something different but I try to give more importance to learning what doesn’t change from one software to another, like geometry or math. It’s quite easy to learn the interface of a new software if you understand the key geometrical concepts that you are operating with. For instance, knowing what to expect from a Nurbs model versus a Mesh is something that I keep repeating to students. The same applies to scripting. The syntax of a new scripting language is not difficult to learn, what is important is to understand the different paradigms behind each language.

Having said this, I spent a lot of time in Processing and Rhino. Both modelling and scripting. Grasshopper is also a great tool that I use a lot, but I really enjoy having a run time environment like Processing. I feel that coding allows me to accumulate the knowledge of a project in a more consistent way. The concepts of inheritance and encapsulation from object-oriented programming I feel are key to developing a more sustainable design practice.

Lately I have migrated to Unity3D. I feel really happy with the platform. The welcome the ability to distribute and communicate some of the ideas behind generative design with a much larger community. I feel that sometimes our discipline becomes quite obscure and starts using a vocabulary that hides or pretends the actual processes we are dealing with. This is what I describe as obscurantism in design practices. I’m strongly against it. This is why both my practice and teaching have been developed around ideas of open source.

BLOOM PLAY from Jose Sanchez on Vimeo. 

 

Novedge: Your practice combines different disciplines. How do they inform each other? How important are collaborations and team work?

Jose Sanchez: I truly believe that the boundaries of what we consider traditional disciplines are starting to blur and we are seeing more and more professionals that operate in an ‘in-between’ space. That is why I decided to organize a monthly event called the Bartlett Nexus trying to wire together some of the individuals that are often collaborating via open source projects but don’t know each other. In this scenario, collaborations do not happen in the way of bringing in a specialist from another field but rather work by implementing and hybridizing the material that each one of the individuals participating is already sharing online. I see this landscape of designers with their own set of open-source tools as a completely new framework for collaboration, where much smaller practices can strategically scale or tackle complex projects.

Today, a format like the Meet Up is starting to become a strong form of collaboration and perpetual learning strategy, challenging traditional models of practice and research. We are seeing a proliferation of tools, games and software being developed by skilled individuals that are wired in new ways. This is an exciting time to develop a practice that can both develop new projects from some of the accumulated resources within the community, and share the progress or tools developed with them.

You can see more of Jose's work at the Plethora Project's website or follow him on Twitter.

And here are some creations made playing Bloom.

Do you know someone I should interview? Send Novedge a tweet!

The Edge: What is the Matter(form)?

Novedge: Adam and Drew, tell us a bit about you.

Drew Cox: We are both tinkerers, makers, and inventors. Adam [Brandejs] specializes in electronics and design, while I'm more engineering and software.

Novedge: Partnerships are powerful, but can also be difficult. How did you two come together? What makes your collaboration successful?

Drew Cox: We met through working in Advertising. We both had a love for interesting tech, and Adam knew every cutting edge thing that was out there. So we started working together on projects and one of the ideas was for a laser based 3D Scanner. We work well together because our skills only overlap where it's important. Otherwise we are both pretty eclectic individuals.

 

Novedge: Why do we need the Matterform?

Drew Cox: Maybe not need, but want. 3D Scanning is a technology that is new to a lot of people, and the more people that get to try it out, the more interesting things we find to do with it. Right now there are a lot of people from all walks of life who are interested in the Matterform 3D Scanner. Everything from medical and dental applications, to artists, or dads wanting to save their daughters plasticine sculptures. The uses are really unlimited.

Beta Scan

Novedge: You received great support on Indiegogo. What advice would you give to anyone looking into financing their project using that platform?

Drew Cox: We used Indiegogo because it was open to Canadians. It's important to remember, with any crowd funding platform, that you be honest, and make sure you communicate to your backers as much as possible.

Beta Scan

Novedge: Do you have a 3D printer at home? Or do you use a 3rd-party 3D printing service?

Drew Cox: We use both. We have a few different 3D printers here in the shop, but we also use local services such as 3DPhacktory, and online services to help us print parts when we need them.

Novedge: What software do you use to prepare your files for 3D printing?

Drew Cox: We use a wide array of professional and free software. It depends what we are doing. I am a big fan of Solidworks, but it's not for beginners. Blender and SketchUp are great free modelling packages. After that we use Repetier (with Skeinforge and Slic3r) to print our own parts here.

Novedge: Are we in the midst of a 3D printing revolution?

Drew Cox: For sure! I want to live in a world where we can fabricate whatever we want without big machines and lots of restrictions.

Novedge: What's next for the Matterform and for you?

Drew Cox: We're just focused on finishing the production of the Matterform Scanner, and polishing off all the software. Of course we never stop tinkering and developing new ideas, so hopefully there will be some surprises to come.

 

Check out Matterform's website for more details and images.

Get in touch with Novedge on Twitter

At the 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire

This year, I attended the annual Bay Area Maker Faire, one of the largest and most extravagant festivals where, "invention, creativity and resourcefulness" can be found in one place. To see all my pictures, check out Novedge on Facebook.

On assignment, I met and rode on my bike with a small group of dedicated enthusiasts at Dolores Park.

Upon my arrival, I couldn't help but notice a fellow cyclist's awesome ride. It turns out the very frame of his MTB bike was crafted out of solid mahogany with absolutely no CNC/CAM! Bay Area native and proprietor of Masterworks Wood and Design, William Holloway has been crafting these human powered locomotives for a number of years now. And if it is any testament to his skills as a craftsman, he reached the Maker Faire before yours truly!



My ride locked and secured, Kinetic Steam Works' printing press beckoned me with its distinct whistle. Compliments to KSW for reminding us that human ingenuity has been ours from the very start and for the freshly printed Maker Faire coasters!

Close by, Fun Bike Unicorn Club (FBUC) had multiple things going on. People could climb into the Whiskeydrome and see if they could ride the wall, or visit their massive tent to check out their showcase of wheeled contraptions. No one bike was the same. The only consistent theme? Pedals, chain and wheels.

The brave and curious, or those wanting to evaluate the sturdiness of their builds, were more than welcome to pedal to the metal with FBUC's Death Defying Figure 8 Pedal Car Race and Power Racing Series. Power Wheels on steroids anyone? 

In addition to the various Thunderdome inspired projects and workshops put on by non profit DIY spaces, Nimby and The Crucible, before CAD and 3D Printing, creativity is still a hands-on endeavor.

Having had my fill outside, what was THE hot topic at this year's Maker Faire? - 3D Printing. In fact, if the pictures are any proof of how crowded the place was, I had to wait in line just to say Hi to our friend and VP of Marketing, Afinia's own Aaron Pratt. The Afinia team worked overtime to answer any and all questions, as were representatives from Shapeways and i.materialise. With a host of printed samples for festival attendees to grab, what would happen to the waste generated? Interestingly enough, the OmNom Project aims to make filament replacement as easy as feeding a monster. OmNom might indeed be necessary, as the 3DMonstr team looks to create an industrial grade printer worthy of Tim The Tool Man's praise. Both OmNom Project and 3DMonstr will have Kickstarter campaigns up soon, follow us on Twitter for updates.

In an exploration of architecture's potential future with 3D printing, The California College of the Arts along with UC Berkeley's Department of Architecture demonstrated new methods and forms for 3D printed architecture on a massive scale. With so much buzz, I had to pinch my shoulder as there was still plenty to see. Moving on!

Amongst other projects showcased, Maker Faire had on display a number of kinetic art pieces and participants were encouraged to interact with them. Benjamin Cowden's creation Eating my Cake and Having it Too (2007) gently rotates its handle to lick a lollipop with a prosthetic tongue.

 

Gather around to reanimate a floating creature with Oakland based artist Anja Ulfeldt's Undercurrent. With the exception of some of the more fragile pieces, most of everything I saw was hands on. A number of masks from pop culture icons were on display as well. For a fanboy like myself, no way would I miss out on the chance to dress up!

 

Do you want to see all my photos? Check them out on Facebook!

And don't forget to follow Novedge on Twitter for our latest updates.

The Edge: Ryan Swanson and The Urban Conga

Novedge: Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.

Ryan Swanson: My life began in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I went to high school for architecture. I then moved to Tampa about 7 years ago to attend The University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design where I will soon receive my Masters in Architecture.  I'm an aspiring architect, designer and creator. I like to make things and make things for a reason.  I hate making something that has no back story or reasoning for its existence. I try to live by this quote from Jim Henson - "When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.” It's kind of cliché but I believe if I'm alive I might as well make it worth it.

What do I do... Well I try to dip my hand in just about anything I find interesting. I coach and play volleyball, dj on my spare time, and pretty much just try to live life as much as possible.  Which is a hard task to do while in Architecture School. I recently have really gotten into emergent technologies and how they can be used in a large scale realm to push urban activation. So I spend a lot of time learning and designing. I never want to stop learning.

Novedge: How did you become interested in architecture and the public space?

Ryan Swanson: I think my interest in architecture kind of came about when I was young and asked my mom what I could do that involved math and art and she was like "architecture." That started me down this crazy wild path to where I am today. I didn't really get into public spaces until I went to Europe about two years ago. Me and some friends backpacked around for 5 weeks going to about 7 different countries. I began to see what a real public space was and actually be a part of their activeness. It's one thing to read about how a space is in a book than to actually experience it. I saw how people began to come together and interact with one another through the space. It was something that I never really saw in Fort Lauderdale or Tampa in the urban environment.

When I came back to the States I had just actually moved close to downtown Tampa and began to ride my bike there quite often into downtown. Before I never had a reason to drive the 20 min to downtown because there was never anything going on.  I began to ask myself why Tampa was unsuccessful when it came to public spaces.  It had some of the same parks, spaces, and open areas that I experienced in Europe. I began to realize people just either didn't know that the spaces existed or that it was ok to hangout in an empty grass lot. Or, it was just that there was nothing going on for them to want to hang out there. If you look at any big city you can walk down a street and feel like you are alive. Something is always happening or about to happen. I wanted to make this happen in downtown Tampa. I felt it had the potential and wanted to begin to create a change in the social interaction downtown.  Public spaces are a way for people to escape and with the way our world is looking these days people need any way they can get to escape the harsh realities of life and come together.

Novedge: What is a recent project that you worked on?

Ryan Swanson: I'm actually working on a couple of different projects right now. One is this interactive projection installation I call Projecting Fun. The idea for the projection installation is that it is something that can be easy to transport and it can be as big as you want it. The installation is done using the xbox kinect and processing, an open source code driven software.  Right now I have a simple script that reads movements of the body and allows one to dance and play and see themselves projected at a large scale doing it. The idea of this installation is to promote interactive activity in inactive spaces. It draws people in but also makes people begin to appreciate and notice the space they are occupying. My goal is to give people a good time and break up their typical route, but also make them appreciate the space they are in. I have done this installation in two locations, one on the side of an old facade and the other under an overpass. So this is something I have done but I am still working on making it different and more playful.  

The next thing is a prototype for this thing I call the Space Manipulator. The idea is that it's this cube that is placed within an inactive space and it can be broken down to a multitude of spatial arrangements for people to interact with. The idea is to get people to begin to play and work together on something and to create this idea of public interaction. The whole concept is to get people to come together in a space that isn't regularly used but is an interesting public space that should be activated. So when bringing this installation in I hope to not only give people something they can hang out on and move, but something they can begin to discuss and figure out. Public spaces are about bringing people together and creating a place for people to be interactive and become a part of the space. It's about creating a conversation between the human body and the space around them.
The Urban Conga is working on a bunch of different projects right now and they can be seen on our website. But something that has recently fell into our arms is helping design, create, and run a Fab Lab in South Tampa. Essentially we are working to create a place for learning and collaboration. The idea is that the house is always developing projects done by people coming to the Lab to learn and create. We hope to set up a studio in the Lab and begin to collaborate on a lot more public installations with creators from the Tampa area.  

Novedge: What software do you use?

Ryan Swanson: Software is something I told myself I want to have a vast knowledge in. It's like being a painter; you don't want to paint with just one color. Through architecture school and 3d modeling I have become really familiar with 3ds Max, SketchUp, V-Ray, AutoCAD, and Photoshop. I use these programs for prototyping ideas and mostly for rendering and setting up files to be laser cut or CNC routed. 3ds Max is also good for animations for showing how interactive installations work or for getting accurate prototypes to pitch ideas.  When showing people what you plan to do it's all about making it as pretty as possible and 3ds Max can do that for you. Rhino, with the Grasshopper plug-in, is probably the program I use the most for modeling and designing ideas.  Rhino is great for parametric modeling and also it has an endless supply of plug-ins and can do a multitude of functions. Grasshopper is a generative modeling tool for Rhino that uses algorithms to create form. It also can be interconnected to Arduino which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. The two can be used together to create real world interactions and create a digital model from that interaction.  Another program I use for interactive projection installations is Processing. It is another interactive open-source software that runs off of Java. The great thing about Arduino and Processing is that everything is open source, so everyone is willing to share ideas, code, and help. The idea is to keep pushing the limits and for an idea to keep growing. So if you make something maybe someone else can make something cooler with the thing you created and then so on. I believe technology is important to keep up with the ever growing society we are in. So I keep trying to find new software that I can learn to make things better and bigger with.

 

Novedge: What is the Urban Conga?

Ryan Swanson: The Urban Conga is a collective group of creators activating urban spaces through interactive installations.  We stimulate urban spaces through exploration, activation, and above all interaction. The objective is to spark a conversation between the public realm and the human body through interactive installations. Our mission is to start The Conga Line!  We want to collaborate with other creators and begin to start a movement in inactive areas.

 

We are not a group of artists that create static public art to make a dollar. Our philosophy is to inject care into local communities by accentuating and enhancing the beauty of the current urban conditions! With like-minded passions to better communities, we are turning unused and overlooked urban spaces into interactive places to live, learn, and love your city. The Conga started in September 2012 when I and a couple of other students at the University of South Florida School of Architecture realized we were interested in solving the problem that our downtown is having with activation. So in doing my thesis I tried to incorporate my research into The Urban Conga in how to interact with people and what they best respond to in order to begin to activate these unused spaces. Our goal is to start a movement! We hope there will begin to be an Urban Conga group everywhere just giving people something to do and interact with and have fun. Our whole motto is "Come out and play!"

Novedge: What are the rewards and challenges of being part of a collective, such as the Urban Conga?

Ryan Swanson: Everyone works in groups in school and hate it. I feel this gives a false reputation on collaborations or working in a collective effort.  In the working world this is something a majority of people have to learn to accept and deal with. I think working with other people is how to make something better. If you lock yourself in a room you are only getting one perspective on the thing you are doing and that is your own. When you put together a bunch of people that have different skill sets something amazing happens. IDEO is a design consulting firm that solely believes on creations through a collaborative effort. They are one of the top design consulting firms in the nation due to this mind set.  If you look at any online open sourced software, people collaborate everywhere. Someone puts up some code that does a basic function and someone else takes that basic function and makes it fly a rocket ship.  Maybe that's a bit extreme but my point is that things grow from a collective effort, every time being pushed to be better and different. At the same time you do run into problems with communication and people not being on the same page,  but I feel in the end the rewards out way the some time bickering and arguments over how things should happen.  The way the Urban Conga is set up is anyone can come to us with an idea and the motivation to make the idea happen.  What we want to do is make that idea for an interactive installation happen. Either through helping that person with funding or just helping them build and design it. Ever since we started this collaborative group so many artists, performers and creators have reached out to us to make stuff happen. People need something that is actually out, doing stuff that they can sort of latch onto. Collaborating with these people just helps me learn more of their specific skill set.

 

Novedge: What advice would you give to people looking into going to college to study architecture?

Ryan Swanson: If you want to study architecture in college make sure it is something you are truly passionate about because it takes over your life!!! Keep your mindset open when it comes to what design and architecture are when starting. You will realize that the knowledge you learn in architecture school can be used in so many different ways of design not just in building buildings.  Also architecture school is all about teaching the art side of things and not the real side of architecture so make sure you study how things functionally work and about coding and all that jazz as well as the fun stuff. Architecture school becomes a part of your life you kind of begin to realize no one outside of architecture school really understands what you are going through. It makes you feel sort of like an elitist in the college world but also excluded. Learn to love the studio and make it your home. Working in the studio is the most important part of architecture school. It goes back to the whole idea of putting different skill sets into one room and learning from one another. The main thing is just to hold on for the wild ride architecture school will bring you!

Want to see more of Ryan's work? Check out his website and Vimeo channel.

And here's a link to The Urban Conga's website.

Interview with Josh Mings and Adam O'Hern: "Your brain is full of ideas, most of them very bad"

Here at Novedge, we are big fans of Engineer Vs. Designer, Josh Mings and Adam O'Hern's joint podcast on product design. While they are taking a break from their series (and working on new projects), I asked Adam and Josh to share a bit about themselves, the software they use and the innovations of the future. 

True to their style, they sent me this awesome recording. So here it is, enjoy!

 

EngineerVsDesigner: Novedge Interview from EvD Media on Vimeo.

 

Catch up on Engineer Vs. Designer on its website and on Twitter.

Adam O'Hern is the founder of Cadjunkie, join the community and find him on Twitter.

Josh Mings is the man behind SolidSmack and you can read his latest tweets here.

Let's Connect!

NOVEDGE is much more than an online company: born out of the dream of two engineers to build the kind of online store they would buy from, it has grown to support creativity and innovation. That's why it is so important to us to stay in touch and to interact with you. We want to get to know you better and we want to hear what you are doing, what you love, how we can help you design and create.

We have an extensive presence on social media, so today I decided to take some time to list all the places you can find me, interact with my team and connect with other innovators and professionals like yourself.

THE NOVEDGE WEBINAR SERIES

We are very proud of our Webinar Series! You can find all 62 webinars on our YouTube and Vimeo channels and we add a new one every two weeks. And, starting in June, we will record a live webinar every Wednesday at 11 am. You can find all the details of the upcoming webinars and how to register on our website.

THE BLOG

Our blog features interviews with artists and innovators twice a week, like Chris Anderson and Joseph Drust, and occasionally our President and our CEO share their thoughts on a particular topic. We also introduce our new partners and update you on what's happening at Novedge.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Novedge is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Linkedin. If you are present on any of these social media channels, follow us and get in touch! My team and I will get back to you within 24 hours during the week.

On Twitter, you can keep up with the latest webinar announcements and you can ask questions during the live recording by using #NovedgeWebinar

We also use #NovedgePromo to remind you of some of the best specials we run on our website and #NovedgeTeam and #NovedgeBlog when we post inside news and articles.

And search #NovedgeReview to read the latest reviews on our website, from users like you.

NOVEDGE PULSE

If you are interested in the latest news, subscribing to Novedge Pulse is for you! Pulse shows news and posts from 350 blogs, and sources about 500 different authors. You can also read it on Twitter or Facebook.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES

Kevin Luu is our online community manager and does a great job of moderating our three online communities, Rhino Jungle. WikiCAD and Vectorworking. If you haven't already, I invite you to join the one that matches your interests and to get involved with other professionals. Each community is also present on Twitter and Facebook, so you can easily keep in touch.

Rhino Jungle is the place to learn and share about Rhino, plugins and complimentary products. You can also connect on Twitter and Facebook.

WikiCAD is the place for all Autodesk product users. You can also check it on Twitter and Facebook. 

And Vectorworking is the community for all Vectoworks users. You can also connect on Twitter and Facebook. 

THE WORLD IS 3D

We recently created The World is 3D, our community for Media and Entertainment professionals. You can join it on Twitter or on Tumblr. We also publish an interview with an M&E artist every Friday on our blog.

LINKEDIN

Finally, you can follow us on Linkedin and also join our Linkedin Group, The Novedge Network. We are still shaping this group, so I would love to hear from you what in your opinion would make a great topic of conversation.

NOVEDGE'S TIP OF THE WEEK

And last, but not least, we just started a series of short videos of tips on how to best navigate our website. Our site has great tools, including user's reviews and detailed licensing information. I plan on posting one tip every Thursday evening, check out the first Novedge's Tip of the Week and let me know what you would like to see in  future videos.

That's it for now. Please take a few minutes to leave a comment and let me know which social media channel you like the most and what we can do here at Novedge to connect and build community.

 

 

Interview with Chris Anderson: "Technology is not important. What's important is participation"

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Chris Anderson over the phone, for Novedge's series of interviews with artists and innovators. I am a big fan of Chris's books and Novedge fits perfectly in his Long Tail business model . For those of you not familiar with Anderson, he is a writer and the founder and chairman of 3DRobotics, a robotic manufacturing company. He was also the editor of Wired from 2001 to 2012.

Novedge: I'm a huge fan of your books and really enjoyed Makers. My first question for you is: How would you define yourself? You're an entrepreneur, you're a writer. How do you describe what you do and who you are professionally?

Chris Anderson: I try to avoid that question (laughter) I do a lot of things. I try not to come up with any single label. I'm a CEO. I'm a boss

Novedge: One thing I'm curious about is how you became passionate about writing about trends and the future. What lead you to it?

Chris Anderson: I have been very lucky to be around people who were kind of doing the same thing. I was lucky to grow up with a family who encouraged kids to be thoughtful about where this is going and where you should go, and to be exposed to a kind of analytical culture in my family. Then I was lucky to work in places that encouraged that first at Nature and Science and then at Wired. Wired is a publication very much about ideas and trends, from science to future technology.

Novedge: How did you first come into contact with 3D printing?

Chris Anderson: I heard about Makerbot and I happened to be in New York shortly after they started. I asked to get a tour, went to Brooklyn and walked through the facilities. I ended up buying their 3D printer on the spot. I bought #380 and that was mind blowing. I put it together and it didn't really work very well but the next one I got worked great. And the rest is history.

Novedge: What's the favorite thing that you printed on your Makerbot?

Chris Anderson: I wrote about it in Makers. We printed a lot of things but the thing I actually like the most was furniture, you know, items that I do with my daughters. The things I design myself are pretty cool but I'm not a very good designer, so the things that we download from Thingiverse and print out, those are the ones that print so well. So, yeah, I like the furniture the best.

Novedge: Let's talk about how hard it is to use the printer and the software. Do you see regular people learning how to use the software or do you see more people downloading the designs and printing them at home? How hard do you think it is to use this technology, if you don't already work in a tech field?

Chris Anderson: It used to be very hard and now it's getting incredibly easy. So now my children do this. They don't need me anymore. They use Tinkercad on the web, which is super easy for kids, but also very powerful. So, by and large, it's not really any harder for them that using Word software and printing paper. It seems very natural to them. Again, three years ago this was super hard but now it's literally like regular printing.

Novedge: Apart from Tinkercad, is there any other software that you would recommend or that you love to use?

Chris Anderson: It really depends on how sophisticated you want to get. The kids use Tinkercad and I actually prefer it for most of my stuff. When I want to get a little more complex, I switch to Autodesk 123D and then in the office, professionally, we use AutoDesk Inventor.

Novedge: There are companies out there, like Shapeways, where you can get a design or you can order something already 3D printed. Is there one you like the best? Do you wish they did something different?

Chris Anderson: We use Shapeways all the time. About every week we send them something. What we use Shapeways for is the material that we can't touch at home, like metals. Shapeways's printing service is very easy to use, but it takes quite a long time, it can take a month for something to arrive. Ideally it's a little bit less than that. So you have to wait. But when it shows up, it's absolutely beautiful. We actually don't use designs that are already on Shapeways. I don't know why but we don't. We tend to use or create our own designs or download them from Thingiverse and then send them to Shapeways.

Novedge: What do you like the most about Thingiverse?

Chris Anderson: I just love the variety. My favorite designer there goes by the name of Pretty Small Things. She's a theatrical set designer on Broadway but as well as designing sets she puts these designs on Thingiverse and they're beautiful. So yeah, I just like the variety, I like the creativity. It's just there's always something new and cool there.

Novedge: I read your book Makers and  you talk about being an inventor vs. being an entrepreneur, how before it was hard to be an inventor and an entrepreneur and now things have become a little bit easier.

Chris Anderson: The process to go from invention to market is a two-part step. The first was to go from idea to prototype, and that used to require skills, machine skills, manufacturing skills, fabrication skills. And the second was to go from prototype to production and that required understanding, having access to mass production capacities and all of that. Both of those have now gotten much, much easier. Obviously a 3D printer is a great way to go from idea to prototype and likewise for a laser cutter or any of these technologies. So you don't need machine skills to go from idea to prototype. And then to go from prototype to production is increasingly easy as well because of so-called cloud manufacturing. Those same files that you design on screen and send to your 3D printer, you can upload online.  Manufacturing companies will take those files and mass produce products for you any way that you want. It's sometimes a little more complicated than that, depending on the product. But fundamentally, regular people have access to both prototyping and manufacturing, which was not the case when my grandfather was inventing things.

Novedge: Are we all entrepreneurs? Are we all inventors?

Chris Anderson: No, no, I don't think so. And that's fine. I think we are all creators in some way, but I don't think it's necessarily in everyone to become an entrepreneur. I think that one percent of people could design and innovate and everybody could start playing with their creations. Let's say most people do nothing but print other people's designs or distribute them, or customize them. Let's say most people do nothing creative with it: but one percent do have their own ideas or do invent something, or innovate. And let's say one percent of them decide they want to become an entrepreneur. That's one out of a thousand.

Would you say that that's a failure? You know, only one out of every thousand of these people becomes an entrepreneur. There are 300 million people in this country - that's when you realize that 0.1 percent is a very large number. It means you've got thousands or tens of thousands of new entrepreneurs, new manufacturers, new product categories, new products themselves that are entering the market that wouldn't have existed otherwise. And that feels very much like the Web, which basically gave everybody the power to publish and, you know, lots of people did nothing more than update their Facebook page but some people created Facebook. The lesson of the web is that the most innovative ideas, the most energetic entrepreneurs, typically come from outside the traditional industry. This is the first time that has been allowed to extend to manufacturing as well.

Novedge: I like the comparison that you made between the internet and 3D printing, this revolution in manufacturing. What are the advantages of actually having more people participate in making products? What are the benefits to society?

Chris Anderson: What we're talking about is what is called democratization. Personal computers democratized computing, the internet democratized communications and now we're democratizing manufacturing. Any time you democratize, you're basically bringing more diversity, more people, more ideas, more contexts to development. What you find is that typically most people are "amateurs", they're not professionally trained and they don't have credentials, they don't have work experience, they don't work for companies that are in the space. And yet, when you look at everything exciting on the web it was all created by people who were initially amateurs. When you look at the biggest web companies today, they were all started by people in colleges, more or less. And they weren't working for IBM when they created these products. They were working for themselves, or maybe not working at all. They were students or they were just users and they had ideas. Now, maybe they were only one out of a thousand or whatever, just a tiny fraction of people have those skills, but because democratization increases the pool of participants so hugely, that small fraction of geniuses creates a huge new pool of talent that wouldn't otherwise have been tapped. So it's simply that geniuses are hard to find. Great ideas are hard to predict, and the best way to do it is to increase the pool of participation so much that the geniuses will emerge.

Novedge: Would you say that it also equalizes the playing field a little bit? We are removing barriers to education and access to capital.

Chris Anderson: Yeah, very much. I think the combination of these tools and these web services and sites like Kickstarter, which brings access to capital to everybody with a good idea, are all leveling the playing field and lowering the barriers to entry. That's exactly what the web and open source software did and it works. Every important trend in technology over the last three decades has been essentially to lower the barrier to entry to participate. Some of the barriers were cost, some of the barriers were permission, some of the barriers were complexity, some of the barriers were community. As all of those things fall, people suddenly start doing stuff. They start acting. They start creating products and companies. People think that technology is important. Technology is not important. What's important is participation. When technologies work it is because they make it easier for people to participate. And I don't have to predict this any more. It's 2013. We are 40 years into the personal computer era. We are 20 years into the internet era. We are seeing what's happening and this is just the next chapter in that story.

Novedge: Companies are starting to hire differently, they're starting to have a different culture inside. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Chris Anderson: 3DRobotics is an open source community and also a company and so we are a traditional company in one respect, where we have employees who have roles and responsibilities and we create products. But we are also a community in the sense that we have an open platform that allows tens of thousands of people to participate and volunteer and create. Traditional companies do it all themselves and we share the function between professionals and amateurs, between employees and amateurs and engineers, between the closed and the open. So that's my company, that's the way we're structured. I wouldn't say that all companies should be structured that way. I'm sure most companies aren't structured this way but it is certainly one of the lessons from the open source movement that this sort of cross sourcing in a process can create the kind of sophisticated product that people thought could only be created by traditional companies. Turns out that a well-constructed community can be a powerful innovation driver. That's something I think all companies need to pay attention to, but it might not be appropriate for everybody.

Novedge: How different is it now to finance your project? Can you say something about Kickstarter and the impact it is having on the industry?

Chris Anderson: I think Kickstarter is really the final element that completes the industrial revolution of the maker movement. It lowers the last barrier, which is the access to capital. It does three miraculous things. The first is that it moves money forward in time. It moves money from the end of the process, when people buy a product, to the beginning of the process, when you actually need to invest in R&D and production tooling. So simply the act of taking presales and getting the customers to fund the product is terrific because the customers are ultimately the decider of whether it will be a success. The second thing it does is that it builds a community around the product so that lots of people pre-order something and they become invested in the success of the product. They want to promote it, by social media or otherwise, and they want to participate in its design and give feedback.The community is a very important marketing tool, to say nothing of a feedback tool, and using that tool improves the product before it comes to market. And finally, Kickstarter does market research. If the product fails on Kickstarter it probably wouldn't have survived in the market. Move on to something else. In a sense it "de-risks" a product. That's one of the hardest things to do in traditional industries and it's what Kickstarter was designed to do. Anybody can do it. And I think that's the last barrier. A bunch of other sites are doing the same thing and it's not perfect. We are seeing that some people are realistic about what it takes to get a product from prototype to production, and some aren't. But by and large it is less risky than traditional startups. So, I'm really enthusiastic about it.

Novedge: In Makers, you talk about the "happiness economy". You write that basically, once we achieve a certain standard of living, we are not motivated by more money necessarily, we look for more meaning.

Chris Anderson: I did talk about that. That's not my specialty. There are many other people who know way more about it than I do, but when I look at communities where the participation is open like our own, they are rarely driven by money. They are mostly driven by passion, by what we call scratching your own itch. Paychecks ? That's great but it turns out people are doing amazing things as volunteers, driven by passion.  And what you give them is a platform and opportunity to act on that. To take the passion and turn it into something that's shared, something that's a tribute to something bigger than themselves and inspire other people to follow their path. My previous book Free was all about that, about the non monetary economy. Meaning is another word, passion is another word. Connection. These are all forces that drive us to do things and when you think about it, most of our interactions with people are not done for money. Most of what we do is driven by non-monetary forces and to be able to turn those powerful social forces into an economic force just by harnessing passion, that's the opportunity here. So I think that the more control we have over our lives, the happier we are. That's kind of the big lessons. Fundamentally what people want is a sense of knowledge and meaning and certainty and all the things that come with it. To the extent that we can extend that to the products all around us, the sense that we can be more involved in their creation and use, the happier we are. Take food for example: wanting to have a connection to something as important as the food you eat makes you less of a passive consumer and more of an active participant . When you look at the people who are going to Farmer's Markets and buying local, there's a reason why what they want to know about the origins of these products. They want to have a connection to the community. They want to feel that there's more than just a product they're consuming, that there's a movement they're supporting or a story that they believe in or a value that they share. And that relationship with our goods is something that you are seeing across the board. It's just one of those things that emerges out of developed economies and I think that we now have the potential to take that beyond food and textiles to more sophisticated manufacturing goods around.

Novedge: Do you think the same will happen in manufacturing?

Chris Anderson: Yeah, I'm speaking to you in my office in Berkeley, which is next to a furniture design company, called Swerve. We're here in California but California is not a low cost labour market. And yet, they're making furniture. How do they keep on making furniture? The reason that people buy it, and pay more for this furniture, is that they feel that it's a superior design. And the reason they feel it is a superior design is that they see the designers. They talk to the creatives. They understand the process and they value the culture that this design came from, because it's their culture. It's shared.

Novedge: I have one last question. What advice would you give our readers about moving forward with the democratization of manufacturing?

Chris Anderson: It's hard for me to give advice to your readers because they already know a lot of this stuff. My breakthrough was not so much doing it myself but doing it with my children. When we brought a 3D printer home and started showing the children how it worked and using the tools, their own creativity emerged and that really encouraged me: if children could do it, anybody could do it. A lot of your readers probably have 3D printers at work. I would encourage them to consider a 3D printer at home. If they have children, a child growing up in a house with a 3D printer is a child that can imagine something and then can make it for real. And that's a powerful lesson. Some of them are going to become the adults who are the designers of tomorrow. It's an inspiration that my generation grew up with a home computer and we created, you know that generation created our web. This generation may grow up with a 3D printer and this generation can create the new industrial revolution

 

To learn more about Chris Anderson, visits DIY Drones and keep in touch with him on Twitter.

Makers by Chris Anderson is Novedge's Book of the Month.

ZBrush is Talking; modo, Maya, and CINEMA 4D are Listening!

DCC companies do their best to ensure that 3D models can easily and smoothly be transferred to/from their competitors' systems

Coming from a mechanical CAD background I'm always pleasantly surprised by the open approach in data-exchange of 3D graphics software, more specifically known as DCC (Digital Content Creation). While CAD companies try every trick in the book to make transferring geometric data from one CAD system to the other as difficult and painful as possible, many DCC companies do exactly the opposite: they do their best to ensure that your 3D models, renderings, and animations can easily and smoothly be transferred to and from their competitors' systems.

CAD companies try every trick in the book to make transferring geometric data as difficult and painful as possible

The main reason for this open attitude comes from the typical production process: most of the projects in this field require the use of several software tools and it would be unacceptable not to be able to transfer data back and forth. A second reason is the relative simplicity of DCC data when compared to CAD data. CAD projects represent products someone has to build, therefore they must be extremely precise, and able to host a lot of non-geometric information. On the other hand, many 3D graphics projects have as final goal the creation of a movie or a set of images. Precision has to be good enough to support the required quality for the final video or image, but not more.

Pixologic and Luxology today announced the release of GoZ for modo

A good example of the open attitude of the 3D world can be observed in ZBrush products. Pixologic and Luxology today announced the release of GoZ for modo, a free plug-in for ZBrush that automatically transfers mesh geometry and normal, displacement, and texture maps into modo and back again.

Gamasutra explains the power of the new ZBrush plugins with this example: "With GoZ, modo can be used to create a base model, such as a human head, to provide the basic anatomy. This model can then be instantly transferred to ZBrush via GoZ for brush-based addition of scars, warts and wrinkles. The enhanced model can then be passed back to modo to create the final rendered output files."

This is just the latest in a very interesting series of "connectors," including GoZ for Maya, and GoZ for CINEMA 4D. According to the Pixologic website more connectors are expected to be released soon, which will make life even easier for ZBrush users.

Personally I love to see the artificial barriers between software systems fall. I believe that the entire 3D market will benefit from this open approach and I can't even imagine how much better life would be for CAD users if CAD companies were willing to follow the example of Pixologic.

Franco Folini

Pixologic Videos
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[Watch in Full Resolution] Pixologic products are available from Novedge

Interview with Daniel Ha, DisqUs Founder and CEO

Novedge recently added a section at the bottom of each page of its website providing a space where visitors and customers can leave comments sharing their opinions and experiences. The tools that allowed us to implement this service are provided by Disqus, a new startup located in San Francisco, just a few blocks from Novedge headquarters. Disqus has been deployed on over 38,000 blogs and is hosting the comments of over 70,000 users. After only a week from the introduction of this feature on our website we started seeing the first comments appear on our pages. While many visitors post comments about products, some use this space simply to ask Novedge technical questions or to find out more information about prices. I'm getting very excited about this technology, and its future developments and implications. In order to satisfy my growing interest, I went directly to the founder and CEO of Disqus to get a first hand opinion on this topic. Daniel Ha, who is still in his early twenties, promptly accepted my invitation for an interview and almost in real-time answered all of my questions. Here is the text of the interview.

Daniel, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?

I founded Disqus with my friend Jason Yan toward the beginning of 2007. At the end of 2006, we decided to work on a web project together while we were in school (studying computer science). Discussion was an area most familiar to us and we began working on tools for forums, group discussion, and community building. Today's Disqus evolved from this as the blog feature of our project became popular amongst our earliest testers. We both participated in Y Combinator, which gave us some money and a lot of guidance and connections. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough for us to leave school and work on our project (which became our company) full time.

We benefitted heavily from enthusiastic bloggers

After launching publicly at the end of 2007, we raised some more money and began expanding the service as fast as we could. We benefitted heavily from enthusiastic bloggers and commenters are naturally vocal with their opinions. Today, Disqus is the leading comment system and management tool for all sorts of sites.

Disqus is quietly introducing a Copernican revolution for the net. While in the past users had to bring content to their social network websites, with Disqus the social network goes where the content is. What are the implications of this paradigm shift?

I think most implications are yet to be seen. What we've witnessed thus far is that people are more willing to contribute to websites when they feel they are rewarded or have control over their comments. If I know that my comments are claimed by me, and they're not just attached to a single site, I'm more wiling to contribute and develop my online persona.

people are more willing to contribute to websites when they feel they are rewarded or have control over their comments

One issue that is brought up often is the fragmentation and overall messiness of discussion. People tend to use their content aggregator or discussion tool of choice, and the discussion may stray far from the original content. I think Disqus will play a pivotal role, moving forward, in bridging all of this together. We certainly think this is one of the most interesting things about what we do.

Disqus is starting to face competition from some big names. How will users react to a proliferation of commenting systems?

We've always had a smattering of competition here and there. The way we will be the best is to continually innovate in providing a great commenting experience. If we can deliver on this promise better than our competitors, then I think we'll do well.

If we can deliver on this promise better than our competitors, then I think we'll do well

For users, I think it's great that they have choice. On the flip side, it may be confusing to have so many different channels for discussion -- our job is to make sure their choice doesn't negatively affect them. We want to be compatible; our network of commenters and publishers shouldn't be closed and we're working to be more open.

Another big challenge Disqus is facing is the recent establishment of login systems independent from the content provider (Facebook Connect, OpenID, etc.). Disqus promptly embraced this trend by implementing Facebook Connect. What is your strategy in this specific area?

Our strategy is to play nice. We're not going to be a login service. We do the discussion part well because we focus on that only. Our own login system is necessary for how things work, but we'll openly embrace the best technologies that will benefit the most people on the web.

Our strategy is to play nice

Facebook Connect has been working well for us so far and we're going to be adding more functionality that will allow people to take advantage of what Facebook has available in their platform.

How much interaction with Disqus is happening on the Disqus website and how much on the content hosting websites (blogs, newspapers, etc.)? How do you plan to promote the social features of your system?

The majority of interactions is on the publisher partners. That's how we want it -- we provide a service and I don't think we really need to see much traffic on our sites. Most of the interactions on our site is from the administration and profiles.

Novedge, among the first of e-commerce websites, just implemented Disqus across its entire main website. What can we expect as far as reactions from the users and benefits for them?

The first benefit I hope you'll see is an increase in engagement from your users. Novedge is exposed to a greater community of commenters, with social features that ideally encourages contributions.
Users should find it easier to leave comments and find more value in doing this. The overall experience should be more enjoyable as well.

I would like to thank Daniel for taking the time to answer my questions. A special thanks also to Giannii, Disqus Community Manager, for his generous contribution to the Disqus users' community and for connecting me and Daniel. If you have any questions for Daniel or for Novedge, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer. The Disqus commenting system is available on every product and brand page of the Novedge website.

Franco Folini

For more information on this topic, take a look at this foldier sPression, an online collection of the most interesting articles on the new wave of commenting technology and its players.

An Interview with Paul Wilkinson, AEC Collaboration Expert and Writer

Paul Wilkinson is a British AEC expert and writer. In October 2005 he published a very interesting book, Construction Collaboration Technologies: The Extranet Evolution, about collaboration tools and processes for the AEC sector. The book is not an academic exercise but is based on his long professional experience. Paul also keeps a blog (Extranet Evolution) where he discuss topics and issues related to collaboration in the AEC world. It's surprising to see this kind of initiative coming from a design area that for many years has been considered conservative in the adoption of new software technologies. I asked Paul a few questions to better understand how the AEC sector is evolving and what impact collaboration technologies are having on existing processes.

Paul, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional activities?

I ended up in construction almost by accident

I ended up in construction almost by accident. While doing my criminology doctorate at London School of Economics, I needed a part-time job. I ended up working for a consulting engineering practice (Halcrow) for seven years, well beyond my PhD completion. After four years doing PR and marketing for a contractor (Carillion), I ran my own consultancy for a while, then joined start-up UK collaboration vendor BIW Technologies back in 2000. So-called ‘project extranets’ were in their infancy then, but seven years later they have become much more widely used, and BIW is the UK market leader.
While working for BIW, I started two freelance projects in 2005. I wrote the first guide to construction collaboration technologies (“Construction Collaboration Technologies: The Extranet Evolution”, published by Taylor & Francis); then I started writing a supporting blog (ExtranetEvolution.com). While my book is mainly UK-focused, the blog is more international in outlook – I flew over to the US in March last year to attend a collaboration conference at Harvard, and it was interesting to compare extranet experiences on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and I have looked at developments in France, Denmark and Australia, among others.
I’m also active as BIW’s representative in the UK collaboration vendors’ group, the Network for Construction Collaboration Technology Providers (NCCTP) – an interesting example of collaboration vendors collaborating!

You claim that the AEC (Architecture, engineering and construction) sector, always considered the most conservative of the design area, is changing in more ways than we would expect. Based on your experience can you give us some examples?

adoption of BIM will force entire supply chains to collaborate upon shared information from the earliest stages of a project

When I started at Halcrow 20 years ago, most designs were completed by draftsmen working at drawing boards; these drawings were then shared with remote team members in hard-copy form, and comments often took days to arrive back; and designers and contractors tended to keep separate. Today, designers almost always work and communicate electronically, feedback loops are often completed within minutes with much less re-keying of information; and integrated teams – while still not the norm - are becoming more common.
Like many others, I expect such changes to accelerate. Adoption of building information modeling (BIM), in particular, will force entire supply chains - from clients through designers and constructors to manufacturers and materials suppliers - to collaborate upon shared information from the earliest stages of a project. Defensive or adversarial attitudes will hopefully become a thing of the past, but there are some big structural and contractual hurdles to overcome.

I remember during the dot-com boom, everybody was pushing for synchronous-only collaboration solutions. Now we are finally realizing that collaboration is mostly asynchronous. When would you recommend going for synchronous collaboration?

we don’t work in an industry which lends itself to constant synchronous collaboration

Most AEC industry processes currently involve the creation of data and then its onward communication to another person or persons. As that information is often complex, the recipient normally needs time to assimilate and assess it. So we don’t work in an industry which lends itself to constant synchronous collaboration.
However, AEC people still need to communicate in real time. In design team meetings, for example, people will share and exchange ideas and solutions, and employ the full range of verbal, graphical and written communications, plus body language, etc. Face-to-face meetings are ideal then, but sometimes time, distance and/or cost preclude such gatherings and we have to look at alternatives, perhaps audio- or video-conferencing. My experiences to date with these, though, suggests that the technology can often get in the way of truly effective interpersonal communications, but future cohorts of web-savvy AEC professionals may a) have better technologies and b) fewer reservations about using them.

The AEC is slowly embracing 3D, and not only as a way to create nice pictures and videos. How does collaboration differ in a 2D and 3D environment?

3D appraches will not become common-place until fully interoperable BIM solutions become widely adopted

You’re right: 3D was once regarded as a snazzy way to give the client or end-users a “walk-through” the proposed project. These remain useful areas for collaboration, I think (so long as the cost, time and bandwidth involved in creating and exchanging data doesn’t become prohibitive) – especially to involve non-AEC professionals in decisions about their built environment.
But there are other dimensions of the project which can be modeled: time, cost, sustainability, for example. At the BuildingSMART conference in London in May, I saw some good examples of designers and contractors employing ‘nD’ approaches to show the impacts of design decisions on project programs, but these will not become common-place until fully interoperable building information modeling solutions become widely adopted and all parts of the supply chain are involved from the earliest possible stages.

What is the role of visualization tools in a collaboration environment?

visualization tools can help overcome some interdisciplinary issues

The AEC industry is all about delivering projects in the built environment that people will interact with in some way. It is natural, therefore, for people – particularly owners/operators and/or end-users – to want to visualize what the new building, bridge, road or harbor will look like, how it will fit into its surroundings, and how it will be constructed.
Within a project team, too, visualization tools can help overcome some interdisciplinary issues, improving the scope for integration and coordination of design, buildability and facilities management inputs from different professionals throughout the design development phase. Assuming all parts of the supply chain are involved early enough, they could design, construct and even occupy and operate their facility in a ‘virtual’ environment before irrevocable decisions have been taken.

When do you recommend collaborating on the original document and when it is better to work on a digital copy (without the original geometry) such as a PDF, or a DWF ?

some research suggested that, for the majority of team members, access to the native CAD file was unnecessary

When BIW first started offering its collaboration environment to the UK AEC market, we found some research which suggested that, for the majority of team members, access to the native CAD file was unnecessary – most members simply wanted to be able to mark-up (‘red-line’), add a comment, or simply acknowledge that they’d seen it. In such circumstances, digital copies are perfectly adequate (though I have met one or two architects who have resisted using on-screen mark-up tools, preferring – as one put it to me – to “bleed all over paper drawings”). Such copies are also usually smaller file-sizes and so are quicker to open.
There will, of course, always be a minority of team members who would like to be able to re-use native CAD files. So long as the original author of the file is happy to allow this, I don’t see this as an issue – it avoids having to re-key existing data, for a start – though such re-users need to beware of overwriting the original file with their revised version (most collaboration platforms automatically save revised files as new versions, thus maintaining a full change audit trail).

What are the major obstacles that are slowing down the adoption of collaboration tools in the AEC field?

AEC collaboration is at least 80% people and processes and only 20% technology

An industry ‘rule of thumb’ suggests successful AEC collaboration is at least 80% people and processes and only 20% technology.
Accordingly, the major obstacles to adoption tend to relate to the culture, attitudes and behaviours of individuals, departments, organizations and the industry as a whole, or the hierarchies, policies and decision-making procedures created by these. Too many projects are still conducted in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and distrust. If we can motivate people to work more collaboratively, to share information and work towards agreed objectives, then technology adoption is relatively straightforward.
As technology providers we can do our bit to address the 20%. Thankfully, we have come a long way from the days when professionals insisted on getting information in paper form; inadequate telecomms are less common; and browser-based environments and viewer applications have helped reduce interoperability issues. But genuinely collaborative approaches by the people involved remain the exception rather than the rule, and that’s the biggest obstacle.

I would like to thank Paul Wilkinson for taking the time to answer my questions. If you have any questions for Paul or for Novedge, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini