The rest of the afternoon was divided into two different sessions.  the first session was a table top discussion of our take-aways from Lisa’s presentation.  We really hit the “access vs. ownership” idea to heart.  I gave an example that Andrew Maletz, a Vice-President at SHP, had given me a few months ago.  He talked about paying for access to music rather than either the physical CD or a digital file.  He told me, an avid music collector, that I needed to get over the ownership idea and start paying for access.

The table also discussed having a multidisciplinary approach to our education in schools today.  So that students learn to approach problems from multiple beginnings to get at a solutions.  We also talked about issues that may arise from this approach such as: Who Leads?, Who Decides?  This concept supports a more holistic approach to decision making in our industry.

An interesting comment was made towards the end of our table discussion that I needed to share.  ”We assign ourselves titles first…..and then our function.  We are Architects first, designers second.  We are Engineers first, designers second.”  I thought that this was very interesting because it really illustrated how important it will be for us as Architects and Engineers in the future to think of ourselves first as designers then by are individual disciplines.  This comment was followed by, “We are stuck designing “things”, we need to design design.”

The last session of the day was a presentation by David Rova called “Changing Our Practice and Thinking”.  David is a Design Principal with HMC Architects.  David was presenting his work with virtual reality caves and other applications.  Some of the caves and imagery was super cool and really showed off the next level of evidence based design by placing the client in the space to experience not only the visual aspect of things but the noise that goes with the space.  David did bring up a good point in his presentation.  he asked the question, “Is our design thinking changing or is it only technology that is changing?”.

I woke up this morning in my hotel room with ideas still acting like pinballs bouncing around inside my head. The first day of the conference on Design Innovation and Technology did not disappoint. The first presentation that greet all of the delegates was a keynote by Lisa Gansky. Lisa is an author of the best selling book emThe Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing. /emBefore the presentation I jokingly asked Lisa if she was ready for her presentation and she said, Well you will have to tell me after the presentation. Lisa, you were definitely ready. This presentation was amazing. She talked about access verse ownership and moving more towards having access to things/information rather than having ownership of those things. Her ideas on moving towards designing things that are intended to be shared and transforming our business practices in the process were shown in her examples of Zipcar, Honest Buildings, and IDEO. All great examples of how to leverage the power of sharing.

Some take aways from the presentation that I wrote down as she was speaking. Blow some things up, dont be afraid to fail. But fail quickly and often. Learn quickly and learn inexpensively. Make sure that those failures drive understanding and learning.

The future is already here…it just isn’t even distributed yet.

More to come.

Wow, fatherhood really takes it out of you.  I have been spending the last two months absolutely melting every time my daughter smiles at me and trying to catch up on sleep that seems to be so elusive.  But I have finally started to get caught back up at work and able to talk about new things that are happening at SHP and at SHAPE.  But first, I am heading out of town to La Jolla, California for the next three days to attend the Design Futures Council’s Leadership Summit on Design Innovation and Technology.  I will be taking some time to blog about the different things that we will be discussing at the conference.

I have never been to a DFC conference before, although SHP has been a member for a long time.  I have been talking to a few of our leaders within the firm that have attended a conference before about what to expect when I get there.  Everyone that I talked to raves about the level of the attendees and how much brain power will be on display for this conference.  I will be attending the conference with Tom Fernandez from our office.  Tom is the Executive Vice-President for Design Excellence.

The flier sent to the attendees has a few program highlights.  Here are some of the high points:

• Analyze the way leading organizations are creating and fostering design innovations.
• Discover how new technologies are transforming professional practices.
• Develop strategic and tactical leadership techniques that lead to clarity of vision and creative future invention.
• Examine how leading organizations are developing innovation strategies in their practices to create original design opportunities and value propositions for clients.
• Discuss pioneering organizations that fuse marketing and innovation into an integrated growth strategy.

These are just a few of the highlights from the conference.  As I pack tonight and get ready for the conference, I can’t help but have a little sense of excitement about the people that I will be talking to and ideas that I will be exposed to at this conference.  Hopefully I will be able to communicate some of these things throughout the next few days.  Can’t wait and stay tuned.

I’ve started testing out the new Autodesk’s Cloud Service and I have to say that it is really cool.  The new services all subscription customers to Share, View, and Edit Autodesk .DWFX files.   These .DWFX files can be a mixture of 2D and 3D information and can be viewed on a multitude of devices, including the iPad.  It is really a powerful way to take Revit model files with you to meetings or share them with your entire project team.

The only down side to this service so far is the minimal controls for viewing 3D models and the minimal editing and annotating tools.  Other than this, Autodesk has taking some great steps towards giving us tools to leverage the “cloud”.  One side note, it still is the best way to view models on the iPad that exists today.

Other features that are included to subscription customers but are limited to certain product subscriptions include Rendering Services, Optimization, Energy Analysis, and Collaboration tools.  I will cover some of our work in each of this individually.

If you are a subscription customer, check out Autodesk Cloud at http://subscription.autodesk.com/sp/servlet/home/index?siteID=11564774&id=11595437