Autodesk University 2017 Top Sessions and Tips on Speaking

This past November, I had the good fortune of presenting a session at Autodesk University 2017 with my office neighbor Donnie Gladfelter. Our session, Overcoming the Seven Deadly Sins of Corporate Training Programs, was just tagged as one of the top rated sessions at AU this past year.

First off of, I am really proud of the hard work that Donnie and I did and I am so excited that others seemed to enjoy the session as well. It was a topic we are both very passionate about, we feel is very important, and it looks like others agreed.

With that, I thought that I might take a detour on my usual blog topics (which are a little few and far between) and share some tips that helped me out getting up in front of people and speaking. Career wise, speaking at conferences is still new to me, but I am getting a lot of sessions under the hood at this point. Most of these tips you are going to find other places, but I will emphasize the ones that I found especially helpful considering many of my (and maybe your) presentations involve some software demo too.

Do your research

I don’t mean research on your topic, which is a no brainer. I mean you need to watch and attend other similar speakers. You get great ideas on how to present and see how other folks manage crowds, pace themselves, etc.

Prepare prepare prepare

This is the no brainer. Spend the time. Run through your session several times. Ask someone else to look over it. Especially if you are teaching a topic on how to do something in software, it’s always good to walk someone else through it first. You probably know 100% how to do the task, so having another set of ears and eyes on it is very helpful to let you fill the gaps.

Love your topic

Do a presentation on something that excites you. Your audience will see your enthusiasm and be excited by it.

Test your software

Are you demo’ing software? Test it out. Then test it again. Then don’t upgrade Windows or your software or anything at all. I will never forget the first time I presented at BILT Europe and I had a beta version of the Classification Manager on my laptop that it was testing. You know where this story is going. The software didn’t run right. And someone mentioned it in the class feedback, as they 100% should have. I screwed up and I will work very hard to not let that happen again. In fact…

Get your handouts done

You are probably talking about very technical steps during your presentation, and everyone will pay attention, but they are definitely going to need help after to follow the steps.

Think about recording your demo

A recent trend I’ve noticed (see “Do you research” above) is the recording of demos in small chunks and playing the video instead of “doing it live”. I like this idea and am planning on trying it out soon.

Get there early

On the day of your session, get to your room early. Be waiting at the back of the room for the next session to end. When it’s done, your strike! Well, just go up and start plugging your stuff in.

Know how to manage folks

You are the MC for this presentation. You are hosting everyone in that room. If someone starts to take over the conversation, you need to delicately shut that down. Be polite, but be sure everyone knows you are the captain. A benevolent and kind captain, but the captain nevertheless.

Just do it

If you want to share your knowledge with the world, this is a great way to do it. But you have to start doing it. And honestly, you are not going to be comfortable the first time, or even the second. It’s gonna take a couple of these under your belt before you feel like you are in the groove. Luckily, your audience is VERY forgiving as long as you are prepared and enthusiastic. They aren’t going to notice the tiny little things that you will.

So get out there! Spread the word! And have a blast doing it!

For Your Consideration…

Autodesk University has introduced voting for its courses this year, and I have made a handful of submissions that I would love you to think about voting for.  It’s just like the Oscars!  Sort of!

You can get to the voting site here, and you can search for my proposals by their names below.  It would be awesome if you’d click VOTE on them…

• COBie and Classification Systems in Revit
• Enhance Your BIM Workflow with the Autodesk BIM Interoperability Tools
• How NOT to be a CAD Manager: Battle-Tested Secrets for Success
• Maintaining Revit Model Standards: Autodesk Model Checker for Revit and Configurator
• Overcoming The 7 Deadly Sins of Corporate Training Programs

I appreciate your time and hope to see you out at AU!

Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-Up Epilogue

Not anything major here. Just wanted to round things up with a final highlight.

Yeah, that’s not the best photo of me, but it’s about the closest I got to a Stormtrooper… this year. Let’s not forget the Star Wars miniland opening at Legoland back in 2011..

It might actually be the same trooper. I never asked for his operating number.

If you get a chance to make it to Autodesk University, do it. It’s a fantastic (and exhausting) week that gives you great access to new tech, great users of that tech, and plenty of space to be a big nerd.

Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-Up Part 4: What I Can Use Right Now

You’re still with me? Nice, thanks. Fist bump. It’s time to get our feet back on the ground and find out…

What I Can Use Right Now

I feel like I might be late to this party, but there was one word that was on every Revit user’s lips out in Vegas:

Dynamo is billed as a visual programming platform. Here’s the deal. Programming in the Revit API needs a pretty high level nerd. It’s programming. It’s code. It’s not pretty.

Dynamo is there to be the go between the API and the user. The nerd level is still a little high, but nowhere near as high as it is in the API.

Dynamo programming – kind of cute

To top it off, one of the classes I took was taught by Marcello Sgambelluri who was hands down the best instructor I have had at AU. He had a genuine enthusiasm and knowledge of the material that was contagious. Well, the knowledge wasn’t contagious.  That would have been amazing. But you know what I mean.

Originally Dynamo was being sold as a generative design application, so I think it got overlooked. Luckily, some smart people realized it could be used to grab and manipulate many levels of data inside the model, and create more practical geometries within Revit. The most basic example I saw was a method that capitalized all the text in your model. A more advanced, but just as useful Dynamo script showed how to lay out actual linework on a topo element. Basically, things that Revit users have been looking for for years, now easy and magical thanks to Dynamo.

I know I called this “What I Can Use Right Now” and I don’t like false advertising. The Sunday after AU (after the Saturday that I spent sleeping) I cracked open Revit and Dynamo and spent some time throwing together my own scripts to see how simple it could be.

The first script I worked on was prompted from a Revit class I taught a few weeks ago. A student asked if you could see column grids in 3D. Well, sadly, of course you couldn’t. It would be lovely if Revit gave you some functionality for this, but not yet.

Dynamo to the rescue.

After about an hour of copy/paste, editing, and some online research, I ended up with a Dynamo script that got it done. It needs some clean-up, but now I have a function that I can migrate from one project to another with the same results.

Secondly, I tackled a task that you see many add-in solutions for, but I wanted to see how simple Dynamo could make it: check a door’s “To-Room” parameter, and overwrite the door’s Mark with the room number. Turned out, it was pretty easy. Again, needs some clean-up, but now I have this little piece of code that is easy to follow, easy to manipulate if needed, and easy to use in multiple projects.

Dynamo isn’t perfect (it crashed Revit four times when I was working on it) and it’s very early in its development life, but it has a TON of potential, and as long as you are deliberate and save your file before usinig it, you should get some great time savers.

Check out the official Dynamo site here, and Marcello’s blog here.

Tomorrow – final thoughts and final day of the week. Thanks for sticking with me.

 

Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-Up Part 3: Pie In The Sky

You’ve made it! Once you get through this, you’ll be 3/4 of the way through my epic write-up of what I took away form AU this year!

Pie In The Sky

AU is first and foremost a technology conference, so the nerd level is pretty high. And I love it.

Auto Generative Design

This skeleton of a wall is the internal structure for a wall in a new Airbus jet. And this thing was a rockstar. They wheeled it out on the floor during the opening session, it had a prominent spot on the showroom floor. The first thing you might think is “that looks like a poorly put together Erector set.” The second thing you might think is that no person designed this thing. And, the cool thing is, you’d be right.

It came from Auto Generative Design. The basic idea is, you give the computer a set of parameters and priorities, and thanks to the miracle of infinite computing, the computer has the power to run through dozens upon dozens of iterations of design, laying out and testing each one. You ask the computer for a handful of designs and it comes back with what it thinks are the best.

About to dial the nerd level up here. Hold onto your hats.

You give the design software parameters of size and weight and structural needs, and the computer runs through hundreds of iterations of designs, runs simulations on them, evaluates your criteria, and then comes back with however many options you ask for. Then you pick the one you want. This was what the computer came up with for an upcoming Airbus design, and since you know how this story ends, you won’t be surprised to hear that it is lighter and stronger than one designed traditionally.

While this is obviously not even aimed for the AEC industry, Autodesk knows the interest is there, and it’s just a matter of time. Can you imagine laying out your spaces for SD, then telling the computer to give you the five best options for structural design by the next morning, or having your volumes figured out and then asking your machine to give you the most optimal HVAC configuration? You can’t today, but it is very easy to see a future AU to be highlighting that level of design instead of a single airplane wall.

The week after AU, Autodesk officially launched a website dedicated to auto generative design in the AEC industry. It’s all very skunkworks stuff, but it’s up, and there is a lot of interest.

How’s your mind? A little blown? I hope so. Thinking about this is terribly cool. But tomorrow in my final wrap-up post, we bring it all back down to earth for something you can use immediately.

Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-Up Part 2: Not There Yet

It’s time for the umpteenth AU write-up that you’ve seen! And I am probably a whole week later than all the others that you read!

Not There Yet

In yesterday’s AU wrap up write up, I went over some long promised technology that feels like it’s time to take a serious look at it. Today I want to go over some items that I saw at AU that have been talked about for a while now, but they still just don’t seem ready.

When I look at these things, I am approaching them from a very practical point of view. I want to balance cost with amount of effort involved. I’ve said it before, there are firms out there that have the resources to push the limits of technology and throw time and money at these things, and that is awesome. But I am looking at these things for the rest of us.

3D Printing

It breaks my heart, but as far as desktop 3D printing used for day to day design work, it’s not there yet. You can either spend a little amount of money and have a piece of equipment that is closer to a science fair experiment than office equipment, or pay gobs of money and have something that works… but it costs gobs of money. There was only one small footprint, low cost, extrusion printer at AU this year. This tells me that they know it’s not just ready yet. The other printers are the types of models that cost more than my car. I have been in love with the concept with 3D printers for years, and the potential is there, but the hardware and/or cost is not.

Augmented Reality

The close cousin to Virtual Reality is something called Augmented Reality, and they actually talked about it a lot at AU. The keynote referred to the Augmented Age, and that is cool and exciting but it’s not ready for prime time in the AEC industry. I was fortunate enough to sit in on a live demo of the Microsoft Hololens, and it is impressive. It’s so well put together, you forget how impressive it is, it’s one of those things. But the tools they demonstrated, and the form factor lends it more to the industrial design folks than large scale design for the AEC folks. It will be there someday, and hopefully soon, but not quite yet.

Tomorrow, check out part three of my wrap-up, wherein I get a little excited over something really nerdy.

Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-up Part 1: It’s About Time

I recently had the privilege to present an AU wrap up at both Revit DC and Revit RVA user groups. I thought I would massage what I shared with them and slap it up here. Overall, I had a great time at AU this year. I hadn’t been in several years and I forgot what a great combination of design and technology it is. I also forgot how much sleep you need when it’s all over. I am not sure that I got out of bed on Saturday. Sorry, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. AU.

These are the things that I picked up either through classes, on the exhibition hall floor, through conversations, or just through gut feelings. These were the things that I was thinking about after I left the conference, for one reason or another. I tended to ramble in this article, so I am breaking it up into 4 parts.

It’s About Time

These are the things that I feel we have been hearing about and promised for years, and it’s finally time.

The Model Is King

Ever since the emergence of Revit and BIM on the industry, there has been a push to get everyone to work in the model, make your model important, collect your data in the model. If you’re reading this, I am probably preaching to the choir about how important the model is, but I think it has been a tough sell for many of us. At the end of the day, we just need to print paper… that’s the usual excuse. And frankly, a lot of the promises of what the model could do for us or how easy it would just didn’t hold up. I think we have finally turned a corner. There were vendors on the hall floor that were so confident in how easy it was for their technology to be able to get the proper data out of a model, they invited visitors to simply walk up with their Revit file on a flash drive and they would make the magic happen. There were so many classes and vendors on working with the model and sharing data from the model, and you didn’t get the sense that people were rolling their eyes at it anymore. The idea of interoperability was huge, and that’s not interoperability with a DWG file, it’s foundation is the Revit model file.

The Cloud

Are you tired of hearing about the cloud? I am. But, if you looked at either running applications from the cloud or hosting documents a couple years ago, it’s definitely time to take another look. There are probably other solutions out there, but I spent some time running Revit through a virtual machine via Amazon Web Services. I was amazed at how the performance was. Last time I looked at running Revit through the web, there was a lag that made it completely unbearable. The setup I used had completely done away with this lag. This is totally a viable solution now.

I was also really impressed with how effective FormIt 360 is, even moreso that it is a cloud based app. First and foremost, it is Autodesk’s attempt to replace Sketchup. I sat in on a lab with the head of the FormIt team, and it is absolutely ready to replace Sketchup in the design workflow. It feels like it has some way to go for those of you who use Sketchup for presentation work, but it is already a superior tool for design. The modeling is just as easy as Sketchup, and it integrates into a Revit workflow with far greater ease.

Last in the cloud is hosting documents. BIM 360 Docs was officially launched at AU, and it looks sharp. There is a waiting list to get rolling on it, but the team took the time to fill a lot of needs for sharing and marking up docs online. It’s mainly in the construction end, but it is definitely a solution I am going to keep an eye on.

Virtual Reality

Everyone who saw The Lawnmower Man was excited over the potential of VR. So, maybe five of us. Luckily, Virtual Reality became more prominent over the years, and not only through amazingly horrible sci-fi movies. We saw promise after promise of it being integrated in the AEC world, and while we saw some neat applications, they were all at the experimental end, or just for the firms with the really big wallets. That’s not the case anymore. Oculus Rift had a strong presence at the conference, and they were really fun to play with. There were multiple visualization offerings that could work with VR for people to choose from. If you don’t want to pay whatever for a Rift, you can fork over just a couple bucks and get a Google Cardboard or something akin to it. Combine that with Stingray or Max and your Revit model, and you have a high quality and inexpensive VR solution. There isn’t much of an excuse anymore.

That’s it for the first part of my wrap-up. To recap: all of these have been talked about for years, and frankly, were either too expensive or really didn’t work effectively before. It’s definitely worth your time to reevaluate.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll be covering the tech that just isn’t quite there yet.

 

Winter Blues and Online Classes – AU Virtual

Wow!  It’s been very long since I posted something!  Do you care?  Possibly.  If you do, that’s very sweet of you.  Winter is always tough; I don’t like the sun setting right after lunch.  And to top it off, I didn’t even get to go Vegas this year for Autodesk University.  Luckily, Autodesk brought the best parts of AU to me!  (Note: well, maybe not the BEST parts, but some pretty good parts)

According to this article, attendance at AU was down about 30% this year.  That’s physical-in-person-I-can-touch-you attendance.  Now stop touching me.  This was also the year that Autodesk introduced AU Virtual, which (according to the same article) was “attended” by about 20,000 folks.  First off, this number is hard to quantify and verify.  However, I’m not gonna argue with it, because I bet it was a LOT of folks who watched some AU classes online.

My experience with online classes has been hit or miss over the years, mostly miss.  The content is sometimes questionable (no, not inappropriate, just not what I was hoping for – get your mind out of the gutter.  And I told you to stop touching me!) the presenters are not always engaging, but the worst part is the format.  You are stuck staring at someone’s screen, quite often a PowerPoint, and you hear them talk.  That’s it.  You stare at the screen for an hour listening to someone else go on and on and on.  Eyes glaze, minds wander, snoring ensues.

I haven’t done much research into how the human mind learns and how it assimilates data, but I bet staring at a screen with someone talking at you is low on the list of effective ways to learn something.  Luckily, the folks at Autodesk agreed with me.

A+ to the format of the AU Virtual classes.  You have a screen on the left showing a PowerPoint presentation or an application, and on the right is a human.  A real live human being.  Looking up at the camera and talking.  This tiny little human addition made the learning far more engaging than most other online classes I had seen.

Another issue with most online classes is, man, you REALLY want to show something to someone afterwards, but you can’t record the presentation!

A+ to letting folks download the ENTIRE screencast and “handouts”.  This is an absolutely remarkable feature.  If I could do a backflip, I would.

I won’t put an overall grade on the presenters or the specific classes.  I will say this – the large majority of the classes we watched were very much worth our time and the presenters were clearly knowledgeable.

The only drawback was the selection of classes.  I’ll give this a C.  I imagine this was being handled on a more tentative and experimental basis, but there were certainly many more “real” classes that I would have loved to have seen “virtually”.

Lastly, A+ to the price.  For those folks on subscription, the price was very very low.  I don’t want to use the word “free”, because that’s a big check I cut every year to Autodesk.  Having AU Virtual as complimentary for the subscription folks made the value of subscription much greater, however.  And frankly, I sometimes scratch my head as to what exactly why I am paying for subscription fees (aside from the license agreement), wondering what extra I am getting from this.  Bonuses like this make me scratch my head a little less.  It is my understanding that the cost wasn’t crazy for non-subscription folks.  I bet well worth it.

Obviously, there are features to the “in-person” conference that just cannot be experienced online.  I have attended twice now and I look forward to going again, even with the excellent option of seeing the classes online.  And no, not because it’s just Vegas.

So, a big kudos to the team who put together AU Virtual this year.  If you missed it this year, be sure to take advantage of it next year.  Hopefully, Autodesk will continue to expand the offerings and keep the excellent work they did for the first AU Virtual.  Hopefully, they will keep the same cost for subscription users, or have a VERY low cost to offset some of the expenses.

And hopefully next year, I’ll get to back to Vegas.