At Autodesk University last week the winning team of the Autodesk Design & Make contest was selected by the audience as Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski couldn't reach a consensus on the winning team. The Design & Make contest was Autodesk employees using our Autodesk 360 product internally to collaborate and using Autodesk products to design and build a project in a short time.

The contest started on September 4th, 2013 when we made a call to the entire company to join the Autodesk 360 Design and Make Contest. We asked employees to create teams of 4-6 to design and make something to be displayed at the Autodesk Gallery for all to see. The contestants were able to use any tools, all Autodesk products, their only requirement was to use Autodesk 360 to collaborate and report back on it's usability.

By October 1st, the first  milestone, 14 teams from around the world had joined the contest and were busy brainstorming and collaborating on Autodesk 360 to create a design.

On October 15, our design and make committee had met with all the teams, and advised that all the teams that they would be allocated $1000 to build their designs. Our teams started getting busy ordering parts and materials, taking classes at Pier 9 and TechShop and learning how to use 3D printers.

We filmed the final reveal of all the designs on November 20th, where all the teams presented their final designs, excited and ready to send their designs to AU.

After much deliberation with our committees and advice from our SVP Amar Hanspal, we choose our top 4 finalist to head to AU.

The finalists were shown all week at Autodesk University.

There were some great projects; a digital thespian trout puppet controlled by a hand rig using Autodesk Motionbuilder, an Autodesk logo 3D printed puzzle designed using Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile, Autodesk Fusion 360 and even use 360 analysis, 3D print a fountain captured using photographs and laser scanning, and a robot mostly 3D printed that would draw pictures on an iPad running Autodesk Sketchbook for the iPad.

Team All 360 – The Autodesk Logo Puzzle
Michael Oakley, Abishek Trivedi, Jeff Higgins, Matthew Sawhill

Team Robot Talent – The Drawing Robot
David Thomasson, Stephane Bersot, Oytun Akman, Evan Atherton, Arthur Harsuvanakit

Team Digital Muppetry -  The Thespian Trout
Brandon Bittner, Antonio Licon, Ian Volkwein, Alex Smedberg, Nicolas McClay

Team GCSO-GS Project Neuchatel Fountain aka “The Swiss Team” -  The Neuchatel Fountain
Aurelia Fabbri, Nabil Nougha, Laurent Pallares, Giacarlo Molo, Cedric Pignat, Francesco Tonioni

The final judging at Autodesk University!

disclaimer: I remained neutral when asked who I thought would win as I had fellow team members on one of the teams.

The winning team was Team Robot Talent!

Each of the members of the winning team will be receiving an iPad Mini. The winning robot is also going to be on display at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco.

Video of the robot sketching a portrait of me, ok maybe not me. 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/btl/11246859435/ 

This is just another proof point robots are taking over Autodesk University. I had an Autodesk ReCap laser scanning robot come to my Blogger & Social Meetup, the Bot & Dolly dancing robot with a disco ball named IRIS blew minds at the opening session, an autonomous flying drone, and then this cute little blue sketching robot won the hearts of the crowd to win. I was afraid of what would have happened if the robot would not have won, would all the robots come out and cause mayhem in protest? That could have been an ugly scene with robots taking over AU and chasing around 9400 geeks...#AURobotRiot

Congratulations to everyone that participated in the Design & Make Contest!

Cheers,
Shaan