"The world is becoming too fast, too complex, too networked for any company to have all the answers inside." Yochai Benkler

This past weekend myself and consultants Jan Liska and Paolo Serra from Autodesk Global Consulting Delivery participated in the public AEC Hackathon in Copenhagen Denmark. These AEC Hackathon events are where experts from the built environment and tech innovators get together to break silos in the AEC industry.

This AEC Hackathon was hosted by the inspiring innovation lab BLOXHUB that also hosts the Danish Architecture Center in a building designed by famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. There were 159 attendees participating from 39 countries. Participants were from local universities such as KADK, KEA, and DTU with the majority from industry such as SWECO, COWI, Ramboll, Goldbeck, and many others.

The public AEC Hackathon events are open to anyone to show up and form teams to participate.

1. Identify a challenge in your everyday work.

2. Work on one of the pre-posed challenges.

3. Show up and individually join a group.

After 3 days starting on Friday with attendees pitching their ideas then organically forming teams to develop a solution to present to a jury on Sunday, 23 teams formed around several ideas like AEC design scored for UN sustainability goals,  digital twin displaying real-time data from IoT devices, extracting AEC design from PDF files, and a solution for determining safe walk routing at night using GIS.

We chose to be floating mentors to all the teams as we felt we could be more effective and make the most impact by helping teams find and how they could accomplish their ideas from a technical standpoint since most of the ideas were based on Autodesk tools and technologies like Revit, Forge, Civil 3D, and Dynamo. we weren't there to just write code or a product support, we helped point them to the solution and the why. It was not providing a fish, but teaching to fish instead as that is more valuable to the participants to understand rather than just be provided some code.

Congratulations to the winning team Digital Twin 4 Every 1!
This built a real-time cloud based BLOXHUB model in Autodesk Forge that displayed real-time environmental data from the IoT sensors located around the building. Autodesk's Jan Liska assisted  this team with their Forge viewer implementation.

Here is Jan Liska assisting with some Forge viewer code.

Paolo Serra helped several teams on everything from machine learning nd generative design to using Dynamo to process data. I called him “Professor Paolo” after seeing his deep explanations to teams in response to their questions.

The recorded presentations by teams of their projects and then the awards after judging. Thank you Kirahub!
https://livestream.com/kirahub/events/9007335/videos/202207733

Thank You!

I want to thank the host Torben Klitgaard and BLOXHUB for their warm hospitality, inspiring facilities, deep provoking discussions, and the great food. I really loved seeing the kids activities in the DAC and will probably write a future blog post about my time near the ball pit and what I learned by seeing the interactive exhibits all with a learning objective cloaked in play such as spatial concepts. I would love to encourage my local friends at OMSI to consider something like this.

Thank you to Damon Hernandez and Greg Howes of AEC Hackathon for another successful event in the series and look forward to doing it again in Portland next month.

Thank you to all the sponsors, students, BLOXHUB, industry participants and local startups.

Thank you to Paolo and Jan for their taking a risk and joining the AEC Hackathon and being vital to many teams understanding and solutions. They are also just the most amazing colleagues, and now friends. I joined this organization a couple months ago and can honestly say that those in GCD, especially the consultants solve the big challenges for our customers day in and day out. They walk into our customers doors and solve the big challenges with a smile. They are the most skilled developers and solution providers I have ever met, and extremely humble. I intend to show more of the consultants and their tips on this blog in the future. They are  wealth of knowledge to solve big challenges and it is a pleasure to recognize them here.

Thank you to all the students that attended and asked a lot of great questions and got involved in the ideas and participated on teams. Thank you to these two students from KEA that told me they wanted to help be the future of change in AEC design and impact Revit and Dynamo.I expect great things from these two!

Another AEC Hackathon Opportunity in Portland on Mass Timber <canceled>

Consider joining the AEC Hackathon in Portland Oregon in March. Attend on Friday for the presentations and team forming.
Mass Timber Summit and Hackathon in Portland Oregon

I would encourage and challenge you to attend a hackathon sometime, even if only to be exposed to the discussions and ideas and not participate on a team. You won’t regret it. At Autodesk Global Consulting, we have held an internal hackathon as have other teams within Autodesk to find ways to creatively explore ideas and solutions and come up with proof of concepts. I would love to hold hackathons with our customers sometimes combining forces to solve their top challenges in new and innovative ways.

Hackathons are an amazing tool that can open up a better future.

Shaan Hurley
Autodesk GCD Global Innovation Lead