Computational Design Group: Amazing Future Unconference

Hello! You haven’t heard from us in a while, and we’d like to change that.

Some context

A few weeks ago, we got a few people together at HDR and talked about what direction this group should take in the future. There were far more ideas than I’d expected, and the general feeling was that we should be doing more interesting things.

Some people wanted to take over the world, some wanted to get together and hang out, others wanted to do some presentations like the old days. This group has been going for a bit over 10 years, so there’s a lot of history, and it’s time for a new chapter. The overwhelming message that came through it all was that everyone wanted to work together and solve problems so that we could all focus on doing interesting things.

We, as a group, have an enormous amount of capability, and a really broad spread of interests. Another theme that came through was that it'd be sad if we ended up as another BIM power-user group, we can address all kinds of things.

What next

That meeting, where we all got together in one place (shocking! For the first time since Covid) was great, so, let's do it again, but this time with everyone invited.

All the ideas that I mentioned before are going to need people to make them happen. Many of you will have ideas that you'd like to get buy in for as well.

We'd love you to come to an unconference at BVN; anyone who wants to can have a little court to promote their idea, or working group, or give a little presentation. I'm going to canvas for ideas before we meet, and then we'll run sessions in parallel; we can cover a lot of ground.

Some of the things that came up were:
• What’s this group about? Who does it represent? Who are “we”?
• Should we be lobbying and affecting Change? What changes do we want?
• Why are people in senior leadership positions not showing up to these sessions? Should they be?
• Should we all share our solar scripts, and is that an ambitious enough goal?
• Is there an ROI for computational design? Is it just time saving and automation?
• What are the areas that need our help AND we have the capability to do something?
• And a load more, so…

Here’s a form to express interest in discussing an idea. Even if you don't want to run a session, fill in the form anyway because, if enough people express an interest, I will pester someone into taking carriage of that idea. I might also put people with very similar ideas in touch with each other so that you can find some common ground and co-run a session.