Tuesday evening I participated in Sheffield’s first Design Night held at Sheffield Institute of Arts. The evening was kicked off by Lee Mullin, Construction Technical Specialist at Autodesk. Design Night Sheffield was also a great occasion to acknowledge the 20 year anniversary of Navisworks which Autodesk acquired 10 years ago. The Sheffield Autodesk office is the main location for Navisworks and BIM 360.

The main speaker for Design Night Sheffield was Elliott Crossley who is a Technologist in the Building Information Modeling, Generative Design field. Elliot has worked on iconic projects like Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. His presentation was fascinating as I can’t do his talk justice in a summary and will post the entire talk soon.

We had Sheffield themed drinks, lots of local beer and wine, as well as great local foods like canapies and a another new one to me, the “:toad in a hole”.

There were excellent activities like the making of a custom laser cut key chain using Fusion 360 led by our own Maestro of Making, Paul Sohi.

The crazy creative Pimoroni crew had some fun little robots dueling a balloon death death as well as several of their other Raspberry Pi kits and creations.I have challenged Megabot on Twitter looking at a UK robotic duel, with balloons.

Our friends at FARO had the first ever 3D scan capture booth at Design Night. The FARO 3D Capture booth utilized multiple FARO Focus LiDAR scanners capturing attendees as they stood still for about 2 minutes for the scan. Stay tuned for photos of all the attendees that were scanned in 3D and placed into a 3D scene using Autodesk ReCap and Navisworks.

At the end of the evening we enjoyed something new to me and that was algorithm rave music by Dan Hett and Alex McLean driven purely by live programming in C++ and Python language live with dynamic driven graphics on the screen.

video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/dzWxHjXdK0iIphSi1 

I met a great deal of creative and smart people as well learned more about Sheffield’s history and contributions to the world from steel to sports. An amazing city with great people during this extremely busy week filled with meetings, events, and lots and lots of robots. I am left leaving this city but cant help but think how much Sheffield UK and Portland Oregon have so much in common besides both having offices of Autodesk.

Thank you everyone!
-Shaan