We're proud to share that we recently won the Design Slam Competition at Autodesk University earlier this month!

The Design Slam is a intense challenge of design, skill, and presentation, all compressed into 20 minutes. Run by Cut&Paste these mini design competitions are for all sorts of different toolsets, from Photoshop to 3D software.

Three competitors are given a design problem (or "brief" as it's sometimes known) a few weeks prior, and are only allowed to bring a handful of pre-made pieces with them. No notes, sketches, or anything else, and all the pre-made stuff you bring gets reviewed by a panel for fairness. Then it's off to the races, you've got to do the entire project in 20 minutes, live, in front of everyone at the same time, and then present your idea. Best person wins. So it's a balance of technical ability, design chops, and presentation skills that wins!

This being at Autodesk University, Autodesk's great get-together, the competitions were all focused on one of their tools. We were invited to participate in the Revit competition, up against heavy-hitters from HOK and Burt Hill, William Lopez Campo & Arman Chowdhury, two amazing people from amazing firms. One of which had already won one of these things in Germany. Stiff competition!

The design problem was to make a temporary pavilion at a French historic site: The Royal Salt Works of Claude Nicolas. Called 'Dangerous Liaisons' it was to help visitors encounter the site in new ways, inform and entertain them, while expressing the site's rich history, both Architecturally and culturally.

Here was the pitch for the judges: Salt crystals grow mathematically from a single introduced flaw, chaos controlled via structure. Supplanted by Culture & Tourism, Salt is no longer the power to France it once was. So we proposed that we turn the Salt Works into a Cultural Works for a summer by reviving the old factory buildings with the temporary installation a CNC router, and in turn fabricating onsite a whole series of elements to celebrate the site and the culture of France.

Not only a series of towers, a view platform, a bandshell, and cafe pavilions would be generated onsite, but also sellable designer products made from the scrap of the sustainable plywood left over.

No two of any of these items would be alike; for the use of parametricly-driven elements, consumer-driven customization, visiting designers-in-residence, and a simple randomizer script would make creating unique items easy and affordable.

The towers would collect power via draped solar panels, which in turn would drive a site-specific wifi network running an augmented reality application for common smart phones for the visitors to interact with.

This application would not only label everything onsite when viewed thru the smartphone, and show visual ghosts of what was to be historically, it would lead the assembly of the various elements via 2D barcode tags attached directly to the onsite fabricated parts. Thus turning the act of building into a celebratory group effort, a structure that wants to be built, and a new utopian model for our current times reflecting the original utopian ideals woven into the site and it’s history.

Finally, everything shown here is ready for CNC fabrication, right now, from this model, ready to go, and we made and brought along a prototype model to prove it! We really wanted to focus on something that was more build-able, less conceptual.

So the images you see here are nicer renderings and a slightly more detailed version of what we did on stage in 20 minutes. A very intense 20 minutes indeed!

Here's the image that Jeffrey created in the Design Slam itself, where he only had time to do one rendering.

We also have a video of it, and we'll post here on our blog again once the 'official' video goes live on the Cut&Paste site!

Also for those Revit heavies out there, we'll be following up with a more Revit-specific post about how we made the towers, complete with some Families for y'all to download and play with!

Hey, just a quick note: we won the Design Slam at AU 2009! W00t! We'll follow up with a more detailed blog post soon, showing what we did, but wow, we're both excited and humbled by the whole experience. Both HOK and Burt Hill threw down great solutions, and frankly at the end I thought HOK had it in the bag. Maybe my flashy Fluevog Boots I had on that impressed the judges. Honestly though, there is no way I could have possibly won without the support of my whole crew. BWC FTW! Now onto our classes!

So we're honored to be in this year's Design Slam at Autodesk University. We've already won just by being included. But it would be nice to beat HOK and Burt Hill! ;-)

Anyways, I can't share anything about our entry prior, and sure will be posting about it after, but in the mean time wish us luck and enjoy the final playlist.

We can plug into music to help us focus and work better. I really use music a lot when I work, so this was a natural for me! I did consider just putting on some Gamelan music, which I just adore, but figured I needed something more rocking to overcome the techno they pump on stage.

So here's the (approximate) 20 minute playlist:
1. "Sound System" by Operation Ivy. Two things. We're Oaklanders. East Bay. Wanted to Represent. Second, this song is terribly uplifting, and I'll need that to calm my nerves and have fun.
2. "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl" by Faust. We were supposed to have French themes in the competition. We wound up with German ProgRock. Sigh. We're doomed. But it's a driving song. I love drone-y music to work to. Probably should have picked something by Stereolab instead.
3. "This Magnificent Bird Will Rise" by Deerhoof. Another local. The combination of noise, exuberance, art, and well, plain rocking in this track always gives me chills.
4. "Hey! Mashed Potato, Hey!" by the 5,6,7,8's. OK, guilty pleasure. I've been working out to this song a lot lately, and figured it would keep me going through the 'hump' of the middle.
5. "Kingdom Farts" by MC Chris. Yeah. Nerdcore. A rap song about how awesome he is at and how much he loves Video Games. I figured this would be a good finale, very fitting for the activity at hand, and well, I just love this song! Even though I love MC Frontalot more overall...

Wow! Where has the time gone. Less than two weeks left until Autodesk University 2009, where we'll be networking, teaching, pontificating, and competing! Getting to be part of the DesignSlam has been a great experience so far, and we're not even on stage yet. Just getting the chance to dig into some tools we haven't used fully within Revit has been a wonderful (but challenging) experience. See you there!

Finally we're able to share some exciting news: we've been invited to compete in this year's Cut&Place Design Slam at Autodesk University 2009!

What is Design Slam? It's a frantic on-stage 20 minute design competition, done live in front of an audience. Three folks go head-to-head on a preset design problem, each working out their solution live (with their monitor mirrored onto a huge projection screen above them), doing a whole project in 20 minutes. At the end of the brief work time the judges decide who's got the best designer chops right there and then. Woo!

We're going to be in the Revit Architecture competition "Dangerous Liaisons" (natch) Tuesday night and get this: we're up against someone from HOK, and someone from Burt Hill. Both great firms that we have tons of respect for. We're very excited and honored to be included, if not a little intimidated going up against multi-national Architecture firms with hundreds of people and fancy Flash-driven websites...

We'll be the scrappy underdogs, straight outta Oakland I guess. Because We Can!

We just got the design brief last week, and we're already buzzing with ideas and excitement, as well as working on some special Revit API tricks to help out. We wanted to bring a robot to fab stuff live on stage too, but then it wouldn't even be a fair fight. ;-)

Now, other than practicing for the 'Slam, there is one other vitally important issue to resolve prior: What music to play while working? They pump techno onstage while the Slam is going on, but we're able to bring our own music and headphones to help focus. This has sparked lively debate here at the Because We Cannery, with the only strong contender to date being "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl" by Faust being a clear front-runner, as well as some Detroit Cobras, Polysics, and Epoxies songs. "Sister Ray" by The Velvet Underground and anything by Deerhoof being decided to be too noisy in the middle, no matter how much we might love it. And while I'm all for Funkadelic's "Super Stupid", it's too guitar wankerish for Jillian (of course, I mean it's Eddie Hazel on that track after all...).

Wish us luck, and if you're coming to AU, please come and cheer us on!

Just a quick note, we'll be presenting at this year's Autodesk University in Vegas in December. We're leading two hands-on labs & one open panel:

Model to Marvelous Goes Mental: Realistic Approaches to Photo-Realistic Design Visualization With Autodesk® Revit® 2010

From Fabulous to Fabrication: Real-world Digital Fabrication and BIM

Lean, Last Planner, Agile and Scrum, Oh My! Modern Processes for Production

We're really excited about it! One of the labs is on BIM-to-CNC fabrication, and it is really hands on. Rather than just talking about digital fabrication & BIM, we're actually all going to make stuff. Everyone in the lab is going to get to fabricate their lab model right there at the end of the lab & take it home with them!

AU has been a great learning and networking experience for us. Early registration has just started. Hope to see you there!