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Autodesk, a large software company mostly known for its founding flagship design software, AutoCAD, has been developing and selling design-related software for more than 30 years.
BEYOND COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN
While many people may not know Autodesk by name, their software has touched most people’s lives. Most human-created things on earth (designed and made in the last 30 years) – from the chair you’re sitting in, to the building that it’s housed in, to the car you drove in on, to the special-effects blockbuster you watched – are likely to have been created, at least in part, by Autodesk software.
As pervasive as Autodesk’s software may be, the company’s leadership has for the last decade been aggressively exploring what’s next for the company. Beyond incremental improvements to its legacy products, Autodesk has been developing new tools to solve the design problems that its customers will face in the future.
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An illustration of The San Francisco Ferry Building from the graphic novel Prelude to Then.
Carl Bass, Autodesk’s CEO, a hardcore “maker” himself, was not only interested in finding potential markets to expand into. He was also interested in prototyping early and often in order to get real insight into what would matter to the company – and its customer – in the future. Carl is an innovator with a high degree of risk tolerance. As such, he likes to prototype and experiment to understand what’s working and what’s not. This principle permeates Autodesk’s culture today.
Enter Maurice Conti, head of Autodesk’s Applied Research Lab and the director of strategic innovation in the company’s office of the CTO.
CARL BASS: QUICKLY PROVE OR DISPROVE ASSUMPTIONS IN ORDER TO LEARN
THE CHALLENGE
Back in 2010, Autodesk’s CTO, Jeff Kowalski, tasked Conti to “go look in our blind spots,” which Conti knew, by definition, he could not be directed to find. He had to go look where the company was not, seek out new opportunities to focus on, and consider things that no one had yet pondered. So began Conti’s search.
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A-HA
As Conti scanned the horizon for blind spots, he began looking into different areas adjacent to those Autodesk traditionally focused on. For instance, as he dug into the manufacturing industry – one of Autodesk’s most important areas of focus – he saw an opportunity in advanced robotics. “We [had] nothing really going on [there],” Conti said. “No strategy, no projects, no point of view. I thought we were probably overlooking something really important for the future.”
Even more interesting to Conti was the idea that robots could be used to augment human capabilities. Rather than the current debate about how increasing the use of robots will fundamentally remove humans from the equation, Conti has a different point of view. In his mind, there are many jobs that neither humans nor robots do well alone. By getting them to work together, in a sort of symbiotic relationship, you could essentially change how work is done, enabling many things to be performed more safely, efficiently, and effectively.
Conti and his team dove into the opportunity headlong. After asking lots of questions (i.e., observing), the team decided to prototype a scenario whereby humans and robots could work side by side (without the fear that robots would squash the humans). To test this, David Thomasson, a principal research engineer on Conti’s team, began programming small, affordable desktop-sized robots to watch and learn from humans. “There’s a robot watching a craftsman, for example, carving wood. And it’s learning the types of cuts you prefer, and it can come in and repeat them, or make variations of what you do, in your style, so you can both be working on a job together.”
As the team continued to prototype this idea, more questions arose along with the new insights. How can we make it easier to program industrial robots? The software that comes from the manufacturers is focused on getting the robot to do one thing thousands of times. But what if you want to do thousands of different things just once? Can we interact with the robot in real time, without needing CAD and CAM? With just gestures and natural language? Or could we just teach the robot to learn how to do things on its own with deep machine learning systems, so you don’t need to tell it what to do, just what you want?
Conti’s philosophy is that to understand these kinds of questions deeply, one has to actually try to answer them through prototyping.
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KITCHEN OF THE FUTURE
Excerpt from a graphic novel by Autodesk Applied Research Lab
CASE STUDY AUTODESK: PROTOTYPING THE FUTURE
DESIGN JOURNEY
Excerpt from a graphic novel by Autodesk Applied Research Lab
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THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS …
Conti’s team has a unique approach to R&D, which they call Risk and Determinism. Autodesk’s product development teams are on the hook to deliver great high-quality software on schedule. They can’t assume much risk, and the company relies on their determinism. Conti’s team, by contrast, can assume a lot of risk so the product teams don’t have to. His small team of about half a dozen designers and engineers prototype new ideas and concepts quickly and iteratively. They can quickly develop an understanding of the core challenges and opportunities without having to invest a lot in resources.
In Conti’s mind, the absolute keys to his group’s success are the following: a direct connection to management gives them the air cover needed to take the real risks necessary to develop innovative ideas. It also creates a very short feedback loop so that the lab’s findings can quickly influence strategy.
Short, aggressive timelines to prototype and demonstrate value are a must. Typically the Applied Research Lab works in three-month tranches. Some concepts may take longer to develop fully, but prototyping is done quickly and iteratively.
In addition, ideas and prototypes must eventually link with the company’s vision and core strategy. The team has a keen focus on making sure that their work is providing value back to the company.
Finally, prototyping does not have to be physical or cost a lot of money. In fact, storytelling can be a great way to prototype ideas early.
In this vein, Conti and his team have been developing methodologies to effectively explore deep-future concepts. They call it Strategic Futures, but the technique is sometimes called SciFi Futures, scenario planning, or world building.
By using storytelling, in the form of graphic novels, to explore futures that are relevant to the company, Autodesk can validate and execute new business models without wasting time and money trying to bring every idea to life. 
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DISTANT FUTURES
BY AUTODESK APPLIED RESEARCH LAB
Prototyping distant futures takes a lot of creativity and a strong point of view.
GETTING SCRAPPY
A lot of what goes on at Autodesk is about prototyping possible futures, often no more than 18 months out. However, when it comes to prototyping distant futures, this is where the Applied Research Lab steps in.
When you think about the distant futures of design, you may envision robots and Minority Report – style user interfaces. Go further, and deeper, and you’ll find entire fields of study that, at first glance, seem otherworldly. Take synthetic biology, for instance. At this very moment, Auto-desk researchers and engineers are prototyping software to design biological structures at the nano scale. Like biological lockboxes that carry single molecules of cancer medicine through a person’s bloodstream and only open when they encounter cancer cells. Or 3D printing yeast cells with custom-designed genomes.
The challenge in spending resources in distant futures is that it becomes difficult to describe why this research, and the subsequent prototypes, matter. This is where storytelling comes in.
STORYTELLING
For the last year, Evan Atherton, a senior research engineer on Autodesk’s Applied Research team, and a small cohort of interns have been writing graphic novels to prototype stories about distant futures. This scrappy team creates lush environments far out in distant futures, sometimes 300 years ahead, to help convey the possibilities of some of the tech Autodesk is working on today. These aren’t brand-heavy marketing materials. Rather, the idea behind publishing these stories is to connect with people inside and outside the company, giving them a platform by which to pose questions. And, while the results speak for themselves, the cost for this endeavor is minimal.
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PROTOTYPING TOOLS
WHAT MATERIALS TO USE?
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It was author Mokokoma Mokhonoana who said, “A blank check kills creativity.” Constraints are fuel for creativity. When you are in a really early stage, just playing around with different concepts, use materials that are easily available and cheap and that are accessible. A material that limits your aesthetic options helps to remove fear and to avoid focusing on how it looks. That is something to tackle in a later stage. Once you’re a bit further along, it still makes sense to make “throwaway” prototypes, but they will be more involved. Paper prototyping keeps your entire design team engaged, even if they don’t have developer skills.