Research Rooted in Storytelling

In the Office of the CTO (OCTO), we tell stories about the future and make them come true. For technologists, science fiction is often a source of inspiration for innovation. For example, many believe that the cell phone was inspired by the communicator on Star Trek. With this in mind, here are some stories that are guiding our research efforts.

	Construction Reimagined Construction today struggles to find a balance in its economic equations as industry productivity declines and labor costs go up. The construction industry is one of the least digitized industries today. Digitization in the construction planning and implementation process is already enabling our customers to capture data that paper could not. The insights gained through advanced analytics in construction projects can help to improve project quality, jobsite efficiency, and safety on-site. Predictive analytics based on data from previous builds can improve prospective project bid estimation, construction planning, and project management off-site. A digitized construction ecosystem offers an extraordinary opportunity to cut waste — time, money, and material — and to reduce the impact on our planet, but this can only succeed if it addresses the industry’s underlying needs: margin, resiliency, and growth. Better data can help us build better, and by reimagining how we build the places we live in, the offices we work from, and the roads we drive on, a new model for construction has the biggest potential to change our quality of life and yield economic prosperity.
	Manufacturing Reimagined What does the factory of the future actually look like? To answer this question and inform this very future, we're exploring this very story. We're inquiring how manufacturing can be reimagined because we see how carefully-controlled our customers' factories are and how today's model for manufacturing is being stretched. And we see how, being born of six-sigma, this model doesn't stretch well. For decades, our customers have streamlined their manufacturing, locking down their processes, making their model as lean and efficient as possible by using people to provide the flexibility and variability their processes lack. But the conformity our customers expect of their people and their processes don't balance well with their need to build variability into what they're capable of producing. We explore stories of the future, but it's our customers that really help make these stories into something truly significant. That's why we're partnering with customers in aerospace and automotive to figure out: what shape manufacturability takes, what flexible, adaptive manufacturing looks like, and how to move generative design from neighborhood planning to factory planning.
	Design Reimagined Why pursue a line of inquiry about how design can be reimagined? Because we are intent on disrupting our design business before someone else does, and because we think that if we can give our design tools more autonomy, we'll give designers more agency. We see how our traditional design tools are instruments we direct to bring form to our fixed intentions. We think it's time for us to let go of our traditional design tools that we have to direct, that we have to steer, and that we have to fuel with our ideas. A reimagined design process starts with us conceiving of an idea for something we want to make and then directing our design tools to help us express our intent and make our idea real. Our design tools need to understand not just our areas of mastery, but our areas of intention and how these areas connect with the patterns at play out in the industries we serve. Our tools can help us master tool space, give us agency to explore solution space, and in doing so, help us navigate an increasingly complex professional space.
	Work Reimagined We've been struggling to imagine the future of work since the industrial revolution. When the Gutenberg press appeared over 500 years ago, people thought there would be fewer jobs in printing. People struggled to imagine the variety of jobs in publishing that would grow from automated printing. When the Jacquard loom was introduced over 200 years ago, people thought there would be fewer jobs in textiles. People struggled to imagine owning more than one outfit, let alone the diverse set of jobs that would emerge. And how many people could have ever imagined that the punched cards that drove the Jacquard loom would one-day drive the third industrial revolution via computers? Automation is no doubt changing how we work, but more importantly, it's also changing what we can work on and what we make. As our tools evolve from tools of execution to tools of exploration, we're establishing a new paradigm for the way our customers will work. The future of work is still fogged with uncertainty, but a few things are clear. We see that teams are the new currency of innovation. Fueled by human/machine collaboration, these teams can help address tomorrow's challenges. We know there is plenty of work to do. We have agency to actively shape the future we want. So let's not let our own failure of imagination stand in our way.

Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental). Making these stories come true is part of that pursuit.

Autodesk makes software for people who make things. If you've ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a great film, chances are you've experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with our software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything. For more information visit autodesk.com or follow @autodesk. The research we conduct is one of the first steps in this process.

Storytelling is alive in the lab.