Smart cities have been called “the future of urban development”, but what is a smart city and what does it mean to digital designers and engineers?

Autodesk made further strides into its quest to empower the technological transformation of the construction industry with its recent acquisition of BuildingConnected – a leader in preconstruction tools that help building owners and contractors streamline their operations and communicate better.

The state of our nation’s infrastructure is grim. The most recent report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave U.S. infrastructure an overall score of “D” for “poor” or “at risk”.

If your job involves capturing existing field conditions as part of the design and construction process, you’ll know it’s a tedious, manual, often analog and inaccurate process, which often leads to costly re-work.

Whether you’re renovating a building or involved in a large-scale infrastructure project, the process goes something like this:

As any surveyor or field engineer knows, capturing existing field conditions for an infrastructure project or building renovation is a tedious, manual, often analog, and inaccurate process – not to mention dangerous.

Renovations projects are a particular challenge since the infrastructure or building may be decades old and designed before the age of digital blueprints. You’re almost guaranteed to start a project using static 2D image documentation of existing conditions. Verifying and updating these manually is a lot of leg work.

When we launched GovDesignHub in the spring of 2018, we had one goal in mind – to address the lack of resources, discussion, and analysis available online for those who practice in government digital design ecosystem.

Today, we’re proud to be the only website that showcases government design projects and the technology used to support them and deliver content to help public sector organizations accomplish their missions.

In the words of one of our top contributors, Lynn Allen, of Autodesk fame:

What do a Facebook data center, a railway, an expressway, an office building extension, and a cancer center have in common?

These and other global projects are recipients of this year’s AEC Excellence Awards in recognition of how they’ve embraced technology to reimagine the processes of design and construction.

Want to win a free pass to Autodesk University (AU) 2018? Earlier this summer, we announced that we’ll be awarding a full conference pass for you or a chosen nominee at your agency or department to attend Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas from November 13-15^th.

Autodesk introduced its Autodesk Collections a couple of years ago and there’s never been a better time to make the switch from individual product subscriptions to a collection. Thanks to a limited time offer from Autodesk, your agency can save 20% on the remaining months of your existing term if you switch by October 25, 2018.

But what’s the buzz about collections and why make the move?

Why Make the Move to Autodesk Collections?

It’s that time again, when agencies rush to spend their remaining year-end budget before the September 30^th “use it or lose it” deadline. One-third of federal budget dollars are spent in the last quarter of the year, often in a wasteful manner. But for those in the field of digital design – there are many opportunities to make value-based investments using taxpayer dollars before it’s too late.

1. Training