Episode 015 - Shane Burger

Shane Burger Director of Design Technology at Woods Bagot in the house! We talk Smart Geometry, Zach's computer names, Bass Guitar, Brian Exploiting Jane Austen for nefarious purposes and of course design technology.

​

Download it on iTunes!

Show Notes:

1. Shane is the Director of Design Technology at Woods Bagot

2. Shane is Brian’s boss

3. Shane is also the Director of Smartgeometry and was recently named to the ACADIA Board of Directors

4. The ACADIA conference is not to be confused with the mid-size SUV or the national park

5. Zach Downey AKA “ZD” AKA “Baked Ziti” AKA “Z Dawg”

6. Zach’s personal computers are always named Zack Attack

   1. Missed opportunity: Zaq Attaq

   2. Bigoted opportunity: ZaKKK AttaKKK

7. CASE names their computers after elements

   1. Zach chose “Urea” so he could say he’s pissing off at the end of the day

8. The oldest shirt that Brian owns (circa 2006)

   1. 

   2. Go Gooners!

9. Shane plays the bass - he plays a 6 string fretless

10. Shane plays a better Seinfeld bassline than Zach

11. Zach’s bass idol is Les Claypool

    1. Les Claypool once auditioned for Metallica

12. In high school Brian played the trumpet and wore spats

13. He never skanked. He was never a rude boy

14. Reel Big Fish and The Mighty Mighty Boss Tones are two of the worst things that have ever happened to music. Actually, they’re just two of the worst things that have ever happened

15. The last Smartgeometry took place in Hong Kong

16. Cluster champions lead research projects at Smartgeometry - would also make a great cereal name

17. Daniel Davis’s write-up on Smartgeometry 2014 for Architect Magazine

18. Smartgeometry was started in 2004 in Cambridge UK by Lars Hesselgren, Hugh Whitehead, and J Parrish

    1. They had been doing advanced parametric modeling at YRM to resolve structural issues for International Terminal Waterloo along with Grimshaw but no one else in the industry was advocating for this approach, so they partnered with Robert Aish and Bentley in order to develop parametric strategies and tools like Generative Components

    2. For more on the Smartgeometry story, grab the book Inside Smartgeometry from Amazon

19. Shane worked on the design at EMPAC during his time at Grimshaw

    1. Davis Brody Bond were the architects of record

    2. EMPAC has an incredible program

    3. And a heated facade

20. He also worked on the Queens Museum

21. Shane first learned GC and design computation thought processes from Volker Mueller and Rob Woodbury at a workshop at an ACADIA-affiliated workshop at the University of Waterloo in 2004

22. Xavier DeKestelier, Chris Williams, and Neri Oxman were also there

23. Transaction files, ugh

24. Marty Doscher wrote surface unfolding algos for GC

25. Brian was first introduced to GC by Kyle Steinfeld when they were both working at KPF New York in 2005, and again by Stylianos Dritsas at KPF London in 2006

26. Steve Sanderson taught Zach GC

27. Axel Kilian taught Shane about arrays using egg cartons as a metaphor

28. An 18-pack of eggs is called the “Downey Dozen”

29. Brian took a Jane Austen seminar

    1. In Pride and Prejudice there is a character named Mr. Bingley. Hmmm. B(rian) (R)ingley. Coincidence? Yes

    2. Symptomatic of his general illiteracy, Zach confuses Charlotte Bronte with Jane Austen

30. Wikipedia started on January 15, 2001 (Wikiception: The Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia)

31. WikiWikiWeb was started in Portland in 1994 and is known as the first wiki

32. The Create Form button in Revit

33. “Antimony is a computer-aided design (CAD) tool from a parallel universe in which CAD software evolved from Lisp machines rather than drafting tables.”

34. Grasshopper is a UX/UI win

35. While Sony won the recent high-def DVD format war, they lost the original video format war to VHS despite being considered technologically superior in several ways

36. More like Super Nintendon't

37. Shane had Thriller (1983), Flight of the Navigator (1986), and the original Transformers movie (1986) on Betamax

    1. Fun facts from the Transformers movie:

       1. Featured a Weird Al song

       2. Optimus Prime dies (the first of many deaths)

       3. Someone says “ah shit”

38. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's The People's Eyebrow

39. The whoosh of a Lost flashback

40. I was shot in the buttocks

41. Method Design is a studio led by Reese J. Campbell, Demetrios A Comodromos, and David Stasiuk

42. Shane planned the 2011 Smartgeometry event in Copenhagen with Martin Tamke and Brady Peters of CITA

43. Architect Evan Douglis is the Dean of Architecture at RPI

44. Brian is a robotmonger

45. Woods Bagot hired Shane as its Director of Design Technology upon recommendation by a CASE design technology review

46. While Woods Bagot was an early client, it’s likely that either Grimshaw or Cannon Design was CASE's first client

47. Woods Bagot Paris would be called Le Bois de Baguette

48. Robert Mencarini is Zach's doppelgänger

49. After minute 00:59 this podcast is a real pansexual bazaar

50. Woods Bagot has around 900 employees and 12 primary studios globally. With no real HQ, Woods Bagot refers to itself as the Next Generation Global Studio, “collaborat[ing] better than anyone else in the world”

51. Woods Bagot’s origins can be traced back to 1869 in Adelaide

52. Being a global studio means a lot of VCs

53. Brian has been secretly rating the global studios in three areas. The leaderboard is as follows:

    1. Quality of Monday morning meetings: Perth

    2. Quality of Friday afternoon happy hours: Sydney

    3. Quality of coffee machine: Melbourne

54. Woods Bagot’s new General Managing Director (GMD) is Nik Karalis

55. The Design Technology Group has a number of roles in the firm, from direct project support to R&D initiatives

56. As part of an initiative into real time experience and IxD, Shane led an ACADIA workshop in 2014 and will again instruct in 2015

57. The Design Technology Group uses an agile development methodology and a fail fast mentality, which are management techniques inspired by the software industry

58. NYC cyclists are the worst

59. Or just cyclists in general

60. DON’T RIDE YOUR BIKE ON THE SIDEWALK YOU JERK

61. Zach is the granter of sidebars

62. The Google Project Tango Development Kit can be yours for 512 smackers

63. White Christmas is a Black Mirror episode where people can be “blocked” in real life using an AR device called the “Z-Eye”

Lightning round:

1. What book(s) are you reading right now?

   • The Peripheral by William Gibson (2014)

   • The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (2011)

   • Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds by Mitchel Resnick (1997)

   • Steven Johnson books are a little too watered down - would rather read the source material than the recap

   • Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris (2014)

2. What’s your favorite sci-fi film?

   • Tossup between 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Brazil (1985)

     • All about that ductwork

   • The many endings of Blade Runner (1982)

   • Shane watched Ex Machina! (2015)

   • Zero Theorem (2014)

   • Unpopular opinion: Brian doesn’t like Time Bandits (1981)

   • They’re remaking Big Trouble in Little China (original 1986) with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

   • We found something in the ice (1982)

   • Behind the scenes: The defibrillator chest chomp

3. What’s your favorite retro-game?

   • Tetris for Gameboy (1989)

     • The Tetris song is a good song, especially when played on a pipe organ

     • Tetris was the first videogame in space - a Russian cosmonaut took it into space in 1993 and then auctioned it off in 2011

     • Allegedly the fastest to 999,999 points on Tetris. Notice how lines higher up on the screen are more valuable. The Tetris scoreboard maxes out at 999,999

     • “A bored God plays Tetris”

     • Tetris printer algorithm

     • How to play Tetris on a Canon calculator

   • Mario Kart on N64

     • All Mario Kart games from 1987 to 2014

     • Brian prefers the SNES Mario Kart to the N64 Mario Kart

     • Zach thinks F-ZERO was best SNES racing game

   • Brian really likes the songs from Dr. Mario. Especially Chill. So good

     • Fever

     • Chill

   • Brian loves weird spin-off Mario games

     • Daft Punk’s Get Lucky composed in Mario Paint

     • Mario’s Time Machine - you couldn’t even die in this game haha

   • Cubert for Intellivision (1979)

     • The Intellivision used what were called overlays to assist the use in knowing which button did what for a particular game

   • 20 games that defined the TI-99/4(A) (1979-1984)

4. What’s your favorite childhood cartoon?

   • Transformers

     • Did Megatron Just Turn into a Gun?!

   • GI Joe

     • Brian liked the moral lessons at the end of the show, and the inevitable spoofs

5. Describe your productivity ritual.

   • Ritual of coffee and eggs

   • Check emails - be sure to Ignore all emails from Brian

   • Necessity of blocking out time during the day to focus on particular tasks

   • Multi-tasking is a myth

   • Evenings are mostly VCs from home

   • Commuting by bike is nice because it allows for time to stew on ideas or problems

6. What’s something that recently blew your mind?

   • Shane recently attended the EmTech Digital Conference 2015 in San Francisco. The MIT Technology Review puts on two conferences a year - the EmTech Digital (formerly Digital Summit) conference in San Francisco and the EmTech MIT conference in Cambridge

     • The potential of the Magic LEAP “mixed reality” platform stood out among other topics at the conference

7. WHAT IS ARCHITECTURE???!!! In one sentence.

   • The crafting and execution of functional spaces for experience