Earlier this month, Autodesk brought a small piece of their infamous San Francisco gallery to Paris, focusing on the future of how things are made. The #GalerieAutodesk has hosted several events from various members of their community base, which includes nearly 15 million professional customers worldwide.
The pop-up gallery hosted Tuesday the Connected Hardware & maker community, including LeFabShop’s Bertier Buyt, Usine.io’s Gary Cige, former CEO of the Open Data initiative of the French Government Romain LaCombe, and Autodesk CEO Carl Bass (I also made small appearances on stage).
One of the central themes of the event, in addition to shedding light on the connected hardware community inFrance, was the Fusion 360 product, which Autodesk launched as a collaborative tool to design products. The product, notably, is free to use. Bass jokingly stated that the official terms of use say that anyone making less than $100,000 annually from products may use the product for free. Bass says that the company has already noticed that non-paying users who begin to use increasingly the collaboration features, and begin to increase the number of designs added to the platform, as they approach that grey barrier of free vs. paying, and that many clients are already voluntarily using Fusion 360 across their entire industrial design team.
At the Galérie, visitors passing through the Marais were able to get a first-hand look at a working model of Autodesk’s first 3D Printer, the Spark, which the company announced earlier this year. While Autodesk does not plan to go head-to-head with Makerbot and other 3D Printer manufacturers, the company hopes to set a standard for file types and information send to 3D Printers, and the Spark has been a great way to learn about putting that standard to practice.
The pop-up galery was inspired by Autodesk’s San Francisco-based permanent Gallery – this experiment in transporting works to Paris (as well as finding local exhibits to include in the gallery) has been a success, says the company’s curator, Jason Medal-Katz – this past weekend over 1,000 visitors are said to have passed through the pop-up gallery. It seems that Autodesk will be bringing their pop-up gallery to other cities in the future, though we’ll have to wait and see which cities the Gallery visits next.