Share and learn how-to tips, workflows, and general knowledge articles about Informed Design and the future of the Industrialized Construction industry.
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Safe Harbor Statement
Roadmaps are plans, not promises. We're as excited as you to see new functionality make it into the products, but the development, releases, and timing of any features or functionality remains at our sole discretion. These roadmap updates should not be used to make purchasing decisions.
We are excited to share the latest long-term product roadmap for Autodesk Informed Design.
Informed Design is a cloud-based solution designed to empower building design professionals and manufacturers by unlocking the potential of industrialized construction. It seamlessly connects workflows, enabling projects to be completed faster, with higher quality and less waste.
Since our public launch in February 2024, the product team has been diligently evaluating customer feedback, evolving needs, industry trends, and our vision for the future of industrialized construction.
In this article, we will explore upcoming features and the progress we are making to enhance your building design and construction processes with customizable, predefined building components for precise construction outcomes.
Whether you're a seasoned user of Informed Design or just discovering it, we hope this roadmap will ignite your imagination about the potential that lies ahead. We believe that the best way to predict the future is to invent it – and with Informed Design, we're doing just that.
Read on to uncover the details of what the product development team is currently addressing, planning next, and has on their radar for Informed Design.
Content management
Providing Building Product Manufacturers, Specialty Trades, Suppliers, General Contractors, and Designers the capabilities to share and curate their content for product discovery.
LAUNCHED:
- Improve Product Accessibility via Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) Bridge: Building projects often involve stakeholders and collaborators across multiple ACC Accounts, Projects, and Folders. To better connect these diverse project members, we have integrated Informed Design with ACC Bridge.
Products published to shared folders (using the Bridge Share option) are accessible to anyone with access to the Account Project and Folder included in the share. This integration ensures seamless collaboration and accessibility, streamlining the workflow for all parties involved.
Click here to learn more about Informed Design and ACC Bridge.
NOW:
- Get Started Quicker with Public Samples: Ready-to-use pre-published product samples allow designers to quickly see the value of Informed Design workflows in Revit.
While published Inventor samples already enable building product manufacturers to onboard Informed Design for Inventor easily, we did not have sample read-to-use sample content for the designers in Revit.
The pre-published sample products will serve as a starting point, designers can quickly learn the capabilities and benefits of Informed Design for Revit.
- Improve Product Discovery via Content Catalog: Autodesk Content Catalog is a cloud-based digital asset management tool that helps customers manage, distribute, and find the most up-to-date versions of their BIM content, such as Revit families and AutoCAD blocks.
It serves as a single source of truth for storing, versioning, and accessing content and data. Adding the ability to share and curate Informed Design products using Content Catalog will make it easier for designers to find content quickly and efficiently. This enhancement will ensure that users always have access to the latest and most accurate content.
Design and publishing workflows
Enhance the Informed Design offering to improve authoring, customization, and design, and expand the experience across more of the Autodesk portfolio.
NOW:
- Revit Performance Improvements: Waiting for variant generation while deep in design thought in Revit is not ideal. We are enhancing the performance of our Revit Addin to produce custom variants quickly and accurately.
Our goal is to halve the turnaround time for on-demand variants and enable pre-generation of variants on the web, completely eliminating waiting time. This improvement will significantly enhance productivity and workflow efficiency.
Click here to learn more about local generation of Revit families (RFAs)
- Outputs from Revit: To generate outputs from a local Revit project, users currently need to upload the project to ACC, open it in the Informed Design WebApp, and then generate outputs. With any changes to the Revit project, these steps must be repeated.
The product team is working on a way to generate outputs directly from your local Revit session, reducing the steps required and making output generation easily discoverable. This enhancement will streamline the process, saving time and effort. - Void Bodies: We are adding the option to define Void Bodies in Inventor using Informed Designs’ BIM Definition add-in. Solids tagged as Void Bodies will translate through to the Revit Family result, making it possible to create the necessary cut features in intersected elements when placing instances a project model.
For example, when placing a Door (authored and published with Informed Design) on a Wall, an opening is needed in the Wall to accommodate the door.
NEXT:
- Informed Design Product Browser in Revit: An Informed Design Product Browser will introduce a new way to view, manage and launch workflows on Informed Design Products contained within a Revit Project Model.
Since Informed Design content is organized differently than regular RFAs, the product browser will make it easier to navigate Informed Design content. It will reflect the content currently placed in your project model and allow grouping by variant, product, and publisher.
This will also act as a launch point for more complex workflows going forward. The browser will enhance user experience and streamline content management. - Native Revit Families: Native Revit Families linked to an Informed Design manufacturable product will serve as proxies and speed up design, especially during the early concept design phase.
These native families will function like parametric loadable Revit families and be editable using the Type editor. During the detailed design phase, native Revit families can be validated against multiple supplier-provided Informed Design products, linked to a specific product, or even substituted by Informed Design products.
All downstream output generation activities can be driven by these linked and validated native Revit Families. This feature will enhance design accuracy and efficiency.
- Visibility Settings: Defining well-formed Revit content from Inventor will include the option to define Visibility settings using Informed Design's BIM Definition add-in.
Assigning Detail level (Coarse / Medium / Fine) to Inventor elements will result in corresponding representations in the Revit Family result. This will enable designers to use the native “Detail Level” display options in Revit when working with Informed Design content.
ON RADAR:
- Dynamo Nodes:Dynamo is a visual programming tool used extensively in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, primarily for algorithmic design and process automation.
With Informed Design providing the manufacturability criteria, automated layout using Dynamo and Informed Design is the next obvious step towards layout optimization with certainty.
Informed Design specific Dynamo nodes will provide the fundamental building blocks for working with Informed Design enabling more sophisticated and automated design processes.
APIs and 3rd Party Support
Enable customers, channel partners, consulting, and 3rd party developers to customize and extend Informed Design for tailored solutions.
NOW:
- Public API on Autodesk Platform Services (APS): The Informed Design team is working on releasing the first set of public APIs to unlock its services for building custom workflows for our customers.
This will benefit partners, application developers, and customers with unique workflow challenges who want to leverage Informed Design to build custom solutions to address those challenges. These APIs will provide greater flexibility and customization options. - Demo Reference Apps: To go along with the public APIs, the team is developing multiple sample reference apps that will showcase how Informed Design APIs can be utilized to build custom solutions.
These sample apps can be used as training materials and as starting points for building new and novel design solutions for Industrialized Construction.
NEXT:
- Autodesk Viewer Extension: An Informed Design Viewer Extension will provide access to Published Products in a browser (outside of Revit) for generating variants and creating outputs that can be downloaded directly from the viewer or uploaded to an ACC or Fusion Team project folder.
This viewer extension, along with public API access, will provide a potent combination for creating custom solutions that deliver significant value to customers.
- 3rd Party Extensions: We will provide a way for partners and developers, to run 3rd party plug-ins as part of the Informed Design variant generation process. This will enable developers to run custom code alongside Informed Design as product variants and output types are being generated by the service.
3rd party plug-ins can be used to extend and augment the Inventor functionality needed to produce Product specific configurations and outputs that would otherwise not be possible with Inventor/iLogic ‘out of the box’ capabilities. - Custom Output capabilities: Product Engineers and app developers who want/need to extend the output types generated by Informed Designs’ Generate Outputs workflow will be able to use custom iLogic scripts or 3rd Party Extension plug-ins to generate and make these outputs available in addition to the standard output types available in the Informed Design Web App.
ON RADAR:
- Input Form as a Component: The Informed Design Input Form, used for configuring Products in accordance with the manufacturing rules during variant generation, will be provided as a component.
The Input Form as a component will make it possible to embed the Form into other applications (i.e. other Autodesk apps or any 3rd party extensible application). This will enhance the flexibility and integration capabilities of Informed Design. - SDK for API: To further improve API adoption for custom solutions, the Informed Design team will provide Software Development Kits (SDKs) in the most popular programming languages to facilitate onboarding and deliver value to customers with minimal learning time.
These SDKs will simplify the development process and enhance accessibility.
Insights
Insights will provide feedback for both the supplier and designer to offer valuable information for how products are used, how they could be improved and the value of automated output generation.
NOW:
- Request for Outputs: A new ‘Request for Outputs’ page on the Informed Design web app will be added, where you will be able to view all of your upload and download requests.
Searching, sorting and filtering Request history will be made possible which will provide a streamlined way to manage and track output requests.
NEXT:
- Product Insights Dashboard: Understanding usage metrics of your products is crucial to comprehend how designers are utilizing them.
This dashboard will help answer important questions such as: How many times has this product been used? How many outputs have been generated from this product? What are the most common variants designers are using?
This will provide valuable insights for product improvement and optimization.
ON RADAR:
- Project Insights Dashboard: A single design project can contain a variety of products, across various categories, from multiple suppliers. Having a cohesive top-down view together with relevant product insights will be instrumental in understanding the overall project makeup.
This comprehensive view will enhance project management and decision-making. - Cost Savings Tool: The automated output generation afforded by Informed Design delivers significant value to our customers.
The Cost Savings tool will allow you to measure, visualize and report on the time and resource savings realized because of output generation automation. Having the data needed to calculate past savings will also provide ways to model and predict future savings.
This will highlight the financial and operational benefits of using Informed Design.
Your Feedback
Do you like the direction we are heading? Do you have clarifying questions, feedback, or Ideas?
Please give us your thoughts on the Informed Design 2025 Product roadmap in the comments below ⬇