As I mentioned the other day, the AU 2011 Innovation Forums will leave you informed, inspired, and energized about trends and technologies that will be personally important to you and your business in the years ahead. These sessions feature a mix of individual speakers and panels that will provoke, challenge, cajole, and enlighten you about entirely new ways to design and innovate. The forums will encourage to you to think differently about how you get your work done. You will also learn where Autodesk stands on current trends and technologies, such as model-based design, the cloud, product lifecycle management, sustainability, and more.

In addition to the one on the cloud, if you are attending AU, I hope you will consider:

Creativity 2.0 – Making Design Personal Again
Sir Ken Robinson
Tuesday, November 29, 3:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

Join an audience of professional designers and consider the future of design technology and its impact on your career and day-to-day activities. Listen to international author and award-winning TED speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, describe a "crisis in creativity" and how our educational system's traditional models fail to encourage and develop our children's creativity.

Next, see how your peers apply the latest trends in professional, consumer, and crowd-sourced design to explore and accelerate their creativity. Learn how new tools will change the nature of professional design. Learn how cloud-based supercomputing helps architects to design increasingly complex buildings. Discover how manufacturers are putting design into the consumer's hands. And watch leaders in the Maker movement describe an extraordinary universe of creative minds and the software and services that help everyone to personalize and design the world around them.

There are several Autodesk Labs technology previews (plus one recent graduate) that allow a student to create a design from his or her imagination.

http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/123d/">	http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/123d/ - 123D turn your ideas into reality
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/fusion/">	http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/fusion/ - Inventor Fusion Technology Preview unite direct and parametric workflows
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/spark/">	http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/spark/ - Project Spark get started with BIM
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/vasari/">	http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/vasari/ - Project Vasari conceptual design and analysis for buildings

Planning our AU week is alive in the lab.