At the Summit

This year's event is the second annual Vectorworks Design Summit, following the inaugural one held last year in Philadelphia. With 630 attendees this week, the second Design Summit has doubled the attendance of the first year, which saw approximately 300 attendees. Actually this growth extends back even further to what Vectorworks CEO Dr. Biplab Sarkar described to me as the "distributor conferences" that took place in previous years near the company's home in the Washington, DC, area. Made up of distributors, third-party developers, user-group leaders, and invited speakers, these events grew each year, spurring Vectorworks to open them up to the architects, landscape architects, and other designers who use their software every day – the Vectorworks Design Summit was born.

Open to users of Vectorworks's software in the architecture, landscape architecture, and entertainment fields, the Design Summit offers attendees a variety of presentations, events, training seminars, and opportunities to network. But more importantly it enables them to "talk to engineers and find out what's cooking," as Sarkar told me. In fact, Vectorworks boasts that 70% of the features unveiled in the release of Vectorworks 2016, their flagship CAD and BIM software, were born from customer feedback. Sarkar jokingly said that Vectorworks is "too close to its customers," but the company's openness to the feedback – good or bad – from those who use its software on a daily basis is refreshing. In turn this openness has influenced what transpires during the Design Summit: architect Marc Pancera, for instance, will discuss how he uses Vectorworks on a new X-ray, free-electron laser in Switzerland, an application the company could not have anticipated when it wrote the software.

A lot is packed into the three days of the Design Summit: two keynotes, one by new CEO Dr. Biplab Sarkar (CEO as of 11 April 2016) and one by Eva Franch i Gilabert from the Storefront for Art and Architecture; 35 breakout sessions, covering everything from BIM workflow and 3D scanning to lighting design for film sets and the design of public spaces; and nine training sessions, giving users hands-on experience with different aspects of the Vectorworks software. As Exclusive Media Partner for the Vectorworks Design Summit 2016, we'll present some of the major announcements and event highlights in the coming days – stay tuned.