Eric Suesz
Autodesk’s Big Room is an online customer community designed to help AECO professionals connect, learn, and share knowledge. For water industry professionals, it’s becoming a space for collaboration around digital delivery, infrastructure modernization, and practical problem solving.
Do you regularly participate in online forums designed for water professionals?
Whether the answer is yes or no, you’ve undoubtedly had the classic forum experience: You show up with a problem. You search desperately for someone who solved it back in 2019. You download a PDF and then disappear into the void – never to be seen again.
The Big Room feels different.
What is Autodesk’s ‘Big Room’?
If you haven’t yet heard of it, The Big Room is Autodesk’s community platform for customers. It’s somewhere between a user forum, a conference hallway conversation, and LinkedIn – but with a lot more memes.
When you join The Big Room, you’ll notice that it’s not like typical forums. It’s not boring or stuffy. There are badges. There are points. The administrators run challenges, competitions, and post the occasional meme.
Is the Big Room just a big game?
The point isn’t to turn Autodesk customers into social-striving gamers but to make a welcoming space for low-stakes digital camaraderie. The challenges give new-comers easy ways to get started and create some momentum – to nudge you to share your workflow tricks, answer questions that are in your wheelhouse, or just feel comfortable enough to talk about a project that almost went sideways during submittal.
The badges may get people in the door, but the community is what keeps them there – although I admit I enjoy watching engineers become unexpectedly competitive about earning a new community badge.
Why water professionals should join
The water section of The Big Room recently held its grand opening, and it’s starting to fill up with conversation that we hope will resemble the candid conversations we want to see in the water industry:
- What’s the real experience like to build a digital twin? What did you wish you knew before you dove in?
- What’s working in utility modernization? What should be tossed in the bin?
- What’s your take on AI? Are you vibe coding your way to new workflow automations – or waiting until you fully understand the guardrails?
- Which workflows are saving time – and which are just creating new acronyms?
You can, of course, also ask questions about InfoWorks ICM, InfoWorks WS Pro, InfoDrainage, and InfoWater Pro – or any of our other water software. We want this to be a place where you can learn from Autodesk experts and other water utilities or firms who are facing the same digital transformation challenges you are.
Inside the Big Room you can:
- Ask technical questions
- Share hydraulic modeling workflows
- Learn about AI and automation
- Connect with Autodesk Expert Elites
- Participate in product discussions
- Discover best practices from utilities around the world
Sometimes the answers come from Autodesk Expert Elites. Sometimes they come from practitioners in completely different regions who are facing eerily similar challenges. Sometimes, the answer comes from a 30-year hydraulic modeling veteran located in Tasmania, who long ago quietly solved the problem your team has been wrestling with for six months. She can show you with one screenshot what you should be doing.
After all, nobody wakes up one morning and magically figures out digital delivery for capital programs without first learning from someone else’s mistakes.
Are you ready to go Big?
If you’re an Autodesk water customer, you are officially invited to join the Big Room. Sign in with your Autodesk account and click around. Introduce yourself. Ask a question.
Maybe this is the place for you.