Hamish Visser

Engineering, spatial data, automation and design.

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What

I am a Digital Engineer at Taylor Woodrow in London, where I lead the GIS function within the Digital Engineering team and was appointed to Taylor Woodrow's internal Innovation Leader role. The work spans GIS and spatial data, automation in FME, computational design in Grasshopper, and BIM coordination, across highways, rail, renewables, housing and regeneration projects.

How

Most of what I build starts as someone describing a task that takes them a week. The interesting part is usually not the automation itself, it is working out which part of the process is actually load-bearing and which part is habit. I try to build things other people can run without me, which means the configuration lives in a spreadsheet rather than in the code, and the tool has to survive being handed over.

Background

I studied Industrial Design at Victoria University of Wellington, including a research scholarship combining robotic fabrication with spatial 3D printing. Before moving to London I worked at Aurecon in Wellington on parametric earthworks, point cloud processing and geospatial delivery for wind farms, rail and housing. Alongside that I ran a 3D-printed product business for four years and build web applications, which is where the interest in making data usable rather than just correct comes from.