Forma Futures: Design the Housing of 2035 in One Hour
Forma Futures: Designing for 2035 - Adaptive Housing Sprints is a four-part challenge built around short, independent briefs. Participants can enter one sprint or all four. The emphasis is not on producing a polished final project; it is on showing how analysis influenced a specific design decision.
Niknaz Aftahi, founder and CEO of aec+tech, is serving on the external jury. Below is what participants need to know before submissions close on October 16, 2026 at 12:00 PM Pacific.
What Forma Futures is
Forma Futures is a design-challenge series from the Autodesk Forma team. Its first edition, “Designing for 2035: Adaptive Housing Sprints,” is organized as four self-contained briefs. Each sprint explores a different dimension of adaptive housing, each is judged independently, and every sprint closes on October 16, 2026 at 12:00 PM Pacific.
Participants can enter one, several, or all four sprints. Entry is open to eligible architects, designers, and students age 18 and over; the official rules list 29 participating countries.
The four sprints at a glance
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Sprint 01, Constrained Urban Site, is the suggested starting point. Where should adaptive housing go, and why? It asks for a site strategy, early massing, and one design decision informed by Forma.
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Sprint 02, Resident Amenity, asks how adaptive housing improves daily life, through daylight, outdoor space, walkability, social connection or wellbeing, with Forma analysis to demonstrate the impact.
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Sprint 03, Climate Response, asks which environmental challenge the design solves, and wants the climate-adapted scheme, the Forma analysis behind it, and the measurable impact of the approach.
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Sprint 04, Future Living, asks how people will live in 2035, and how the housing responds to a future social, demographic or environmental change and evolves over time.
How to enter in about an hour
The entry process is intentionally lightweight:
- Pick one of the four sprint briefs.
- Work in Forma Site Design or Forma Building Design. A real or invented site is acceptable, and Autodesk says the exercise can be completed in as little as one focused hour.
- Publish a public LinkedIn post that names the sprint, includes at least one image, uses #FormaFuturesChallenge, and tags @Autodesk Forma.
- Once the post is live, the entry is submitted; there is no separate upload form.
One image is enough to qualify, but two or three can make the process easier to understand. Useful combinations include a hero image, a Forma analysis or UI screenshot, and an interoperability view showing how a model moved between tools such as Rhino, Revit, or Grasshopper and Forma.
Strong entries show the study, the number it produced, and the decision that changed.
What the jury is looking for
Autodesk’s published criteria reward process as much as outcome. A strong entry should do four things: respond clearly to the brief, show one concrete Forma analysis that affected a decision, explain the reasoning honestly - including iterations that did not work - and leave another designer with something useful to learn.
The clearest way to tell that story is simple: show the study you ran, the result it produced, and the decision you changed because of it.
That is the key distinction of the challenge. A polished render shows the result. An analysis-to-decision sequence shows the design thinking behind it.
Why adaptive housing, and why 2035
The framing draws on RIBA's Horizons 2034 research and sits at the overlap of two shifts: who housing is for, as households get smaller and older and affordability reshapes tenure, and what conditions it has to perform in, as overheating, flooding and carbon cost stop being edge cases.
Every brief is hypothetical, with no client, live project or NDA site involved, so participants can name their studio in the post without clearing anything first.
The four Forma Futures sprints, each a complete brief judged on its own.
What winners receive
One winner per sprint receives a USD $1,000 digital gift card, up to $4,000 across the season. The four winning projects are featured together in a dedicated round-up on ArchDaily, and each winner gets a project deep dive on the Autodesk Forma blog and an official Forma badge for their website and portfolio.
Getting access to Forma
Participants need Forma Site Design or Forma Building Design . Autodesk offers a free 30-day trial that includes both. Anyone already on Revit or the AEC Collection has both included at no additional cost. Students and educators can verify with a school email for a free one-year educational licence.
The challenge page also hosts sixteen short Forma tutorials, most under four minutes.
The jury
The external jury brings together housing practice, design technology, and AEC innovation. It includes:
- Niknaz Aftahi is joined on the jury by Adrianne Steichen, FAIA, principal at PYATOK architecture + urban design in Oakland, with more than 24 years in affordable housing.
- Mariana Cabugueira founder of [MC] Studios in London and formerly a senior architect at Zaha Hadid Architects.
- Oliver Thomas founder and CEO of Archi-Tech Network.
- Stjepan Mikulić founder of AI in AEC and a former Project BIM Lead at BIG in Copenhagen.
The jury will read the architecture and the workflow, and an entry strong on only one of them will show it.
Why aec+tech is involved
aec+tech exists to connect AEC professionals with the technology changing how they work, and Forma Futures does that in a very direct way: it asks entrants to run one real analysis, let it change one real decision, and write down what happened.
All four sprints are open until October 16, 2026 at 12:00 PM Pacific. Anyone with Forma through a trial, a Revit or AEC Collection subscription, or an education licence already has what they need. Pick the brief that fits the work you want to be known for, spend the hour, and post it.
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