Guidance from Autodesk and academic professionals
Student finalists at the Autodesk Panorama Boot-Camp learned directly from experienced professionals spanning software design, architecture, and academia. Mentors shared industry insight and technical know-how throughout the programme at Feng Chia University.
Across the Autodesk Panorama Boot-Camp, mentors serve as bridges between the classroom and the practitioner’s desk. They bring real-world workflows into each session, walking students through the thinking behind decisions rather than just the mechanics of a tool or technique. This approach helps finalists see how design problems are framed, questioned, and refined in professional settings, encouraging them to treat software as a medium for thoughtful problem-solving rather than a collection of features to memorise and repeat.
Faculty from partner universities contribute academic depth to the programme at Feng Chia University and across host institutions. Their role is to anchor technical instruction within broader design theory, history, and methodology, reminding students that contemporary practice grows from long-standing conversations about form, function, and responsibility in the built environment. Mentors from design schools help finalists develop a vocabulary for talking about their own work.
Industry guests add a further dimension by sharing current practice from software development, product design, and architectural offices. They discuss how collaborative teams structure projects, how feedback is exchanged across disciplines, and how emerging technologies reshape everyday responsibilities. Through these conversations students gain a clearer picture of the varied career paths that lie ahead, from pure design practice to research, education, and cross-disciplinary consultancy roles.
The overall structure of the mentorship programme is deliberately inclusive, exposing finalists to a wide spectrum of perspectives across software design, architecture, and academia. By moving across these domains, students discover that design reasoning travels well between fields, and that shared habits of inquiry unite practitioners regardless of their specific medium. The mentor experience is intended as a foundation for continued learning long after the Boot-C amp concludes.
Based in Shanghai, Jake designed user interfaces and workflows for Fusion 360's modeling and rendering toolsets. He joined Autodesk in 2006, previously working in Cambridge, UK on software quality assurance and 3D geometry modeling for Inventor and Autodesk Shape Manager. He has held modeling workshops and delivered training at events including Autodesk University.
Wu Tien Yu brought an architect's perspective to the Boot-Camp, guiding students through holistic design thinking and the practical realities of architectural practice using Autodesk tools such as Revit.
Kane Yanagawa contributed academic grounding to the programme, supporting students as they connected design theory with hands-on, cloud-based product development during the Designathon.
See how the mentorship fit into the full week of activities, from arrival through the Designathon.