The addresses
He opened GDI 2025 on 2 December at AUT City Campus, sharing the platform with his co-founder, Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, and Professor Suzanne Wilkinson of the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies. GDI exists because the green, digital and intelligent agendas in the built environment are usually pursued by different communities, and the conference was built to bring them into the same room and the same proceedings.
On 3 December he closed the conference at its gala. The closing address drew the three days together and committed the organisers to a second edition, which followed at AUT within the year.
GDI is no longer a single event. It is becoming a platform. A community. A movement.
His closing reflection, LinkedIn
The conference
GDI 2025 was organised around three pillars: green, for sustainable urban design; digital, for AI, automation and smart systems; and intelligent, for human centred design. It received more than 200 full papers and presented over 180 across ten thematic tracks, an unusual scale for a first edition.
Beca joined as primary partner, hosted the first day at its Wynyard Quarter precinct and contributed a keynote from Thomas Hyde, its Chief Transformation and Innovation Officer. The research presented is captured in a five volume, Scopus indexed proceedings series with Springer Nature, with contributions from more than 50 countries.
Significance
His closing reflection described GDI as no longer a single event but a platform and a community, and recorded the question delegates kept asking at the close: when do we meet again? That shift matters. A conference that ends when the delegates leave produces papers; a platform produces partnerships, follow on work and a recurring place where industry and academia meet on equal terms.
The model also served the School directly. GDI sits alongside SASBE 2024 and IGLC32 in the School’s programme of international conferences, which brings external income, international authors and industry partners to AUT, and gives staff and doctoral students a stage at home.
The lineage
GDI is the direct successor of the NZAAR international event series he co-founded in 2016. The themes NZAAR gathered under one roof were reorganised into GDI’s three strands, and the ambition grew with them: from regional multi conference events to an Auckland based international conference with a major publisher and an industry partner of Beca’s standing.