Artificial Intelligence Turns Design Into A Collaborative Undertaking Posted on : Jun 22 - 2018

A Chinese aphorism says that “the fire burns highest when everyone adds wood to it.” It’s an apt way to describe the way that industrial design and product development are becoming a collaborative undertaking. Cities like Shenzhen, long known as factory towns that churn out low-end toys and shoes, are embracing a new identity as creative meccas for design.

This trend is gathering steam worldwide, for one main reason: design tools are starting to function less like inanimate objects and more like colleagues or assistants. As people and machines begin working together in new ways, the field of design will turn into a team sport, one where human ingenuity combines with artificial intelligence and automation to broaden the possibilities of how society shapes the world.

Expanding Your Options: Generative Design

Generative design lets you feed specifications into computers that harness the processing power of the cloud to spit out hundreds of design options that meet your particular requirements. For example, you might want to manufacture a table made of rugged plastic that can support a weight of up to 200 kilograms. Enter the parameters and constraints, and almost immediately you’ll get a myriad of from which to choose. You’re likely to find some alternative you probably would not have considered.

Airbus used generative design to create a better partition for its A320 jetliner. The partition separates the galley (the airplane’s kitchen) from the main passenger compartment, and Airbus had specific requirements in mind. The new partition had to be lighter than the old one, no more than one inch thick, and strong enough to anchor two jump-seats. Airbus used generative design to review thousands of options that met those weight and strength requirements. The end result was a new partition that was 45% lighter – a feature that Airbus estimates will save 500,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Printing Bridges in Mid-Air, And Other Robot Tricks

Robots are combining with generative design and additive manufacturing to come up with new design technologies. In in the Netherlands, for example, software maker Autodesk has partnered with MX3D, a company that makes robotic additive manufacturing technology (more commonly known as 3-D printing). The company’s industrial robots manufactured a steel footbridge, incrementally building the structure over an Amsterdam canal in a process some described as “printing in mid-air.” The bridge is still being tested for structural integrity and will be installed later this year. Dutch designer Joris Laarman, who worked on the structure, said the 3-D printing technology “connects futuristic technologies with the historical city” in a way that brings together the new and the old. View More