Manufacturing an industrial product that can go viral with your target audience is difficult. There are so many elements that need to be optimized simultaneously: material, utility, space, strength, and so much more. This makes design the key differentiator of great products from the good ones, where the core challenge lies.Â
Traditional industrial design development is incredibly limited in nature. Be it the quality, quantity, or time efficiency, your manufacturing process loses a significant amount of potential and resources at this product development stage. This is where generative design comes in.
Taking out the human intervention, the generative design brings tomorrow's disruptive design technology. Its innovation and scalability capabilities ensure that your design process is lean, fast yet agile, throughout the product development process.
The best part?
It doesn't stop at this. Together with simplified design development comes multilayered benefits directly targeted for manufacturing businesses.
In this post, we bring you closer to this technology and its multifold benefits.
By the end of this post, you will be able to see what this technology can accomplish for your manufacturing business.
A Guide to Generative Design
To understand why and how generative design redefines manufacturing design technology, you need to have a problem-centric mindset.
Understanding today's manufacturing problems will give you insight into how this cutting-edge technology is shaping the future.
The classical manufacturing design setup follows a linear process. Here one designer is equipped with one design software like AutoCAD to develop viable versions for one product.
However, this design process that requires human interference is incredibly limited in its capacity.
Not only do human limitations dampen the total producible design versions that can be obtained, but they also compromise creativity and quality, incurring colossal time investment from the designer.
This is precisely where the generative design alleviates the problem.
But to know precisely how let's take a look at the secret to this technology's superpower.
What Is Generative Design?
Establishing a sharp contrast to the traditional industrial workflow, generative design can create innumerable designs at record speed.
Harnessing the power of cloud computing and integrating it with artificial intelligence (AI), generative technology transforms the manufacturing design landscape to give you access to every possible high-quality design version viable for your product.
The best part is all of this can be achieved in lesser than half of your standard time.
What follows is more creative room for designers to focus on high-value work.
Your only requirement is determining high-quality design input that can create high-quality end design output. Parameters like material choices, shape and size, density, manufacturing methods, cost limits are some that you can utilize in this process.
This can be done through a rigorous process of audience research. Empathizing their core pain points and what they care about can easily give you the answers to your input constraints in the design process.
What's more, you can keep reiterating your design inputs until you reach your most desired design outcome.
Now when you know how generative design is revolutionizing the manufacturing industry, let's look at it from the business aspect. How does it add value to your business?
The Top 6 Benefits of Generative Design
The generative design brings multilevel benefits to designers and business processes alike. While some can be traced out right on the first look, there are more.
Here we talk about the six prime merits that you can readily enjoy.
- Lighter product manufacturing
When it comes to weight optimization of products, generative design is unbeatable.
To do so, it targets the specific design part to experiment with different variations while keeping all other parts fixed.Â
What follows is a brand new version of the product design with alterations in the specific parts of the product.
The result is your development of a viral product now costs less, increasing your profit margin. The best part? You do not have to compromise functionality, product quality, or performance.
- Infinite design possibilities
Perhaps the most significant selling point of generative design lies in making the impossible possible.
Breaking the biggest barrier of the traditional design development process, generative design is capable of developing every probable design outcome for your product development. This gives you more comprehensive options to choose from.
This, in turn, promotes the development of high-quality products in your market scape.
- Short development cycle
The manufacturing design process is complex and time-consuming altogether. A designer developing designs manually can only perform so much in a time-constrained environment. Plus comes human error.
Taking all these shortcomings out of the design development system, the generative design creates an agile, lean, and fast development environment.
Achieving every possible design outcome in a time-constrained environment is the new normal for the manufacturing design process now. This, in turn, promotes faster product launches in the market.
- High-quality designs
Having designers develop manufacturing products is not only complex and time-consuming but limits the quality of the end product heavily.
So many factors come into play. The experience and seniority of your designers, the knowledge and skill, and most importantly, how aware they are with your target audience.
Generative design eliminates all such human constraints. Integrating the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, this technology removes human bias and keeps on going better.
The historical design data ensures your software keeps on learning from your past choices to give you personalized results that are most suitable for your process.
With every iteration you make, the software learns about the critical vulnerable areas and points while optimizing them simultaneously. This increases your chances to reach product-market fit faster.
- Cheaper production costs
Creating an MVP (minimum viable product) is a critical stage for any design development process. Testing the viability of the first version on your real users ensures you develop a product that people want. But the traditional model to do so was immensely more expensive.
Generative design achieves higher quality results at significantly reduced costs. Creating different versions to test on users is much more cost-effective with this technology. What's more?
Manipulating multiple product parts into a weight-optimized single piece, this technology successfully reduces the costs of production of final products.
- Simplified development process
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Developing industrial products is inherently complex. Be it in terms of achieving a desired shape or design or meeting certain functional capabilities, coming up with one breakthrough design that does it all is a lot of hard work wrapped with frustration.
But with generative design, this designer's dream can be easily achieved. Breaking free from all traditional design limitations like CAD, this technology promotes the development of complex structures.
Structures that were before unachievable before are now at your access. All you need is a 3D printer to realize the virtually achieved design into reality. The best part? Your raw materials suffer from minimal wastage.
So now, with the knowledge of what generative design can do for your business, let's take a look at the best tools that justifies the power of this technology.
Top Generative Design Software
The cutting-edge technology of generative brings has the power to change an entire industry.
This makes it no surprise that the generative design software market is getting crowded fast. With almost every other tool claiming to deliver the same performance, it is normal to get overwhelmed.
This is why we have scoured the market and brought you the top 3 tools that you can integrate into your business in 2021.
nTopology
Integrating this software might be the smartest move you make in your business this year.
With its advanced engineering, this software brings high-end innovation and scalability to product development. You can now design product parts and the entire process successfully. This means you are in complete control of your design process.
Autodesk Dreamchacher
If you are a CAD fan, this is your go-to tool. All you need to do is define your problem, input your constraints, and you are good to go. What's more? Adapting to this tool has the lowest learning curve.
Solidworks
If there is one tool that provides end-to-end design solutions, SolidWorks is your tool. Whether your real-time design goal is design generation, simulation, iteration, or final publish, everything is under a single dashboard.
Conclusion
Generative design undoubtedly is powerful but futuristic manufacturing technology. This makes it to be still in its early stage of development, where its mass adoption has still not been realized.
If you integrate this powerful technology into your manufacturing process, not only do you streamline your developmental process but gain an unfair advantage over your competitors.
The best part is you can use generative design to develop one of your key differentiating factors amongst other market players.
So that’s all the necessary information you need to help you leverage your operations with generative design. The key role resides with you. You need to be strategic about your generative design adoption to make the most out of it. This takes us to answer the only question left here.
When did you plan to introduce the powerful technology in your business?Â
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as an instructional designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband and parents. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time.