Design has always played a critical role in determining the success of industrial products. However, designing a disruptive product is complex and takes a lot of hard work.
There are so many factors that when aligned together give a viral product – raw material, space design, functionality optimization, and much more. No wonder why industrial engineers and designers are so worked up all the time.
But here’s the thing.
Revolutionizing the industrial design process, generative design changes the design landscape completely forever. Fleshing out the problems of the traditional design process, this bleeding-edge technology creates a more agile, effective, and time-efficient design process.
What follows is an unprecedented growth in innovation, creativity, and scalability in products.
This blog post demystifies the technology of generative design to help you better understand the scope of its potential benefits for your design process. Let’s dive in.
Generative Design: The Ultimate Guide
Generative design is a powerful yet complex process to study. To understand the scope and direct benefits of this revolutionary technology, you would have to take a step back.
Start with understanding what really is generative design. This would give you an anchor to speculate over the potential benefits it can bring to your unique product design process.
Let’s take a look.
What Is Generative Design?
Generative design is the path-breaking technology that creates a clutter-free workspace for industrial designers and engineers to create high-quality designs without the limitation in quantity. It is the best of all worlds of the design space.
In doing so, it challenges and redefines the notion and approach that a traditional design model uses to create product designs.
A traditional engineering design model adapts to the waterfall approach to come to end designs. On the contrary, the generative design uses agile design methodology for producing end results.
In a traditional design space, one designer is powered by one software like CAD to produce the design versions on the basis of set constraints making the process time-consuming and vulnerable to frequent human error. But not the process that has integrated generative design.
Powered by machine learning and cloud computing, generative design takes out all the limitations caused by human intervention. Here, one designer is powered by bleeding-edge technology that automates the design development process. The only involvement of your designer here is to set the parameters.
This streamlines the design production making the rendering of every probable design version possible. The best part? It takes a fraction of time to do so leaving more creative room for the designers to create a strong product. The best of the generative design
Why Is Generative Design Important?
Understanding how the technology of generative design works definitely gives you a headstart to gauge the scope of its benefits. But to answer the big ‘why’ for adopting this technology for your design process, you would need to undergo the foundational areas where it revolutionizes your product development.
The following section gives you the core areas where you see improvement in your process.
Superior Product
The first benefit that the generative design renders to your process has a direct relation with creating a viral product. It ensures you can achieve the very best quality product for your target customers which can manifest itself in terms of high adoption and retention rate.
To do so, there are many areas of the product that the generative design technology alleviates. From improving design rendering to achieving complex shapes and optimizing product weight, it can do it all.
To improve the design renders, this technology uses advanced machine learning models to learn from past renders and design iterations. This makes your design renders only improve with time and shorten the reiteration cycles. It even goes deeper to identify and resolve the most vulnerable design spots for your renders. But for this, you would need to undergo some significant design development. But it doesn’t stop here.
Breaking the limitations of traditional modes of design development, it realized some of the most complex shapes and structures with ease. A phenomenon that was previously impossible to achieve. But you would still require a 3D printer to produce these designs.
Yet again, product weight optimization is a big selling point of this technology. Simulating design parts the technology runs every possible permutation and combination of the design variables of the specific part of the product. But it is done so by keeping the rest of the product fixed. Naturally, you get the lightest version of each of the product parts viable in the set constraints.
Time-Efficient
In business, time equals money. If your product development process takes forever to perform the final launch, you are either leaving money on the table or wasting it. The worst-case scenario? Realizing you are actually doing both.
Eradicating this critical problem, the generative design brings speed to your design process. Your design processes are lean, agile, and smooth, not constrained by any human limitations. You do not need to wait for days to get a couple of design versions ready. You can render all the possible design versions by the end of the day. This makes your iteration process fast creating leaner product launch cycles.
The best part is achieving the product-market fit suddenly looks easier than before.
Cost-Efficient
One of the biggest benefits that generative design brings to the manufacturing industry comes in the form of multi-level cost optimization. It not only saves you valuable resources during the product development but also in your workforce.
One of the most advanced features of generative design is the capability of meshing multiple product parts into one. This not only optimizes the functionality of the product but lowers down the development and manufacturing costs of the product when processed for mass production.
Yet again, with the help of artificial intelligence and cloud computing rendering the most complex yet powerful designs does not need you to deploy an army of skilled designers. You can achieve the same results by deploying a handful of designers. Rest, the software can take care of it. This makes optimizing your workforce maintenance costs so much easier.
Bonus Point: Top Generative Design Software You Can Use For Your Process
The generative software market is flooded with options. Naturally, selecting the right one is overwhelming. To ease your decision-making here is a list of the top 5 tools you can consider for your process.
1. nTopology
If you have to start your journey with generative design, nTopology is one of the best choices you can make. Unlike average tools, this software makes you fall in love with the design process bringing in quality, quantity, and convenience.
Plus it comes with a host of powerful features. From the transformational GPU acceleration technology to power lightspeed design workflows to advanced geometry and design data models to simplify rendering complex designs, it has it all. But that is not all. For facilitating better control, it has a unique toolkit to deploy process automation and personalization to make the most of your valuable time.
It comes at a price point of around $7500 a user, annually.
2. Fusion 360
The next tool in our list is the gen-next tool of the famous CAD software. If you are a CAD fan, there is no way you can escape from the addiction to this tool. The best part? Learning it would look like a breeze.
Integrating the power of all the powerful designing tools, the brand brings you the next generation of manufacturing design software. Whether it is design, engineering, electronics, or manufacturing, it can support all your activities. The best part? Its existing familiarity in the industry makes it very user-friendly for its customers enabling rapid prototyping.
It comes at a price point of $495 a user annually.
3. SolidWorks
If you are looking for personalized software, look no further than this tool. No matter what your stage is, be it design development, simulation, iteration, or final launch, it can do it all. To do so it uses powerful features like conceptual designing, 2D and 3D modeling interface elimination, sheet metal and welding and much more.
It comes at a one-time price point of $3995 along with an annual subscription of $1295.
4. Siemens NX
If there is one tool that stands unparalleled in terms of flexibility, it is this one. From the multi-screen view, easy collaboration to lightweight engineering, it covers all. It even integrates powerful features like lattice design, mentor graphics and much more.
It comes at a pricing of $279 a user, monthly.
5. PTC Creo
When it comes to achieving more in less time and budget, this tool comes out as a champion. To do so, it has powerful features like freestyle surfacing, routed system design, and much more. It comes at a cost of $2480 a user, annually.
Conclusion
There is no doubt in the power and merits that generative design has to offer your design process in the future. Yet here’s a reality check.
It is still in the early days of its development. The best is yet to come. Depending entirely upon it would not be the best strategy for your design process today. You need to give it some time to mature itself. That being said, adopting it today is still a viable option. It can readily give you some significant technological edge over your competitors.
For now, the best option for you is to go hybrid.
Continue utilizing your existing design model but keep room for integrating the generative design model in this setup. In doing so, you not only kickstart your transition process for the future but optimize the power of your existing process. The best part is your flexibility to cope up with future disruption will witness a boost making your process sustainable.
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