Automation of Design - Autodesk's automated design software

I don’t like this:

‘Generative design’ has it’s place, but…(remember this?)

This comment:
““Design right now, as it’s been put on the earth — whether it’s buildings or cars or hardware — is pretty much the first thing that worked, as opposed to the best one that could be found,” says Kowalski.”

and
“If designers were able to keep the development process digital, as software developers can, the process could run faster — no need to constantly translate between digital and physical — and parts of it could be automated and optimized.”

Isn’t the point of making a physical thing, is that at some point you make a physical thing, like, to check?

Putting a creative decision in the hands of an algorithm means you are surrendering your fate to an algorithm, that some person wrote, so you are letting someone else make a decision for you.

It’s the equivalent of turning down the sucks, and turning up the rocks.
Rockin the Suburbs.jpg

I think this is just one evolution of how software will evolve. It doesn’t undo the need for designers (or engineers) but starts to provide more decisions for how to create better designs.

I recall seeing a demo like this a few years ago where they took a lower control arm from a car, reduced it to the minimum structure (3 mounting points and some connecting walls) and then were able to use the software to completely go through and redesign the part based on the loads for optimum size shape and weight - that is pretty cool.

I for one think we are in need of a big rethink of tools around additive manufacturing. Traditional CAD tools don’t enable you to build objects that are optimized for some of the crazy structures and shapes you can achieve with 3D printing - that’s why so may of these new tools have been evolving to fill in that niche.

This pretty much blew anything the author was going to postulate after it right out of the water for me…

“Services like AirBnB and Uber have broken certain kinds of transactions and relationships free of human intermediaries, and now the information contained in physical objects is undergoing a similar transformation.”

Ummm. I’m just going to go over here now…

There’s a real over-hype culture going on around technology these days. Maybe it’s been there the whole time and I haven’t noticed how much the flapping heads have been spouting nonsense out of their talky round holes.

“Design right now, as it’s been put on the earth — whether it’s buildings or cars or hardware — is pretty much the first thing that worked, as opposed to the best one that could be found,” says Kowalski.

No. No it’s not. It’s pretty much not that.

Let’s just wait and see what happens. This technology speculation and futurism philosophy seems to be based on very unsubstantiated arguments.

Here’s another one that had me chuckling.

For stuff like Voronoi patterns, maybe, but software like this is still channelling a decision down a certain path. I’d want the software to guide decisions, not make them, which to me is how it is being sold.


Pretty misanthropic. It does sound like the jargon on the TV show “Silicon Valley”, where every startup is about “Disruption”, “Revolution”, “Making the World a Better Place”: