Imagine a future where you design a house on a whim or a car from a doodle; that's the future I glimpsed at Autodesk University 2017

Ansel Adams wasn’t a great photographer only because he knew how to wield a camera. Ayrton Senna wasn’t a great driver only because he knew how to drive a car. Adams and Senna were artists in their respective fields. They had vision, and mastery of their tools made their vision a reality. In fact, all artists are limited by their tools, but not by their imaginations. Artists are not defined by the tools they use, they’re defined by their creations and a good tool gets out of the way of the artist, enhancing their capacity to create. [caption id=“attachment_4272575” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A poster at the Autodesk University 2017 venue[/caption] In the field of engineering and design, the same rules apply. You want to create a bridge, but you must spend an inordinate amount of time stress testing girders, you want to build a home, but you’re bogged down by material costs and the limitations of archaic construction techniques. Design shouldn’t be that hard, and if Autodesk has its way, it won’t be. Imagine a world where you design a house at the press of a button, a bridge on a whim, or birth a car from a doodle. It was a glimpse of this world of endless possibility that I glimpsed at Autodesk University (AU) 2017 in Bengaluru. AU 2017 was kicked off with quite the spectacle. Autodesk’s Patrick Williams rode onto the stage on a bike as sparklers lit his path and filled the hall with smoke and light. The bike he rode in on was designed by a 19-year-old college student who designed the bike himself using Autodesk software. As Williams describes it, “AU is a celebration of the work that our customers do. It’s a chance for us to spotlight our customers, and that’s what Autodesk University is all about.”  

Sparks fly as @autodesk’s Patrick Williams drops by to open #auindia pic.twitter.com/WUqJSMgjz8

— Tech2 (@tech2eets) December 14, 2017

Somehow, this moment, for me, was the moment that defined AU. If I were to pick one theme that defines 2017, that theme would be machine learning. If I were to pick one theme that’s defined Autodesk, I’d say that it would be one of democratising design tools, and the two themes are closely interlinked. That 19-year-old student designed, built and tested that bike with little help from the outside. A feat that even ten years ago would have required inputs from teams of engineers and months, if not years of R&D.

All it took that student was access to the right tools. Design has become exponentially easier to do now, and all because of massive advances in machine learning capabilities and advances in 3D printing and the like. What started off as mere buzzwords are now ideas that our reshaping our future. Generative design: The future of design Design, particularly industrial design, is a painstaking process of trial and error. A designer must factor in myriad variables when creating their project, and even then, they may not have factored everything. At every step of the way, prototyping and testing is required, further adding to cost and eating into available resources.

As painstaking as the process is, it’s an inseparable part of design. It’s partly for this reason that design today is limited by certain core principles and templates. It’s easier and cheaper to work with what you know than it is to create something new. Nature is not limited in such a fashion. A gazelle’s skeleton is a work of free-flowing art. There are no right angles and straight lines here. A butterfly’s wing is a mesmerizingly organic structure of a type almost impossible for us to replicate. For a designer today, designing such structures can seem impossible. Nature, after all, can bank on millennia of evolution, of trial and error. How can a mere human hope to replicate the same feat in a matter of months? Clearly, a sufficiency of data and processing power are an issue. Humans can only process so much information, after all.  

.@autodesk’s Patrick Williams describes an exciting future where machine algorithms will design and build products at the press of a button. #auindia pic.twitter.com/rUdoqplWiZ

— Tech2 (@tech2eets) December 14, 2017

This is where generative design comes in. At AU, Williams discussed the concept of generative design, an ML-enabled design approach that mimics nature’s approach to design. “Generative design is one’s ability to input parametric requirements into a system and have the computer automatically generate what it is that they’re trying to do”, says Williams. “It allows us to create designs that a human would not have been able to process and create on their own”, he adds. His own belief is that the next wave of innovation will be defined by data, how it’s acquired and processed. [caption id=“attachment_4272615” align=“alignnone” width=“792”] Using generative design to design a bike chassis[/caption] Take the example of an office space. You know that total area and volume you can work with, you know roughly where the windows will be, the staircases, ventilation, etc. People will also have their own preferences, some might want it warmer, others colder. People are going to be working in that space, they will move about, they will bump into each other, there might even be traffic jams of sorts. A good designer with years of experience might be able to account for all these variables, but an intelligent enough program with the near infinite computing resources of the cloud might be able to do a lot more in only a fraction of the time. A computer might even factor in the differential heating in the space as a result of human presence, develop heat maps for movement, etc. No human can do this, not quickly anyway. A computer could run through tens of thousands of iterations a second, coming up with designs and solutions that you might never have dreamed of.  

Generative design could transform your boring office space to something far more comfortable. @autodesk #auindia pic.twitter.com/CtnEXqV8jl

— Tech2 (@tech2eets) December 14, 2017

As Autodesk CTO Tatjana Dzambazova explains, where it might take one human sitting on one computer an hour to create and modify one design, leveraging the power of machine learning (ML) and the cloud could put thousands of virtual computers at your disposal, giving you thousands of design options to choose from in just one second. The beauty of generative design is that it can be applied to anything, be it the partition in an aircraft or a chair or even something as complicated as a racecar chassis. The possibilities are endless. Rip, mod, fab Dzambazova fondly refers to a culture that she calls “rip, mod, fab.” You “rip” reality, “mod” it in a virtual environment and then fabricate a new prototype or model in the real world. The faster this happens, the faster your design develops. New modelling and capture tools coupled with immense capabilities of generative design enable this.

She has spoken in the past about how the design of today need not start with a blank screen. Citing the design of a computer mouse as an example, she points out that the fundamental design of the mouse need not change, but you can use generative design tools to build on that base. The same is true for houses, vehicles and just about anything else. Re-skilling the next generation When asked about the possible skill gap that such disruptive jumps in technology herald, Williams indicated that it wasn’t that much of a concern. “What always surprises me is the rate and speed at which customers are picking up the tech”, he says. Companies are more than willing to adopt this new technology. “Three years ago, architects were aspiring to use BIM [Building Information Modeling]. Now, it’s a mandate”, adds Williams. Autodesk has also ensured that students have free access to their tools and events like AU reaches out to and builds on a community. The company has also adopted a subscription model for many of its apps, substantially reducing the cost of entry. “Providing access to technology is important for bridging the skill gap”, believes Williams. [caption id=“attachment_4272623” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Computers can come up with other-worldly designs, but these are usually stronger, cheaper and lighter than anything humans have previously made[/caption] More importantly, this technology is available to everyone, and you needn’t be an expert or a geek to know how to use these tools. You don’t need to study engineering, you don’t need to study architecture, not when a program is performing all that stress-strain analysis and more for you. The tools aren’t just for creation, they can enable a new kind of learning experience. At the VR booth at AU, I could explore the internal structure of an animal cell and learn to operate complex machinery in far more detail than a video or textbook could ever explain. I saw intricate 3D models of ancient buildings, could explored the inside of the Apollo 11 capsule, saw prosthetics that were almost organic in appearance and was walked through engineering marvels made by kids and students. I don’t think I’ve even scratches the surface of what generative design and Autodesk’s tools have to offer, but I can tell you this much, AU 2017 was an eye-opening experience that has me more excited for the future of design than I’ve any right to be. Disclaimer: The author was invited to Autodesk University 2017 by Autodesk. All expenses related to food, travel and accommodation were borne by Autodesk.