Generative Design featured in Canada's The Globe and Mail

Pubic Relations Manager, Alexandra Constantine let me know that following an interview with Director of Research, Francesco "Frio" Iorio, The Globe and Maill published a story about how generative design is shaping the world around us. Autodesk is featured alongside examples for product packaging, architecture, and design. Check it out:

The Globe and Mail: "How technology is shaping the world around us"

Although generative is often envisioned as a technology that produces an optimal product design given a set of requirements, it's actually a multi-variable problem-solver that can be applied to a variety of complicated dilemmas or predicaments. Generative design is actually the process of defining high-level goals and constraints, and then using the power of computation to automatically explore a wide design space and identify the best design options.

Some key excerpts include:

• It’s a radical departure from what we’ve been using for the last 40 years,” says Francesco Iorio, director of computational science research at Autodesk, which develops CAD software. Later this year, a program that Iorio has been working on called Generative Design will hit the market, and, according to him, will act more like “an actual partner” in the design process rather than a passive tool. In effect, designers will be able to ask the software questions and get optimal answers back.
• The legs and arms mimic forms found in nature, such as bones, which have been optimized through evolution to withstand the forces of the world. In essence, the program came up with a design “that was most fit to survive,” says Iorio, by learning from the world around it.
• “The results can be surprising,” says Iorio, “because the program isn’t constrained by biases.”

Thanks to Frio for taking the time to have a conversation with one of Canada's most influential news outlets.

Spreading the word is alive in the lab.