ManufacturingAI: An Overview
The convergence of AI and digital manufacturing are leading to new design languages that will define next-gen product creation.
The tension between design and manufacturing - creativity and control - is timeless and universal. A former creative director at Adidas calls design packs “90% hope, 10% design” on the part of the designer, knowing they’ll get factory samples back very different from their creative vision.
On the manufacturing side, practical minded engineers ask themselves why designers often don’t listen to them. The former head of engineering for Nike prepared a complete engineering guide for footwear that he compiled using everything he learned across his career – it was his legacy before retiring, filled with an incredible wealth of testing information and best practices. But it was a static and external resource, something seen as suspicious and outmoded by the design teams meant to adopt it, and it wasn’t used.
Software struggled from the same tension between design and engineering until the advent of no-code platforms allowed designers to build websites and workflows themselves. Finally designers were able to not just build for themselves, they learned the capabilities and limitations of the software they were building within and understood where they could get creative. Websites became more beautiful as the level of design elevated across digital properties.
And it wasn’t just designers who benefited. By focusing on building tools that designers would use, engineers began to understand design and its process better, tailoring capabilities accordingly. Their task went from executing on a design to building better tools for designers to create with.
No-code platforms broke down the translation barriers between two critical teams, design and engineering, and allowed each to better understand and work with the other.
Now we are focusing on going from no-code to no-CAD, allowing designers to build physical products and toolchains themselves. This builds on the transformation no-code platforms brought to software, extending it to physical product creation and onto the factory floor. No-CAD platforms enable designers to create manufacturable 3D products without the years of training and experience required with CAD software or specialized product engineering.
In the example above, a designer moves from developing an initial concept to redlines to building out the outsole and developing a custom texture for its sidewall within a few minutes. The outsole is generated alongside 2D cut-views of each section so that the designer can make changes in 2D and have them impact 3D space. What formerly would have been a hand off and led to a technical design package and then a 3D model is now driven entirely by design.
We’ve learned that the key to an effective no-CAD platform is the ease of translation between 2D and 3D space, physical sketches and models to digital ones - designers are creative across mediums and agile by nature, where one process is helpful to edit in 3D another is more intuitive in 2D.
Just like no-code platforms did for software designers and developers, no-CAD platforms raise the level of design across product creation while building better engineering and manufacturing teams. By centralizing and constantly updating a platform’s engineering standards with each prototype and launch, every test and trial, a developer’s experience is immediately amplified across design teams and built on by other teams in real-time. These platforms are more than just translators across teams – they become the living institutional memory and mind of an organization’s product creation engine.
One of the most powerful capabilities these platforms enable is the seamless training and integration of custom AI models within the design workflow. Whether it’s testing or training data, brand DNA, collaborations or archives, providing design teams with enterprise-level intelligence directly in their workflow will unleash a radically new generation of product.
Unlike no-code platforms, no-CAD platforms are only made possible through the latest leaps in computer vision and genAI. Over the past 18 months the team at HILOS has built customizable and modular AI-driven manufacturing workflows for footwear design that show the degree of creativity and control no-CAD platforms can deliver.
We began by focusing on dissolving the barriers between physical design mediums and digital product creation, allowing attendees at Vogue Business’ Fashion Futures to sculpt with clay and see 3D shoes change on screen through real-time computer vision capture.
At TechCrunch Disrupt we moved further into sketching, showing how a designer went from sketch to on-foot sample during a live 3-minute demo on-stage.
As we’ve built up our own no-CAD application, Interplay, and continued to develop our underlying operating system and 3D engine, we’ve forced ourselves to be comfortable with showing work when it’s still early and being open about our own conceptual growth as this fast-moving frontier expands. These ManufacturingAI systems are very new and promising, and they come at a time when how and where we make things is more important than ever.
For a more technical deep-dive into HILOS OS, read the white paper below.
Still curious? To learn what manufacturingAI means for the future of footwear, click here.
Or if you’re an executive at a large brand exploring how you can bring this into your company, we have a few tips for you here.
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