Quickly generate high-performing design alternatives—many that you’d never think of on your own—from a single idea. With generative design, there is no single solution; instead, there are multiple great solutions. You choose the design that best fits your needs.

What is generative design?

Generative design is a design exploration process. Designers or engineers input design goals into the generative design software, along with parameters such as performance or spatial requirements, materials, manufacturing methods, and cost constraints. The software explores all the possible permutations of a solution, quickly generating design alternatives. It tests and learns from each iteration what works and what doesn’t.

Benefits of generative design

Explore a wider range of design options

In the time you can create one idea, a computer can generate thousands, along with the data to prove which designs perform best.

Make impossible designs possible

Generative design lets you create optimized complex shapes and internal lattices. Some of these forms are impossible to make with traditional manufacturing methods. Instead, they’re built using new additive manufacturing methods.

Optimise for materials and manufacturing methods

Set goals and parameters and the software will create high-performing design options based on those constraints. The software resolves conflicting design constraints so you can focus on innovating.

1. Solving design challenges

Engineers and designers are limited in time, resources, and energy that can be spent on a given design problem to fully explore both the design and manufacturing options that may be available.

2. Generative design enables you to explore multiple solutions

Generative design is a design exploration tool that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to simultaneously generate multiple solutions based on real-world design goals, product performance requirements, and manufacturing constraints.

3. Increase innovation capacity

Leveraging artificial intelligence, advanced simulation, and cloud computing, generative design enables a new method of rapidly generating hundreds of potential design alternatives by simply specifying design, performance, and manufacturing constraints.

4. Improve product performance

Light weighting or material optimization can improve a product’s performance profile and can reduce product costs by reducing the number of materials used in the design. Light weighting initiatives are pervasive in the automotive and aerospace industries where even incremental reductions in mass can result in dramatic savings in fuel costs.

5. Win more business with generative design and mass customization

Across all industries, there are growing pressures and demand for customized products and services. Attempts to satisfy this demand have strained traditional manufacturing methods and has led to increased production costs and extended timelines.

6. Breaks down data silos between product design and manufacturing constraints

Due to the sequential nature of the product development process, decisions are often made in a vacuum. Decisions on manufacturability and fabrication are typically delayed until late in the design process after major aspects of the project are locked in, sometimes forcing production down a costly and less than desirable path.

7. Enables you to consolidate components

Short-run or custom components are often designed as a subassembly of welded or stamped components that are assembled with fasteners. Ideally, engineers would rather design one component that meets the design requirements rather than decompose it into separate parts that add complexity, must be validated, and need to be assembled.

8. Generative design helps reduce CNC machining

In the aerospace and medical industries, low volume parts are more cost-effectively produced by CNC machining from expensive billets of high tech alloys than by forging, stamping, casting, or moulding, despite the excessive waste material produced from this process.

For more information about how you can embed generative Design process into your design contact the technical team at Quadra