A plethora of gadgets provides a platform for productivity
With today's ever-developing technology, industries may find it difficult to keep pace, but it is giving businesses a platform to compete vigorously.
Design tools and services are giving designers and innovators the ability to collaborate globally so that they can take on large-scale projects. This year, Autodesk foresees yet another year of productivity and innovation breakthroughs.
Here are the trends that will amaze you with how innovative we all can be with the right tools:
Humans and robots working together
Today, robots are being fed big data to do analytics and machine learning. Robotics will evolve into collaborative robotics, with humans playing a proactive role and working alongside robots.
For example, Bloomberg reported that Toyota is becoming more efficient by replacing some robots with craftsmen.
Generative design
What if a computer-aided design (CAD) system could automatically generate tens, hundreds or even thousands of design options that all meet your specific design criteria?
Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher, the next generation of computational design, is a generative design system that lets designers input design objectives, including functional requirements, material type, manufacturability, performance criteria and cost parameters.
The power of the cloud then takes over. This doesn’t replace the designer but it does the grunt work, processing and evaluating design trade-offs at a speed impossible for humans.
Living buildings and bespoke materials
New materials and building typologies are being made possible through CAD. In the future, most buildings and products will be made of bespoke materials, requiring today’s standards like ISO to evolve.
For example, David Benjamin, founding principal of the design and research studio The Living, is collaborating with plant biologists at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom to grow new composite materials from bacteria.
It’s also harnessing live mussels to detect water quality in the East River and relay environmental conditions to the public.
Last year, The Living delivered Hy-Fi to build a project in its PS1 courtyard in Queens, New York. It involved a 40-foot tower with 10,000 bricks made entirely of compostable materials – cornstalks and mushrooms – developed in collaboration with Ecovative, a company that makes use of innovative materials.
Biotech is the next info tech
Biotech is the use of living systems and organisms to develop products. It is one of the fastest-growing industries of the global economy. Product development in the pharma industry takes longer and has rising costs, so synthetic biology based on digital design tools can help by making biotechnology more accessible to more innovators.
Design tech is enabling nano-to-metre scale breakthroughs. Autodesk is working with scientists, academics and customers on cross-scale design projects, from molecular biology and tissue engineering to self-assembling, human-scale manufacturing.
They are researching the intersection of programmable (bio, nano) matter and design spaces such as manufacturing, construction and digital entertainment.
Life and other forms of programmable matter are successfully being reprogrammed and can be conceived as emergent design spaces. For example, Autodesk is working with partners to support their efforts to program nano-scale machines to fight cancer.
Chatcharn Sutthipisal is manager of Autodesk Thailand.
