Tag: CAD/CAM

OM in the News: AI Is Becoming Every Product Designer’s Companion

Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot have already proven their value in many product designers’ daily design work, asking questions about design decisions and giving advice on design and CAD strategies. (See Chapter 5 in your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text). But AI is moving beyond being a tool to becoming an active collaborator, reports Industry Week (Jan. 24, 2025). There are a huge number of exciting AI applications in design:

Generative design as a standard: AI-driven generative design tools are becoming more popular, producing optimized solutions that human designers might never consider. These tools will seamlessly handle constraints like material properties, manufacturability and sustainability.

AI-Powered decision support: Product designers are increasingly relying on AI to analyze massive datasets, predict performance outcomes and recommend design improvements. AI-powered digital engineering tools that accelerate physics simulation through “simulation surrogates” are helping designers make faster, smarter decisions throughout the product lifecycle. AI models trained on numerical analysis can run simulations up to 1,000 times faster.

Human-AI collaboration: The best results come from teams that embrace a symbiotic relationship between AI and human creativity. AI can help human designers answer questions by doing the legwork and analysis on documents and information.  AI will provide expert advice on how to use other computing tools like computer-aided design (CAD), product data management (PDM), and simulation, much like expert human designers provide advice to their colleagues. The latest conceptual industrial design tools take simple sketches and generate rendered design concepts based on text prompts, such as “orange and black controller, Nintendo-like.” Meanwhile, AI assistants for computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software–see Chapter 7– can quickly produce machining strategies, reducing time spent on CAM programming and making manufacturing processes more efficient.

Customer-centric design: AI is also playing a significant role in aligning products with customer preferences. The latest AI product development solutions mine product reviews and other customer feedback data to synthesize design directions tailored to consumer tastes or specific attributes like performance. This insight can help teams create products that better meet market demands.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How is AI revolutionizing product design?
  2. Are there disadvantages in becoming AI-dependent?

OM in the News: Why Can’t Houses Be Built Like iPhones?

Katerra manufactures whole walls—including windows, insulation, wiring and plumbing—in its factory

The world’s housing crisis has many causes, but there is a stubbornly persistent one that we should have been able to solve by now: Productivity. As prices of components and materials for pretty much every other physical object—cars, cellphones, clothing—have dropped precipitously, it still costs too much to build a building. “Over the past 60 years, productivity in manufacturing has increased 8-fold while remaining basically flat in construction,” writes The Wall Street Journal (July 3, 2017).

Some companies think they have a solution. They are reviving old ideas in construction, including prefabrication and modular building. And they’re applying all the logistics and IT knowledge gained from building the global supply chains that deliver mobile devices, and all the automation pioneered by the automobile and other manufacturing industries.

Take Katerra. It has a 200,000-sq-ft factory in Phoenix where it manufactures whole walls, including all the windows, insulation, electrical wiring and plumbing. Katerra uses an integrated CAD/CAM system that tells all the factory’s automated saws and routers how to produce all the buildings’ components. The same system connects to job-site cranes that lift and place the finished panels. Katerra ships the walls to construction sites, where they’re snapped together like Lego bricks. The company’s goal is to build 7 more factories in 2 years, each intended to serve a different geographic area.

Katerra is responsible for its buildings from design to final construction, which allows it to further cut costs. In consumer electronics, “design for manufacturability”—the reconfiguring of a device’s shape and function to make it cheaper to build—is standard. Another thing Katerra borrows from that industry: buying goods in bulk, direct from suppliers.

Classroom discussion questions:
1. What is design for manufacturability? Give an example.

2. Of what type of layout is this an example (see Ch. 9)?