This Industrial Design Team Turns to AI to Quickly Generate Form Studies

By on September 20th, 2018 in Design

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AI-driven furniture design [Source: chAir]
AI-driven furniture design [Source: chAir]

Even though centuries have passed, the act of designing and making objects is still primarily the same: the human mind comes up with a project, the human hand sketches it down, and finally, human hands get to work on manually making the dream a reality.

Throw in some modern computer-know-how and manufacturing technologies in there, and you’ve got the foundation for just about any mass manufactured object.

But what if you reversed this process? What if … the computer was in charge of crafting the project?

Training the AI to recognize chairs [Source: chAir]
Training the AI to recognize chairs [Source: chAir]

Such is the premise behind the chAIr project is. The big ‘AI’ in the project name stands for “Artificial Intelligence” – which pertains to two generative neural networks at the heart of the project. Put together by designers Philipp Schmitt and Steffen Weiss, chAIr reverses the roles of humans and machines by using the AI to generate a variety of different chair designs which are then brought to life by the designers.

It all starts with the AI, which is trained using a data set consisting of 562 chair pictures on Pinterest (See? Your photos DO have use on that website!). Unlike humans and other programs (Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher comes to mind) which take into consideration things like proper weight, balancing, and the number of chair legs, the AIs only care about how the chair looks.

AI-generated chair forms [Source: chAir]
AI-generated chair forms [Source: chAir]

This is where the human factor comes in. Using the AI-generated images, the two designers generate sketches of what they envision are functional furniture pieces. A backrest here, a chair leg there – it’s fascinating how Schmitt and Weiss’ sketches flesh out what initially look like poorly watercolor-painted images. Eventually, these sketches make their way into CAD.

Read the rest at SolidSmack.com

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This Industrial Design Team Turns to AI to Quickly Generate Form Studies



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Even though centuries have passed, the act of designing and making objects is still primarily the same


By SolidSmack.com

This is a very small behemoth of an online community about 3D CAD, technology, design, robots, ninjas… Ok, maybe not ninjas so much, but those guys are COOL so there just might be something about some dang ninjas. Besides the occasional blast of intensely cool product design and technology, we look at what’s going on in the world of 3D, add a splash of business insight and web tech into the mix and there ya got your SolidSmack.