'The opportunity of better' - doing or making more with less. That was the headline theme for this year's event. In a world where population continues to grow and that population gets richer and wants to consume things, the challenge is to achieve this at the same time as reducing resources - people, time, materials, energy - required. As Sam Ramji, vice president, Forge (Autodesk’s cloud-based developer tools activity), said: “More is inevitable...We have to fundamentally rethink the way we make things…It is both a massive challenge and a massive opportunity.”
Doing more with less is a design-focused solution for the most part, but whereas a couple of years back generative design would have been linked strongly with additive manufacturing (AM) at the production end for metal components, Autodesk’s (https://is.gd/litoha) message has matured, with subtractive processes now driven by this technology.
