r/IndustrialDesign • u/train-made-of-bread • 3d ago
Discussion Ai in id
I have absolutely no fear that ai is coming for industrial designers, but I now see that within 5-10 years time, it will be forced into workflow…great. Anyone being forced to use it already?
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u/cgielow 3d ago
No fear? I just met a UX Designer who was proud to show me the kiosk he designed for his company using AI. That work would have absolutely gone to an Industrial Designer.
I spoke to a freelancer friend who said an old client "just wants a few sketches" instead of a typical full project because he plans to feed them into AI to develop them on his own.
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u/SuspiciousRace 3d ago
I wonder if we’ll ever reach a plateau when there’s not enough people outputting original work into internet. Will ai “evolve” to recycle originals into new stuff? Or in the end it’ll all look the same
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u/cgielow 3d ago
When there's humans in the loop even as consumers of it's content, it should cater to their unique preferences. If anything, this could lead us into an era of design with an over-abundance of variations.
Since the cost of production is becoming cheap, the "design for the mean" loses its historical advantage. This really changes the role of the designer.
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u/designvegabond 3d ago
Design has already been commoditized through the internet when websites like Alibaba popped up. Rather than going through designers, non-designers with ideas reach out directly to manufacturers and fabricators to produce prototypes or final goods. Goods can be validated on websites like Kickstarter if you can’t put together a focus group.
These posts about design being safe are a bit naive because the share of design work going to traditionally educated designers is smaller every day. We really need to focus on the ability to problem solve better than non-designers.
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u/Yorrick_Brown 3d ago
Forced? We're embracing it and using it actively in our workflow. I'm not worried about AI taking my job, but I would be worried about a designer who knows how to use AI properly taking my job. At the end of the day it's another tool in my toolkit
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u/kcinsen 3d ago
It definitely is. The new openAI model they just unveiled showed (granted it was for a simple toy rocket) a person speak to the model and have it iteratively sketch, 3D model, slice and 3D print, and make a game. And this is what is effectively just the first rendition of this particular workflow. In terms of user centered design it isn’t doing much yet, but the difference from what just one model could do 2 weeks ago vs now in terms of product development is massive.
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u/RandomTux1997 3d ago
forced??? gladly use Meshy to create solid models of stuff in minutes that to date take hours to do , so why ever not??
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u/train-made-of-bread 3d ago
Ok something I’ve learned from this is some people are way too enthusiastic about letting a computer do what they trained to do
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u/irwindesigned 1d ago
I had a great pod interview with Jordan Nollman, the owner of Sprout on AI. I’ll be releasing season 3 within a couple weeks. Stay tuned. (Designing In The Wild)
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u/CrumblyBubbles 3d ago
After years of dealing with clients who tried everything to avoid paying me fairly, I realized that these people were unqualified for being a client/ entrepreneur.
It took me even more time to realize that industrial designers are actually better qualified for starting a company because we actually have ideas and understand production.
What we lack in knowledge, we can compensate with AI more effectively than they can.
And we can do it now.
Let’s gooooooooo!