New Age Design

U.S. design software company Autodesk sees opportunity for India to solve its problems through better design.

- Prerna Lidhoo

PRADEEP NAIR, managing director, India and SAARC, Autodesk, talks to Fortune India about how the design and services company is integrating automation with design and helping the industry move towards generative design, offsite manufacturing, and 3D printing.

How is Autodesk trying to reinvent design?

Our customers are from five broad industries: architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and visual effects. We help design professionals in these spaces re-imagine design. Essentially, what we are saying is if you have an idea in your head of building a physical object like a car or a building, we help take what’s an idea and create a design to make it real virtually before you actually build it. We take what’s in your imagination and make it. So, traditionally we used to play, strictly speaking, in the design space. What we’re now doing is, we’re not stopping with design, we’ll help you make it too. So, as an example, take something that the government talks a lot about, housing for all. It wants to build about 20 million houses by 2022. That’s a huge goal. Now, the fact is that even if you had the resources, it’s an almost impossible goal to achieve unless we are talking about changing the way things are built in the first place.

What is generative design? How can it be applied in the Indian context?