Tag Archives: generative design

This Concept Headset Was Grown By Code Instead of Designed By Humans

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Generative design has been making waves in aerospace and automotive engineering for years, but it hasn’t really imprinted on consumer tech the way you might expect. Engineers use it constantly to shave grams off aircraft components or optimize chassis structures, then someone wraps the results in conventional styling so customers don’t have to think about the math underneath. The benefits stay hidden, buried under smooth surfaces and familiar forms that don’t challenge our expectations about what products should look like. Consumer electronics especially have remained stubbornly traditional in their design language, even as the tools available to create them have become radically more sophisticated.

The Grow headset concept takes the opposite approach and puts the algorithm’s output right out front, turning what’s usually a backend engineering tool into the primary design language. What emerged looks less like consumer electronics and more like something that washed up on a beach after spending years underwater. That skeletal structure with its organic voids and flowing curves comes from letting software iterate through thousands of variations, testing each one against structural requirements until it arrived at these forms that feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic.

Designer: Why Design

The most striking element is obviously that frame. Instead of the typical headband with internal reinforcement hidden under padding, Grow exposes an exoskeleton of flowing, organic voids that look almost coral-like in their distribution. The algorithm determined where material needed to exist based on stress requirements and where it could be removed to save weight, which is exactly how bone structure develops in nature. Every solid section and every void exists because the math said it should be there.

Look beyond the skeletal outer frame and the Grow headset feels like something you’d find in an Apple showroom. Outer shells made from metal, inner earcups made from a diamond woven mesh. It really feels like Ross Lovegrove or Zaha Hadid were given the reins to redesign the AirPods Max. The design looks bony and alien, but still has a level of pristine-ness to it.

The white and light gray colorway emphasizes that bleached bone aesthetic, though the renders in darker tones show how versatile the form actually is. Change the finish and you get something that reads less natural and more alien, which speaks to how much color influences our perception of organic versus synthetic forms. Either way, you’re getting something that looks fundamentally different from every other headphone on the market.

What Grow proposes is about as radical as the new transparency trend in tech. Sure, transparency is efficient because it just involves a material-switch from opaque to transparent. Grow’s generative design might require way more material than the minimal tech we see around us, but with the right algorithmic tweaking, these next-gen products could actually be tuned to work better, last longer, or be more comfortable. If you ask me, that’s a design trend worth investigating.

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These vases were (almost) completely designed and made by algorithms and machines

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From the conceptualization to the actual production, the Differential Growth Vases hardly had any significant human intervention. The vase shape was determined by a differential growth algorithm, while a 3D printer manufactured the vase. Although designer Tim Zarki orchestrated the project and came up with the very idea in the first place, the machines pretty much took over the execution of both the concept and fabrication phases, displaying two things – AI-based creativity, and the ability to have humans step away from creative roles with a fair amount of success.

Designer: Tim Zarki

Differential growth might sound like a fancy term, but it’s a way of explaining how cells multiply. The process can be understood through a series of rules that are repeatedly applied to points in space (called nodes) connected into chains by lines (edges) to form paths. In short, the cells adopt a pattern (based on their DNA) and create within that particular pattern, resulting in growth that follows a template set by previous cells. You can see this in how plant branches grow, how cells expand, how rivers meander, etc. Zarki put the same sort of algorithm to the test with the vases, setting a base shape and having the algorithm expand it. The result is nothing like any pottery you’ll ever see…

While most vases are created using a potter’s wheel, resulting in a rotationally symmetrical design, these vases have undulating designs created by the algorithm. The best way to understand how the algorithm works is to look at the shape of the base of the vase, and the final shape at the top. The vase’s vertical growth shows the transition between these two shapes, helping you understand how the algorithm works. There’s never a set final pattern, as the algorithm creates something new each time. This means each vase ends up looking unique. Zarki experimented with three overall designs, although the possibilities are quite literally endless, much like how no two plants grow the exact same way, or no two fingerprints look the same.

The final forms were then fed into a slicer software, that helps prepare them for 3D printing. The slicer creates a path that the printer’s nozzle has to follow, and once ready, the printer gets to work, slowly, but steadily printing the vase. As is evident, this entire process is nothing like the current conventional pottery methods, but with this project, Zarki hopes to challenge convention. By eliminating standard processes, and to quite an extent the human too, these vases show how oddly appealing a world would be to live in if AI designed more… obviously with humans playing a final role in determining whether the design is aesthetic or not!

The post These vases were (almost) completely designed and made by algorithms and machines first appeared on Yanko Design.