Before Artificial Intelligence, There Was Design Intelligence:
In my last post, I mentioned that I would write more about the influence that Artificial Intelligence is having upon the way engineers design, model, and even simulate. Now, l will take you back in history.
Well before the era of AI hype, engineers were actually looking at how we could get a computer to do something more than merely “draw.” We were asking a computer to obey rules, think of its own geometry, ensure adherence to standards, and avoid unnecessary human labour. One of the least appreciated pioneers with regards to this approach is the programming language known as LISP.
LISP was first used many decades before AI came onto the scene, but it provided a principle that is extremely important today: procedural, rule-based thinking. Rather than manually coding line by line, an engineer could implement logic, i.e., rules that can be used to determine how a certain design is developed, which can then be followed perfectly by a computer. LISP enabled users of AutoCAD to create layouts, automatically create elements of a building, create a standard, and code engineering intent into a design process.
This is far from what you would call “artificial intelligence” today. Yet it is one of the first forms of what I call design intelligence. The computer is no longer simply a drawing tool. It is a system that understands instructions.
With modern AI, we build on that same basis, but we are also extending it beyond it. While LISP enables automated or computer-generated designs using logic, AI can facilitate various design possibilities, improve performance, predict failures, and hasten decisions, using data, of course. In that sense, it wasn’t that AI replaced rule-based automation; it merely enhanced it in several areas.
To individuals like us, working within the field of design and simulation, this is particularly critical for our understanding, particularly with how our work lives and functions within the broader scheme of design and the design world, particularly within the context of what a Design & Simulation professional like myself does: translating theories, concepts, and ideas into a working model of electronic equipment, imitating the real-world device, before any physical construction takes place.
As for my attached video, I demonstrated where LISP is utilised inside AutoCAD in order to create a simple structured layout of a building in an automated manner. I hope you find it informative.