AI Use Statement

I've been designing with AI since 2023. That fall, I presented at Denver Startup Week on using AI for brainstorming — at the time, MidJourney was one of the few tools available. A week later I discovered Vizcom, which has since evolved into one of the most powerful AI tools for industrial design.

We view AI as a powerful tool in the design process — much like Adobe Creative Suite and 3D CAD transformed how designers work, elevating the deliverables a single designer can produce.

Using AI to actually create is often misunderstood. Rather than asking AI for direct solutions, we use it as a creative partner. Ask AI to design a bike, a backpack, or a water bottle, and it will generate versions based on existing products. Instead, we prompt it with unexpected ideas unrelated to the final product — this encourages more original concepts and leads to more innovative thinking.

We recently applied this approach to a hard hat project. AI quickly rendered our concept sketches, then helped us explore design variations, and even produced preliminary 3D geometry that served as an underlay for our SolidWorks model. One amusing detail — the imported CAD model measured only 1.3 mm long, so it needed a bit of scaling.

The example below shows how quickly AI can accelerate the creative process. Starting with a simple sketch brought into Vizcom, we created a realistic video of a father and child riding through Boulder, Colorado — in about five hours. Just a few years ago, producing anything like this would have seemed impossible.