Designing is fun
Designing things is fun. That’s why we became designers. Letting our creativity flow and bringing new concepts and ideas into reality, that’s what we love to do. We love it so much that we even take a pay cut when choosing a creative profession over another one that would be more lucrative.
But it’s not only the pay cut that is making life as a designer harder. Putting ideas into reality is a difficult task. It can take years to go from an initial concept to a final product, building or object.
The reason is simple: After coming up with an idea, you need to figure out how to actually build it. And that’s not easy. Along the way, we use something called CAD Software.
The inefficiency of CAD Software
CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. In a way, the computer does aid us but in a way CAD software is just a digital version of a drafting board operated through mouse and keyboard. While tools in other industries have been revolutionized by the advent of computers over the last 30 years, CAD is still a very manual and tedious process.
The reality in design practices around the world is still this: The lower you are in the internal hierarchy, the more CAD you have to do. Design is easy, fast and fun, while working with CAD is painful and slow.
AI as an Assistant
In the early 2020s a magical technology was released to the world - and changed it forever. Computers started to communicate with us through natural language. This new technology was called Artificial Intelligence.
A lot of people started claiming that this ‘AI’ will become so powerful that humans would not be required to do work anymore ‘very soon’. Unfortunately, this dream hasn’t materialized yet, so we are still at the office, pushing points, curves and surfaces for many hours a day.
We - as in the Raven team - are less ‘optimistic’ with that timeline, but we did realize something: If LLMs can write code and describe geometry, they may be able to help with CAD as well. And that’s when we started building Raven, the first true Copilot in CAD.
Raven brings the fun back
AI CAD assistants are an immense opportunity. They are very far from significantly automating anything.
But: Raven teaches parametric design to people that thought they could never learn it. Raven explains grasshopper scripts where even their authors have no clue what is going on. Raven doesn’t master complex workflows, but it can speed up the process by orders of magnitude. And Raven turns sketches into parametric models in minutes.
There’s still a long way to go, but thousands of users using Raven every month confirm: There is a place for AI in CAD, and we’re on the right track.
We are not building a Design AI. We set out to empower the designer and most importantly: make design fun again. We’re glad to have you on board on this journey, let’s build the future together.