Generative design for Social Manufacturing

Social Manufacturing is a novel approach where different members of a community can interact within a cyber-physical social space in order to achieve specific and personalized solution for manufacturing processes. In such digital scenario, interactions, driven by information flows, can be divided in different branches depending on the actors involved in the whole process. One particularly critic branch for such collective production, is the one that captures the information related with product design, due to its direct link with creativity. Here we show how active tools based on Artificial Intelligence triggers artificial creativity that can be used for the user capabilities augmentation. We show how the use of deep generative models, based on Variational Autoenconders, offers solutions for a particular social manufacturing platform for furniture design combined with additive manufacturing to drive the transition from a digital framework to a real context.