AI in Design and Prototyping Toy manufacturers have significantly enhanced their design and prototyping capabilities through AI.
While Santa Claus and the North Pole elves may not be using artificial intelligence (AI), the integration of AI into the toy manufacturing industry has been a game-changer, revolutionizing the way toys are designed, produced, and interacted with. Let’s explore how AI has been seamlessly woven into the fabric of toy manufacturing, touching on aspects from design and production to user interaction.AI in Design and Prototyping
Toy manufacturers have significantly enhanced their design and prototyping capabilities through AI. Advanced software powered by AI algorithms can now analyze market trends and consumer preferences, providing toy manufacturers with invaluable insights on the rapidly changing needs of their target markets. With a data-driven approach, the toy manufacturers have increased their flexibility and response capability to enable the creation of toys that are more likely to appeal to target demographics that have increasingly fickle needs.
For example, LEGO, famous for its interlocking plastic bricks, has integrated AI into its design process. The company developed an AI-powered tool that allows designers to explore a vast array of brick combinations and structures more efficiently. This tool can predict how certain pieces will fit together and suggest optimal ways to achieve specific design goals. This AI assistance is particularly valuable in the prototyping phase, where it can take countless hours to manually test different brick combinations. With AI, LEGO designers can quickly prototype new sets and themes, significantly reducing the time and resources required to bring a new product to market.
Interestingly, with the explosion of LEGO sets, Instabrick is a crowdsourced and crowdfunded community that uses AI to inventory and track LEGO bricks for a person’s collection. So, even consumers are designing and developing AI tools for their own toy collections.
Likewise, Hasbro uses AI to enhance its prototyping efficiency. By employing AI algorithms, Hasbro can quickly generate and evaluate multiple design iterations, far more than they could consider manually.
