The art of balancing the design, safety, and comfort of automobiles involves a lot of complexity—especially when it comes to adding more space to a finite area. Toyota is responding to the market demand to free up more room in the cabin by creating thinner and lighter seats.

“While the current seat frame is designed to meet the strength requirement with trusted manufacturability, it is difficult to make it thinner,” says Shinsuke Omori, project manager in the Interior Design Department, Vision Design Division at Toyota Motor Corporation. “Designers do not usually work on the seat frame itself, but rather add materials to it, and that’s the restriction.”…

Generative design, a technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) that is available in Autodesk Fusion 360, makes a good fit for this balancing act.