Cast your mind back to 2017. If you walked the floor of any serious engineering organisation and mentioned 3D printing, you’d get one of two reactions. Either a slightly dismissive wave toward the machine that spat out fragile white prototypes, or a flash of genuine excitement from someone who’d just discovered topology optimisation.

The challenge, for those of us working in additive manufacturing, wasn’t technical. It was cultural. It was about changing the way design engineers thought.

The battle cry of that era was simple, if not easy to win. Stop trying to use additive for a design meant for subtractive methods, and start designing for additive from the very beginning.

Breaking the Prototype Mindset

For decades, 3D printing was synonymous with rapid prototyping. It is a useful step in the development process but firmly positioned as a means to an end. You printed a part, held it in your hands, checked the form, and then sent the design off to be injection-moulded, machined, or cast. Additive was a visualisation tool, not a manufacturing method.

The shift we pushed for — and gradually achieved — was to get engineers to ask a fundamentally different question. Instead of “Can I prototype this in additive?”,   “Should I manufacture this in additive?” That distinction matters enormously. Once engineers began designing with the additive process in mind from the outset, the results were transformative. Internal lattice structures, consolidated assemblies, and complex, conformal, cooling channels that no drill could ever reach weren’t design flourishes. They were functional advantages that only additive could unlock.

It was hard-won progress. It required training, evangelism, and more than a few internal battles over qualification processes and material standards. But it worked.

Additive Grows Up: Into Production and the Factory Floor

As the industry matured into the early 2020s, the conversation evolved again. The next challenge was scale. Could additive move beyond bespoke, low-volume applications and compete as a genuine production method?

The answer, it turned out, was yes — in the right context. We saw significant inroads in tooling and fixtures, where additive’s ability to produce complex, lightweight jigs quickly translated into reduced lead times and lower capital expenditure.

And we saw genuinely compelling production use cases emerge. The roof mechanism bracket on the BMW i8 stands as one of the cleaner examples: a structurally optimised, additively manufactured metal component on a production vehicle. It was proof-of-concept at scale. The GE LEAP Fuel nozzle was another example. Twenty-five parts consolidated down to about 10, and it is in many engines flying us today. Additive had earned its seat at the grown-ups’ table.

But even as we celebrated these wins, I kept coming back to one thing. Even as we celebrated these wins, in almost every case, the decision to use additive had already been made before the design optimisation began. A component was earmarked for additive manufacturing — whether for complexity, weight, or strategic reasons — and then the design team got to work extracting the most value from that process. The process selection came first. Then the design followed.

For high-value, low-volume applications, this is a perfectly workable model. But the engineering world doesn’t deal  only in BMW i8 roof brackets or high-end fuel nozzles for GE.

The Real Challenge: Cost, Speed, and the Decisions Nobody’s Making Fast Enough

Today, the pressure on engineering teams is categorically different. Speed-to-market is existential. The cost of a wrong manufacturing decision — identified late in development — can be devastating. And sustainability credentials are no longer a nice-to-have. They’re scrutinised by customers, investors, and regulators alike.

Against that backdrop, the question I find myself asking is this: Are we still choosing our manufacturing processes too late, and with too little information?

In my experience, the answer is yes. Design engineers are still largely working in a world where manufacturing process selection is somewhat predetermined. Driven by convention, material habit, or whoever shouts loudest in the planning meetings. The cost implications of that choice often don’t surface until a supplier’s quote comes back , at which point significant design investment has already been made.

What if that were reversed?

Designing for the Best Process, Not the Most Familiar One

The opportunity that genuinely excites me right now is the ability to get cost insight at the concept stage — across multiple manufacturing processes, simultaneously. Imagine a design engineer who can generate a concept geometry and, before committing a single hour of detailed design work, understand what that component would cost to produce additively, versus injection moulding, versus CNC machining. Not a rough guess. A meaningful, process-aware estimate.

That changes the entire dynamic. Suddenly, the question isn’t “We’ve designed it for this process, because that is how we always did it. Now, what is the best price we can get?” It’s “What’s the best, most cost effective way to make this, and how does that shape the way we design it?” Process selection becomes a design input, rather than  a design output.

The implications ripple outward. You can optimise simultaneously for cost, manufacturability, cycle time, weight, and carbon footprint — because you have the data to do it. You might discover that a component you’d always assumed was an injection moulding job is actually cost-competitive in additive at your target volumes, with the added benefit of geometric freedom. Or you might find the reverse. A component your team had been excited to print could be made faster and cheaper through a traditional route, freeing your additive capacity for where it truly adds value.

This is the next chapter for additive manufacturing — not just as a process to be optimised in isolation, but as one option in an intelligent, cost-aware manufacturing strategy.

The Thought That Stays with Me

We spent years teaching engineers to design for additive. That work mattered, and it paid off. But the fuller lesson — the one we’re still learning — is that great design isn’t about defaulting to any single process. It’s about having the insight to choose wisely, early, and with evidence.

The companies that figure out how to embed that cost and process intelligence into the earliest stages of design won’t just make better products. They’ll make them faster, cheaper, and more sustainably than the competition. In 2026 and beyond, that’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between gaining a competitive advantage and falling behind.

The author has spent over 20 years working in 3D CAD, additive manufacturing, and design engineering. He has helped organisations move from 2D to 3D, design for additive, improve design processes, and reduce product environmental impact and improve profitability.