Design for Additive Manufacturability

Leonardo da Vinci has long been a patron saint of engineers, and for good reason. Da Vinci’s designs combine insights from mechanics and the natural world into concepts that were centuries ahead of their time. Of course, that’s not always a good thing. For all his innovations, there’s one thing da Vinci didn’t anticipate: designing for manufacturability (DfM).
These days DfM is almost a given, although its implementation differs widely depending on the manufacturing technologies at play. 3D printing, for example, introduces an almost entirely different set of constraints on manufacturability compared to injection molding or CNC machining.