Speakers’ Corner gives you a preview of the voices you’ll hear at upcoming PI events, straight from the people shaping fashion and footwear.
In this edition, Natacha Alpert, Founder and Tech Innovation Educator at Miras3D, IED and Washington University, reflects on how digital product creation is shifting from a visualization layer to a manufacturing layer, and why solving interoperability between design, simulation and production systems will define what comes next.
What's the most meaningful shift you've seen in digital product creation this past year?
The shift I keep coming back to is the move from digital as a visualization layer to digital as a manufacturing layer. For years "digital product creation" meant CAD renders and virtual samples that still had to be translated into physical tooling somewhere else. What's changed is that the digital file itself is starting to become the production instruction, especially in 3D printing direct to substrate.
When you can go from a CAD pattern straight to a 3D printed, functional part on a textile or midsole without an intermediate mold, the whole meaning of "digital" changes. It stops being a preview of the product and becomes the product.
What's the biggest friction point still slowing down digital workflows?
Interoperability between design software, simulation tools, and print or production hardware. Everyone's digital thread breaks somewhere, usually at the handoff between a designer's native file and the format a manufacturing system actually needs. In footwear and apparel specifically, we're still translating files by hand between platforms that were never built to talk to each other.
Until file formats and metadata standards catch up to the ambition of digital product creation, teams will keep losing time and fidelity at every handoff.
Which emerging technology do you think will define the next phase of DPC?
Digital Twin technologies and multi-material, multi-property 3D additive manufacturing that prints functional gradients directly onto existing substrates. Instead of designing a shoe or a garment as an assembly of discrete parts sourced from different suppliers, you design a single continuous material system with zones of stiffness, cushioning, and flex built in at the print stage. That collapses supply chain complexity and design complexity at the same time.
What new skills or mindsets do you think teams need to build today?
Materials for 3D printing. Designers who understand polymer behavior, cure kinetics, and print parameters make fundamentally better decisions than designers who only understand form. Giving product creators enough materials science fluency to speak the same language as an engineer, without needing a materials science degree.
The other mindset shift is comfort with iteration in public. Digital tools reward teams that are willing to show unfinished work early and adjust, not teams that wait for a perfect reveal.
What's the most persistent misconception you encounter about 3D or digital design?
That 3D printing is a prototyping technology rather than a production technology. People still assume 3D printed parts are inherently lower performance or one-off novelties. In reality, direct-to-substrate 3D printing with the right material system can outperform molded parts on specific functional metrics like targeted cushioning or flex response, because you're not constrained by what a single mold geometry can achieve.
How has sustainability influenced the way you use digital tools in product development?
Digital tools let us ask a materials question earlier: do we actually need a separate component here, or can we print that function into the base substrate. Every eliminated part is an eliminated adhesive, an eliminated supply chain node, and often an eliminated end-of-life separation problem. Sustainability in my work is less about a certification checkbox and more about using digital precision to reduce material intensity and part count from the start.
Will AI become a creative partner or a creative disruptor for apparel designers?
Both, and I don't think that's a contradiction. AI will disrupt the parts of design work that are pattern recognition and repetition, and it will partner on the parts that are exploration, generating more material and form options faster than a human could sketch them. The designers who thrive will be the ones who use AI to widen the option set early and then apply human judgment, materials knowledge, and taste to narrow it.
Do you think the future of product creation will be more human-driven or machine-driven?
Human-centered design, machine-directed production. The decisions about what a product should mean, who it's for, and what trade-offs matter will stay human. The execution, iteration, and optimization within those constraints will increasingly be machine-driven. That balance is already visible in how 3D print parameters get tuned computationally while the design intent stays entirely human.
What's currently overhyped in the digital fashion technology space?
Purely virtual fashion and digital-only wearables as a near-term business, at least outside of gaming and entertainment contexts. There's real long-term potential, but right now a lot of energy is going into virtual goods while the harder, less glamorous problem of making physical production genuinely digital-native gets less attention than it deserves.
Favorite digital tool in your stack, and why?
Lumexor3D printers that print directly onto textiles and fabric. What makes them different from almost anything else in the 3D printing space is that they print FlexShock material directly onto textiles and fabric, not onto a build plate that then gets bonded or laminated to a textile afterward. The fabric goes in as the substrate and comes out as a finished functional part, with the printed material fused into the fibers rather than sitting on top of them as a separate layer. That single capability changes how I think about design from the ground up.
One word that sums up where DPC will be next year.
Interconnected.
Finish this sentence: In 2026, digital product creation will...
...converge the physical and digital intelligence of a product into a single continuous process, rather than two separate steps.
Natacha Alpert will be leveraging her deep knowledge and experience at The Fashion Tech Show LA (15-16th September) to not only chair the event, but to join a panel discussion on 'Scaling 3D Printing in Fashion: Next Industrial Revolution'.
