Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGDBuilding upon research experience in simulation and optimization, scientists from Honda Research Institute Europe (HRI-EU) and Fraunhofer IGD worked together on development of interactive engineering systems to shape the future of the industrial design process. This fruitful collaboration was established in 2019 and resulted in a CAE tool, taking advantage of Fraunhofer’s computationally-efficient GPU-based interactive simulation software, RISTRA (Rapid Interactive Structural Analysis), to effectively utilize innovative preference-based optimization technologies from HRI-EU. We strongly believe that such systems will be an essential part of the future development process in industry, allowing for a seamless human-machine collaboration. The current project developments open the perspective for a joint future research, which can potentially involve utilization of Fraunhofer’s advanced visualization, nonlinear simulation, and multi-material 3D-printing technologies, as well as geometric deep learning methods from HRI-EU, to bring the CAE systems to the new levels of creativity.