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For the fourth episode of ‘Navigators of Design’, Jonas Nyvang and Tue Beijer, founders of the design technology platform STILFOLD, reveal their revolutionary software-driven approach to liberating industrial design from the rigid constraints and costly bottlenecks of traditional tooling. The 10-part interview series produced in collaboration with Most Studios, invites the visionaries to discuss how the convergence of computational design, robotic fabrication, and AI allows them to completely eliminate conventional limitations.
Decoupling the creative process from heavy industry’s machinery, STILFOLD grants designers unprecedented freedom to fuse fluid, sculptural aesthetics with structural load-bearing strength directly from a single flat sheet of metal. This paradigm shift is poised to disrupt manufacturing across the transportation, aerospace, and construction industries.
‘We found a surprisingly strong synergy between material, geometry, and their collective performance — curved folding doesn’t merely shape metal, it makes it stronger. There is a vast, unserved gap between basic sheet bending and sophisticated, tool-based stamping. Inside that gap, we unlock a massive opportunity: a flexible way to make products with the fewest steps and the highest refinement possible,’ Tue Beijer opens the conversation.
STILFOLD transforms flat sheet metal into high-performance structures | all images courtesy of STILFOLD
STILFOLD TURNS SHEET METALS INTO HIGH-PERFORMANCE STRUCTURES
STILFOD is a software-defined folding company, transforming flat sheet metal into high-performance structures that shift complexity away from traditional tooling and assembly into pure geometry. Partnering with industrial leaders seeking lighter, stronger, and lower-carbon components, the platform eliminates capital-intensive manufacturing constraints to unlock a more agile, tool-free future for product design. Through their proprietary STILFOD technology, they replace physical tooling with a software-driven laser-creasing process, using curved folds to provide load-bearing capacity to thin metal sheets. This process boasts up to a 70% reduction in components, condensing multiple elements into single, complex folds.
‘We still have to obey the laws of foldability, and curved folding in particular demands developability, which means every design must begin from a flat sheet. That’s a genuine constraint, and it comes with both pros and cons,’ explains Nyvang. ‘But folding over a curve introduces a compliant behaviour that activates the material itself. A straight fold simply changes direction. A curved fold changes the physics — it places the metal into a balanced state of tension and compression, so the geometry carries the load instead of the mass,’ adds Beijer. ‘That’s why the curve is so efficient. Moving from a flat, two-dimensional sheet into a three-dimensional curved fold builds stiffness out of geometry rather than thickness, and the relationship is dramatically non-linear: double the curvature and you get roughly four times the stiffness. You’re not adding material to gain strength — you’re creating a mechanical system that holds superior qualities.’
STILFOD introduces a manufacturing process that eliminates restrictions of industrial design
SYNERGY BETWEEN MATERIAL, GEOMETRY AND COLLECTIVE PERFORMANCE
Developing a process that optimizes the creative freedom of industrial design, STILFOD shifts the discipline away from physical tooling and manufacturing limitations, allowing designers to integrate surface and structure into a single continuous form. ‘Our whole philosophy is to go from a flat sheet to the finished product in as few steps as possible, at the highest level of refinement, and without the costly, slow, and wasteful tooling process,’ Beijer adds.
the iterative process transitions from computational models to tactile paper prototypes
Driven by a vision to build a self-sufficient digital value chain, the company aims to deliver production as a service through local, modular robotic cells. This model is grounded in the belief that the future of heavy industry lies in software-defined manufacturing, where companies can simply ship code to fabricate products close to the end customer. A single shift that rewires the supply chain away from a handful of massive factories and fragile logistics networks.
‘In traditional manufacturing the tooling is the bottleneck — millions in cost and months of lead time before you can hold a single part. With a generic, software-driven formative process, that bottleneck disappears. The design is no longer hostage to the tool,’ Jonas Nyvang notes.
‘The recipe stays reassuringly simple — material, method, and geometry. When your value chain rests on those three things rather than on a specific tool and factory in a specific country, resilience stops being something you insure against and becomes something you design in,’ Beijer shares.
advanced robotics, computational design, and AI unite to unlock the potential of sheet metal
Eliminating the joints, rivets, and welds, STILFOD’s digital platform changes the manufacturing equation at its roots, shaping materials that simply can’t be formed or stamped conventionally. ‘A continuous folded structure carries load through its geometry rather than through adding material or fasteners, so we’re changing where, and whether, it fails.’ Jonas Nyvang explains. ‘We have folded 1700 MPa high-strength steel, 7000-series aerospace aluminium, and even titanium. So we aren’t just removing failure points; we’re building from stronger materials to begin with,’ Tue Beijer completes.
STILRIDE goes beyond shaping sheet metal, actively altering its physics to maximize performance
Featuring a fluid, continuous, and distinctly sculptural design, STILFOD’s products range from mobility-tech to on-demand infrastructure. This is exemplified by STILPOD, a flat-packed vertiports for heavy drones constructed from recycled aluminum that can be unbolted and relocated without leaving a trace. Navigating a path toward cleaner ways of manufacturing, with a technology natively accommodating lower-carbon materials, STILFOD’s sheet-based forming utilizes smart nesting and precise process control to eliminate the scrap typical of traditional cutting methods, significantly reducing material waste. The resulting lightweight structures inherently minimize operational energy throughout their entire lifecycle.
STILPOD constructed from recycled aluminum, to be unbolted and relocated without leaving a trace
From the outset, the duo has relied on their design background rooted in the strategy that seeing is believing, using their products to challenge the limitations of traditional industries through their respective outcomes. A journey that demands significant time and effort, yet STILFOD never loses faith in the power of the curve and how it can be utilized through mining structural folding intelligence.
Closing this awe-inspiring conversation Jonas Nyvang leaves the advice ‘Keep it simple, have fun and constantly create physical demonstrations and preach whenever you can to get ambassadors. As we like to say: Slice the elephant, share ideas, drink water and stay metal.’
value chain resting on material, method, and mathematical geometry rather than factory-specific tooling
shaping high-strength steel, STILFOD‘s platform eliminates structural failure to engineer stronger products from the outset