What if we could recreate the human heart in a virtual world and watch it beat in real time? What if we could test a cancer treatment on a digital twin before it ever touches a patient? What if we could design a prosthetic not just for function, but to complement human identity? These questions are no longer the stuff of speculative fiction, they’re at the core of a brave new world where designers are shaping not just products but life itself.
And at the frontier of this world? WDO Corporate Member Dassault Systèmes. Since 1981, the French company has been a catalyst for human progress, pioneering virtual worlds that improve real life for consumers, patients and citizens. “Our vision is to harmonize product, nature and life,” Anne Asensio, Dassault’s Vice President of Design Experience and WDO Regional Advisor explains. It’s a mandate that has evolved from aerospace and automotive mockups into virtual twins of human organs, bodies and even experiences.
Through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, a digital environment originally used to prototype aircraft and cars, designers and scientists can now simulate everything from the fluid mechanics of a beating heart to lattice-structured breast implants. This shift toward life sciences, powered by data and driven by design, allows for collaborative modeling and testing of otherwise complex systems.
One such example is the Living Heart Project, a 15-year endeavor that brings together diverse expertise from across 125 organizations to model the human heart down to its cellular structure. “We can simulate a child’s heart, place a stent virtually, and even predict how it will grow,” Asensio shares. The goal with this project is not just precision medicine, it’s actually ethical medicine – to ensure medical professionals can make better, safer and more informed decisions for their patients.
There’s also the Smartweave project, which aims to improve surgical implants through AI-driven, patient-specific design. Leveraging the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Smartweave’s Kasim system creates virtual human twins to optimize surgical mesh for conditions like stress urinary incontinence, making implants that integrate more naturally.
And Hopper, a French‑based start-up that is using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to reimagine mobility for those with limb loss. As Asensio sees it, Hopper’s high‑performance prosthetic blades exemplify how design and biotech can harmonize product, nature and life. By leveraging digital twins and virtual simulation, designers can optimize blade geometry for comfort and agility, balancing performance with accessibility.
What’s radical about these projects isn’t just the technology, it’s also who they include. “The bio and care fields are more welcoming of designers than traditional engineering,” says Asensio. Designers bring empathy, systems thinking and user experience to traditionally rigid scientific frameworks. In both hospitals and biotech startups, their contributions help shape how treatments are delivered, how products feel and how healing starts.
Yet with power comes responsibility. “Ethics is the most important question,” Asensio asserts, sharing that Dassault Systèmes works to embed ethical reflection as part of everything they do. Virtual tools, she explains, can simulate the outcomes of ethical choices, helping teams weigh sustainability, health impacts and societal effects before making decisions in the real world. Still, challenges remain. “Corporations often use this technology just to save time and money,” she notes. The designer’s voice isn’t always in the room when decisions are made. Ultimately, it’s this gap between simulation and application that poses the most danger.
“The future of design should help people stay who they are, not transform them into something else.”
“Technology is both a remedy and a poison. What worries me isn’t the tech, it’s removing humans from the loop.” Rather than designing people into some optimized, algorithmic ideal, Asensio actually aspires for a return to ontological design – a discipline that helps people stay who they are. “It’s about enabling everyone to design their own life,” she says, “not conforming to a predefined standard.”
And so, as biotech increasingly gives us the power to alter, enhance and redesign ourselves, restraint becomes key. These innovations shouldn’t be framing the human body as a machine to be fixed, but rather as a life to be honoured. Because what is good design if it isn’t rooted in our humanity?
