Intent Driven Design is the new term added to Fusion in 2026. At the core this is asking if you want to design all your parts internally or if you want to create them externally and put them together. Historically this is called Bottom Up or Top Down modeling.

Bottom-up assembly means that each component is created externally and brought together into a separate Assembly Design.

Top-down assembly means that each component was created internally to a single design.

Fusion also gives us flexibility allowing us to have external designs in a Top-down assembly, and also use modeling tools in a Bottom-up assembly. So the best way to figure this out is with practice.

In our course we are going to walk through the various methods to clarify this process.