Surface Design Solutions co-founders Tevis Jacobs and Lars Pastewka were featured in a trade magazine of the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, on the science behind physics-informed surface optimization. The article makes the case that conventional roughness metrics like R_a, the industry standard for decades, simply don't predict how surfaces actually perform. SDS's physics-informed AI takes a fundamentally different approach: rather than chasing a roughness number, it identifies the surface features that directly govern performance and generates purpose-built specifications to hit them. The result is a tool that helps manufacturers stop optimizing surface finish and start optimizing what actually matters — yield, uptime, and product performance.