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AM lends increased design freedom for the manufacturing of unique functional geometries. Hegab [15] reviewed the design aspects of geometrically graded functional materials. These range from rudimentary component optimization through integrated component design, to flexures, engineered to form compliant mechanisms that are constrained in specific degrees of freedom. The ease by which metamaterials can be manufactured from a highly engineered and well‐defined unit cell enables the construction of filters, membranes as well as light and stiff components where the uncertainty from using a stochastic manufacturing method such as foamed materials is taken out of the equation. Said metamaterials can be designed using topology optimization, also known as generative design, to functionally grade a component toward a specific wanted behavior such as thermal conductivity or elastic deformation. The above‐mentioned capabilities enable AM to be strategically employed to induce added functionality of a part. For example, how a load‐bearing part will buckle and deform and eventually collapse plastically can be precisely be achieved by a combination of integrated component design, compliant mechanisms, and topology optimized metamaterial gradient. The performance of geometrically graded AM parts depends on the voxel size, which in turn determines the limits to physical complexity. Hence, AM processes with smaller voxels, namely powder bed fusion (Section 1.2) and sintering‐based hybrid AM (Section 1.5), have the best applications of geometrical gradation.