We discuss the significant technical challenges facing the CAD industry and research community and present an approach to address these issues. The key component of all CAD applications is the end user. Users' success or failure in interacting with CAD products ultimately governs the success of the products themselves. We extend the meaning of interactive techniques for this article to include more than low-level input device, display, and human factor issues. We deliberately include the way users work with applications to accomplish a work task. Using this extension we define three difficult challenges with interactive techniques: geometry shape control; interoperability across CAD, CAM, and CAE applications; and automatically morphing geometry in a meaningful way during design optimization.