From CAD to Machines as Co-Designers
Finnish economics professor Osmo A. Wiio claimed that we typically overestimate the near future and underestimate the distant future. His thoughts resonate well with today’s perception of design automation. Back in the 1980s, I took part in the first-ever Finnish “integrated CAD” projects, in which the architect, the structural, HVAC, and electrical engineers exchanged CAD files instead of blueprints. We used minicomputers, which had about as much computing power as today’s laser printer. Still, we were able to automate design tasks. Our flagship project was the biggest office building in the Nordics. The design consisted of repetitive floor units and, thus, was ideal for primitive design automation. We could, for example, make changes to a few base units and propagate the updates throughout the floors and blocks of the building. It was a huge time saver if you compare it to manually doing the same operation a number of times to dozens of drawings. Today’s designers have tools ...