Thinking point: Manual or digital?

Are there any designers who still sit at their drawing boards to draw by hand? Can’t drawings all be made by using drafting soft ware on any good computer? And what about model making – why would anyone want to work with glue, scissors, sticky tape, craft knife, card and paper to make a model when they could use that very same piece of drafting soft ware to produce a digital model of the space that can be rendered and lit an infinite number of ways? Isn’t it sensible to tap into the power and freedom that computers give us for all our design work?

The answer is both yes and no.

There is no question that computers allow us to work smarter, more efficiently and with more freedom than is oft en the case when using manual techniques, but this argument misses a vital point about the relationship between old and new methods that can more than compensate for the efficiency that computers bring. Manual drafting and model-making is a craft that gives you a real connection with the project. There is a wonderful link that allows ideas to flow through you and your pencil on to the paper which means you to engage more fully with the project. All the decisions about placement of lines and so on belong to you, and not a computer, and you are forced to think carefully about what you are drawing. There is no doubt that working manually leads to a better understanding of drawings, what they represent and how they work. The manual process allows for a more expressive and spontaneous approach that computer-based design oft en lacks; a sweep of the hand across a sheet of paper which leaves a unique and eloquent pencil line is not something that can easily be reproduced by a computer, for example.

On the other hand, computers give us the opportunity to copy and edit work quickly and easily. Simple functions such as ‘Copy / Paste’ are incredibly liberating – no more laborious hand drawing of 30 tables and 120 chairs on a restaurant plan, for example. Instead after just a few keystrokes, the designer is free to concentrate on the design, rather than the act of drawing itself. Drawing with the computer also means that ideas can be exchanged quickly and easily by email or other means of file transfer. So, computers give us freedom and versatility throughout the design process, which is very appealing. But you should remember that the CAD (computer-aided design) soft ware is essentially only a pencil, a tool to aid the drafting process. It has functions that enable some of the tedious aspects of working on drawings to be automated, and it can put lines on to a virtual sheet of paper where you tell it to, but CAD soft ware cannot create a drawing by itself, nor is it able in most instances to decide if what is being drawn is sensible or logical in construction or space-planning terms. It is, therefore, important that the operator understands what it is that is being drawn and how it should be represented on the page. The computer cannot add creativity to a project: that is the sole responsibility of you, the designer.