Stage Directions – December 2014: CAD is helping sets become ever more complicated – and is also complicating the discussion about how to build them
While it goes without saying that CAD has completely changed the design world, charting all those disruptions is a different thing entirely. Scene shops are unique animals. The Vectorworks files for a million dollar touring show are going to look a lot different than the elevation drawings printed out from Vectorworks for the summer stock performance of A Streetcar Named Desire. And the methods for communicating the necessary information to both are not the same.
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The most interesting thing about this article to me is to hear that a successful company like Connors has been trying to move as much as they can away from printed drawings in their shops. I took a class in Mechanical Engineering this semester and one of the processes we learned about concerned 3D assembly drawings and how they are more and more prevalent in the manufacturing world. Often, assembly instructions are now sent to the floor as an animated, step by step video instead of a drawing. You can especially see how this would be important with large manufacturing operations who are often dealing with shops across national and linguistic barriers. You don't have to translate an animation. However, there is so much more information on a detail plate than I think could ever be portrayed in a video. And I still wonder about the long held belief, perhaps superstition, at least in our shops, that the carpenter should have to do a little work, or at least math, to properly understand a drawing. For instance, even though it wouldn't be hard to generate, technical designers do not generally make cut lists for the floor, or even give every dimension on a drawing. If the dimension can be inferred from the rest of the information on the sheet, then we leave it to the carpenter to divine. I have always had a little suspicion about how useful this actually is, but with touchscreen models on the floor instead of plates, I think the argument may well become moot. The other problem I see with this tactic is that now to be a fabricator on the floor you also have to be acquainted with the software on the touchscreen in order to get the relevant and correct information out of it. I'm not sure if adding this requirement in skill set is going to guarantee the best fabricators available on your floor.
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