| authors |
Jabi, Wassim (Ed.) |
| year |
2001 |
| title |
ACADIA 2001 [Conference Proceedings] |
| doi |
https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.acadia.2001
|
| source |
Proceedings of the Twenty First Annual Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture / ISBN 1-880250-10-1/ Buffalo (New York) 11-14 October 2001, 415 p. |
| summary |
The theme, which preceded my knowledge of ACADIA’s true age, resulted from a realization regarding the development and current state of CAD in Research, Education, and Practice. While I only got involved with ACADIA in the last half of its current life to date, I had the honor of studying with some of the early pioneers of CAD: 1) Harold Borkin, a founding member of ACADIA, 2) Jim Turner, a longtime ACADIAn, and a past ACADIA Conference organizer (actually the very first conference I attended), and 3) Ted Hall, another longtime ACADIAn. What I have learned from conversations with them and later witnessed for myself is a fundamental shift of focus in CAD from building tools to using tools. That is, while early CAD students, including myself, used to learn how to create software and tools to solve a particular problem, the current focus in the majority of schools that include a CAD component in their curriculum is on teaching the use of commercial software and/or the use of digital media in the design studio. One need only take a look at old list of courses that used to be offered in the CAD area and compare it with a new list to see this shift. Yet, one form of tool building that is continuing in a significant number of schools is the creation of scripts or small software modules (usually built using a visual editor) to create interactive systems for delivery over the web or on CD-ROM. Examples include the use of Macromedia Director or Flash for creating interactive digital titles. While this current state of affairs has increased the receptivity to digital tools and media, it does obscure an important fact. For knowledge to advance in this area, we need researchers who can not only use tools, but also invent new ones to solve new problems that are not addressed by the existing crop of commercial software. The more time we spend not educating our students in the art and science of building digital tools, the harder it will be to: 1) find teachers in the future with those skills, 2) advance and influence the development of the state-of-the-art in CAD, and 3) erase the use of CAD as a euphemism for slick computer-generated imagery. While not common, the tradition of tool building is still going on most notably in architecture schools with strong financial resources and those that offer doctoral level education. Commercial, governmental and business/education entities are also continuing the research tradition of tool building. ACADIA, as a reflection of the field it focuses on, has widened its scope to solicit papers that deal with CAD education and the use of CAD in practice. Thus, you will read in this book papers that focus on all three aspects: research, education, and practice and in some cases the intersection of two or more of those areas. Thankfully, ACADIA, while concerned with CAD in education has maintained its receptivity to basic research papers as well as a willingness to publish innovative papers in the area of practice. As chair of the technical committee, I made sure that the call for papers and the final selection reflects this desire. We should continue to emphasize the need for presenting this diversity of work in our annual conferences and I am optimistic that the ACADIA community is in support of this notion. |
| series |
ACADIA |
| email |
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| more |
www.acadia.org |
| references |
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| last changed |
2022/06/07 07:49 |
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