Now, there’s a dark side to this. I have a good friend at the Department of Housing and Urban Development named Al Ripskis.[[30]] “They’re reorganizing again,” he groans from time to time. It’s a waste of good tax money in Al’s opinion. The faces and desks change; the bungling remains.
Shelton, though, says the better companies thrive on fluidity, and in Silicon Valley he may be right. It depends on your outfit’s style of management. Don’t play computer games with your people, however, just because the machines make it easier to play musical chairs.
AN ARCHITECT
Microcomputer graphics might be just the ticket for rough sketches. In fact, on a sophisticated machine, the computer graphics would do for the final version.
Who knows? An architect someday might carry around a little computer the size of a sketch pad and do designs to be fed into a larger machine for the detail work.
A PRODUCT DESIGNER
If I were one, I’d leap at the chance to try computer-aided graphics. Sooner or later, American industry will make widespread use of machines that automatically turn drawings into real frying pans, soap bars, or refrigerator cabinets. Well, it won’t be that simple. But computer graphics and related technologies will increasingly blur the line between creative types and production people.
Just look at the newspaper industry. Reporters, after all, on most daily papers are basically setting the type for their stories as they tap them out.
But back to the factory. The jargon is computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing or CAD/CAM.