I see matt is having a wee rave on his blog again about SW development. I thought I should counter this just for balance and to stimulate thought. Not that we ever get much of a discussion going about these things here.
Some time ago when I posted to this group more often I suggested that SW could be picking up game technology for use in CAD. At that time SW had achieved quite a lot with the product and was facing uncertainty about where to go next. It was apparent that the largest innovation in 3d was being done in other graphics sectors. To my mind there is no reason why this borrowing should not take place provided the look and feel is tailored for technical use. I suggested that there was no good reason why a digital calculator should look like an abacus and no fixed requirement why CAD should remain rooted in AutoCAD type icon swatches I have also made other suggestions including emerging technology like MS SeaDragon in CAD which many people would find even more incongruous. Indeed extrapolating this notion you could actually completely re arrange the engineering mindset to be more about information exploration and refinement than carefully controlled sequential projects executed by specialists Far from being junk crammed in to a CAD program I see it may well be that the junk is going to be the real tool and that CAD is only going to be a sub module of it We will be taking advantage of automation not only to take the donkey work out of projects but to make them self propagating and adjusting. I see CAD as such to be less important in the future of design than traditionalists would like In fact I am going to throw in a new idea and state that the next pursuit should be a move to a more holistic approach where the design process is replaced by a readily re-orderable database of information, images and even sound and where drawings become largely museum pieces I think the real items destined for the bargain bin are the people and businesses who don't reach forward with an open mind as to what part technology can play in their endeavours
have a nice day all