New Ideas in the Drawing Office

Abstract

The term ‘drawing office’ goes back a long way, and until the advent of technical education this was the place where ‘drawings were made’ there the whole of the engineering thinking was done — and all too often still is done — by very few people, and in many cases by one person only, out of a drawing office of ten or more. The result was that a draughtsman was purely a ‘drawer of lines’ and was judged as such. The emphasis was on the drawing and not on the design. Also, because the drawing office head would not delegate even the simplest design, he usually became the bottleneck thus encouraging the draughtsmen to over-elaborate just to fill up time; hence over-elaboration became ‘established practice’.