These days, public works professionals are spoiled for choice when it comes to technology. But, of course, this wasn’t always the case.

There was a time, before computers, when every design was meticulously drawn by hand and slide rules were relied on to perform calculations. Here, Terry McIvor looks back at a career spanning 50 years, and asks whether the bevy of digital tools now available have made it easier to get the job done – or just create more complications. 

By Terry McIvor, Senior Civil Designer, Toowoomba Regional Council 
I commenced work fresh out of high school in 1968 with the then Toowoomba City Council as a cadet draftsman in an office of fourteen men.

There was one chief draftsman, one senior draftsman, a number of draftsmen from first year to seventh year, cadets and a tracer. I was a cadet for two years and then progressed to assistant draftsman and afterwards yearly through the ranks until I reached the pinnacle of a seventh year draftsman after about twelve years.

One did not advance to first year draftsman until a certificate in civil engineering was obtained. I later gained the position of specially classified draftsman. It was about this time that I resigned and went to work in a private consulting engineering practice as design office manager.

To progress further at the council I would have needed to wait until the senior draftsman or chief draftsman retired or dropped off the perch.

However, after a seventeen year absence (ten years in the consulting practice and seven years with Laidley Shire Council) I returned to Toowoomba City Council to fill a position that had become vacant and that required stormwater drainage design skills.

Skill sets during the 1970s were completely different to what is needed in today’s design office. There were no computers, so every design had to be drawn by hand, needing a considerable array of equipment to achieve a final product. Drawing in ink on tracing paper was difficult enough, but to try to correct a mistake was tricky and needed further skill.

Consequently, you always attempted to do the job right the first time. Drafting was done by standing or sitting at a drafting table.

When I first started, electronic calculators were yet to be invented and slide rules and calculating machines were the only way of completing mathematical tasks.

A cadet or young draftsman had many other tasks that he or she was required to do. We undertook traffic counts by sitting in a car all day with traffic counters on boards. We even undertook pedestrian crossing counts by standing on a step-ladder, trying to count how many people crossed each time the lights changed. We went and measured newly laid water mains. We undertook stadia surveys and monitored pressure testing of pre-stressed water pipes. As a cadet, it was our job to take the smoko orders and go off down town to buy the food and then come back and make the tea for the more senior draftsmen.

We would go and collect the rainfall records from the BOM site in town and collect the pluviograph charts from our bore station sites and read the data. We would take the seismograph up to our council quarry and monitor the explosions that took place.

These were also the days of imperial measurements. Metric would not arrive until 1974. I was later commissioned to build a model (CAD 3D and 12D were still yet to be invented) of the proposed water bird habitat that the council had decided would be Toowoomba’s bicentenary project.

When the model was completed, it was taken around many of the schools to explain the concept to the children. It was put on display at shopping centres and in the front foyer of the council’s administration building. The model certainly helped clarify what was going to be built.

The 1980s saw a revolution develop for designers. Not only did computers come along, but also came design software in the form of CivilDes (later CivilCAD) and AutoCAD. Then, we received PC Drain for stormwater drainage design, AutoTURN for vehicle swept paths, Perfect Lite for lighting design, together with the Microsoft suite of programs.

Later still came 12D Road Design and many other add-on packages. Wow! Now we could design all sorts of things and draft away to our heart’s content. No more special equipment, no more drafting by hand, no more plain black and white. Now we could improvise and use  256 colours and draw wonderfully complex details and show all our designs in 3D and even conduct fly-throughs of our design!

But, has it made any difference to the volume of work and its quality?

In many ways, yes, but in some ways, no. We now have very powerful software at our disposal. We can produce any number of designs on just one project quite easily. However, this leads to a lot of tweaking – what if we do this, what if we do that, what if raise the road another 50mm, what if we reduce the carriage width by half a metre? Multiple options are tried and tested. Even after all that, it is still difficult to get a final decision on how something should be built.

We have to standardise so many aspects of AutoCAD so that every design comes out with the same line types, pen types, colours, fonts and text sizes.

We can, however, produce drawings at a much faster rate; we can download huge surveys in seconds; we can have a design ready in hours rather than days or weeks; and we can create elaborate presentations. We can try many options in a short time to get the best result. We create standard blocks that are just inserted into drawings to avoid drawing the same thing over and over.

However, there are many more distinct advantages. We can now visualise everything in 3D. We can produce video fly-throughs of designs with all the design elements shown, pavement marking, street trees, buildings, street lighting, moving vehicles and people, which enable our clients to see quite graphically what is being proposed.

The quality of work produced now is amazing and older designers could only dream of what we can now do. Instead of all the equipment we had to use, we just now press a button and magic appears on the screen.

There’s definitely been much change, and all for the better. I will look forward to hearing about what happens in the next ten years. Virtual reality helmets so we can really picture being there, walking through the design perhaps? Who knows! To see the changes in my life time is mind-blowing enough. I can only guess what the future holds.

This story has been adapted from a paper presented at the 2017 IPWEA International Public Works Conference. Read the original here.