Past, Present and Future Sentiments Towards CAD [Computer Aided Design]

Abstract

With new technologies, come hopes, expectations, and speculations of potential new futures. This thesis attempts to understand such attitudes, specifically around the development and evolution of Computer Aided Design (CAD) technologies. To this end, text corpora from 1980 onwards that centers on CAD is extracted from 880+ PDFS of the AIA magazine corpus. AIA corpus was chosen as the AIA has historically dominated design discourse and educational pedagogy and is much of the reason of why architecture exists the way it does today in America. Furthermore, their archives offer free and available past issues since the publication’s inception (1913). These bodies of extracted text are then compiled into four timescales 1980–1989, 1990–1999, 2000–2009 and 2010–onwards. These categories are then compared and analyzed using a natural language processing (NLP) word embeddings approach revealing semantic and syntactic relationships between words. This analysis frames language as a partial reflection of social values and hopes to reveal insights into understand past, present, and future sentiments around CAD since its inception.