CAD Smart Objects: Potentials and Limitations

For many years, CAD software depended on entity objects that were manipulated and interpreted by the user as meaningful symbols. These entities only represented the geometrical aspect of the design, but never had knowledge of what they are, or how to behave. With the new CAD systems, this concept has changed into the smart CAD objects. The smart objects will automatically provide all the data related to it: geometry, materials, specifications, price, as well as manufacturers and theoretically any related data. Creating new objects is not an easy straightforward job, and requires more programming skills than previously needed. Taking into consideration the relative difficulties in learning to modify and create new CAD objects, this might lead to a new branch of learning, as the architecture students might not only need to learn how to use the CAD packages but also how to program it in a way that makes them capable of doing what they want rather than doing what the package allow them to do.