Designers everywhere must be aware of the great changes taking place in the drawing office. Drafting is rapidly becoming a new technology. The drawing office environment, which has hardly changed in the past half century, is undergoing a revolution. The employment of advanced electronic equipment and automated drafting machines within the drawing office has given rise to the creation of an atmosphere much more in keeping with the draftman’s important role in industry today.

Quality and reliability standards of products have become more rigorous, and manufacturers have been faced with the problem of needing to reduce overhead costs. Lowering standards of accommodation in the drawing office, coupled with the feeling of not being paid a salary proportional to the importance of their contribution to the company’s success, have resulted in trained drafttsmen leaving the drawing office for other related fields. These factors gave rise to the need to automate the traditionally manual methods of drawing offices in order to reduce to a minimum the lead time required between the conception of an idea and its production reality. And the drafting machine, as a device, is central to this.

The fuller utilisation of the higher abilities of draftsmen is a  major challenge today. To meet this challenge, ways and means of reducing the time and effort required to make drawings are needed. Among these ways and means are the use of simplified drafting machines and methods, the elimination of non-essential and exclusive use of drafting aids, and time savers.

Unlike in foreign countries, India cannot go for computer-aided drafting machines because of the high capital costs involved in it. The majority of drawings required by industries today in India are still produced by manual methods, and this situation is likely to continue for some time.

Most of the drawing machines manufactured in India today are so expensive that an ordinary designer can never afford them. Furthermore, in the available drafting machines, no human consideration has been taken into account, resulting in user fatigue. The unnecessary floor area taken up by its bulkiness and complicated operational sequences make the product still worse. After studying the aforesaid problems, the redesigning of the drafting table was felt to be long overdue.