[karmakaze]

I know this story is about company scale RnD. It can also be applied at any level. Research lives on a gray scale. At its core is growing understanding of your area so that you can do things you didn't know how to do before. I've always gravitated to the hardest problems to be solved so that I can learn something and make something that no one else had the vision or perseverance to make. So almost all my jobs have been RnD though only a few formally.

The most fun I'd say I've had was recognizing something ineffective and making (software) tools for it. Now that I think about it one of the first programs I made on my Atari 400 as a kid was Room, which let me move/rotate my to-scale bedroom furniture outlines around to see what layouts were possible and may be good to actually move the furniture.

[jfim]

Alternatively one can just use grid paper and some scissors. I bet you learned a lot writing that program as a kid though!

[dartos]

Sometimes a computer is just more accessible than paper.

[eska]

I remember being laughed at when I cut out coffee filters with a certain angle in order to plan how I would position motion capturing cameras to cover the room optimally. My manager liked the pragmatism though

[taneq]

There’s some incredible things being fabricated on YouTube with “cardboard aided design.”

[williamcotton]

How so?

[jagged-chisel]

Now, where is that pad of paper? Bah, the pencil is broken — who took the sharpener??

My computer goes with me everywhere and is ready as soon as I open the lid. Unless I forgot to charge it.

[smokel]

The Atari 400 would be connected to a separate CRT monitor.

[calamari4065]

The entire industry of CAD

[williamcotton]

What does that have to do with implementing a 2D model of a room with movable furniture?

How is paper not accessible? Do people not have note paper? What about junk mail? The last few pages of a book? You can make a scale ruler with any uniform markings.

[RugnirViking]

actually using paper for designing objects, especially complicated objects, is an extremely annoying process. lots of erasing lines causing paper to break, areas with internal complexity requiring sub-diagrams, often causing nesting complexity to blueprints on large projects. It makes it so much harder to simply view and talk about the current state of a design when that means sorting through filing cabinets for revision B12 part A.3.1 only to find the paper has torn. Not to mention making physical carbon copies of things.

It's one thing to draw a rough sketch of a part, and have someone else do the creative effort of turning it into an object. But quite another to specify in exacting detail how that part should be, so that given to several manufactories you would get back parts that are even remotely interchangeable. In that way it's a lot like the difference between a specification for a computer program, and the actual program.

When designing parts I often use pencil and paper when in an initial meeting with stakeholders, to quickly demonstrate ideas. But these sketches are not analogous to the real thing. They simply represent a direction work could be done

[harimau777]

This doesn't necessarily apply to every situation, but drawing, cutting out, and positioning paper takes more manual dexterity (and potentially artistic ability) than moving things around on a computer.

Pieces of paper are also likely to shift if you need to move things around frequently.

In a small apartment, surface space could be limited.

[digdugdirk]

And yet I still want nothing more than to see Solidworks burn in the deepest depths of Dante's Inferno.

[JoeAltmaier]

Wait - isn't the 9th circle of Dante's Hell a frozen wasteland?

[dartos]

I can use blender, but I can draw or paint to save my life.

[crq-yml]

For making it really exact to the actual measurements(which presumably was the goal) grid paper isn't going to work, not without large sheets and drafting tools. Illustrative drawing can be done freehand and allowed to slop and distort things a bit, but for a practical interior design you need to get down to centimeters of space.