Outsourcing the Drafting Department

Earlier this week I got an email press release from an outfit in India that provides outsourced architectural drafting services. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but it still gave me a bit of a shudder. What this company’s people do is what I once did for a living: take an architect’s roughly-to-scale design sketches and turn them into working drawings. I like to think that I was more than a human drafting machine, that I had some influence on the design, but I must admit that the essentials of the job did not depend on proximity. If had been in India, with the communication technology we have today, my effectiveness would not have been greatly diminished. Try this thought experiment: If your favorite associate moved to another town, could you still work together? What if he or she moved to another country? What if you met someone with the same skills and personality who already lived in another country?