Interview questions for a Student

Hello Everyone,
My name is Valerie, and I am a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division. I have an assignment that is due on Friday, April 6, 2012. I was wondering if any forum users would be interested in helping me out with the following questions:

1. When do you use CAD in the production process(e.g. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?
2. What types of standardization do you use?
3. What are the advantages or disadvantages that CAD brings to your practice?
4. Can AutoCAD be used as effectively for designing as it is used for reading construction documents? And can you provide logical examples to support your answer.
5. Do you use Modelspace and Paperspace? If so what are the advantages of doing this? If you did not use model space and paper space, what changes would have to be made to your drawings and what problems do you foresee if you have to go back and edit these?
6. If you do use model space and paper space, and since every drawing is usually created on a scale of 1:1, won't the scale hinder you as a designer in terms of sheet layout? Why or Why not? And can you provide me with some samples?

I will be very appreciative if you all could help me out with these questions. Please email them to me if possible at v.raiche@comcast.net

Sincerely,
Valerie

1. Post-construction (facility management, facility engineering, cafm, etc)
2. My own, because everyone knows their own standards are the best. Seriously, my pared down quality-control document standards do not conflict with the National CAD Standard, and we utilize AIA layer naming guidelines. We also use BOMA and IFMA for space measurements.
3. No disadvantages. We have a 100 year old campus and have a huge paper archive room already. Before those drawings were scanned, I had to keep the room under lock and key, otherwise vital documents would disappear. It's also a hassle to access the paper plans when we span so many acres. With CAD, all 200+ people in my department can access them no problem.
4. The Engineering staff accesses CAD files when trouble-shooting building performance and maintenance issues, paper is too much of a hassle for us. We have to call our outside contractors and beg them to NOT send paper over out of habit, just the CD's or download links.
5. Yes. The advantages are preset scaling, model being 1:1, and ability to use the Sheet Set Manager within AutoCAD.
6. I don't do sheet layout, and mostly, we look at our as-builts through modelspace, unless we need information from the titleblock.

1. Start with existing conditions, then design, and finish with as-builts. So everywhere.
2. In-office, not strict about it though.
3. Abaility to easilly modify and store you can't do with paper.
4. It's never been used for reading construction documents here. We plot construction copies for use in the field.
5. Modelspace is the drawing and Paperspace is for borders and viewports for plotting. Civil 3D and other verticle products create both automaticly for you. Paperspace has been around since release 11 many years ago.
6. Both Modelspace and Paperspace are drawn 1:1, the viewports are scaled to fit whatever I need to display in them. You can easilly add custom scales like 1 inch = 5 miles if needed for sheet layout. Profile views in Civil drawings typically have different horizontal and verticle scales to make the elevation difference easier to see.

I can imagine how difficult it is for students to start on the career ladder after receiving their education.