First published Nov. 19, 2021, on MIT News.

In the 1960s, the advent of computer-aided design (CAD) sparked a revolution in design. For his Ph.D. thesis in 1963, MIT professor Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a game-changing software program that enabled users to draw, move, and resize shapes on a computer. Over the course of the next few decades, CAD software reshaped how everything from consumer products to buildings and airplanes were designed.

“CAD was part of the first wave in computing in design,” says Maria Yang, Gail E. Kendall Professor and director of MIT’s Ideation Lab. “The ability of researchers and practitioners to represent and model designs using computers was a major breakthrough and still is one of the biggest outcomes of design research, in my opinion.”

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