ready made-we just manufacture them; then we get products where a company is putting out a feeler--can this be one? What materials do I use?-and that I call "design collaboration which makes up about 1/3 of our work; and then there's the third level where the owner comes to you and says, "make me this floor," or "design me this bureau." ~ that's where honest costing has to come in because you're controlling how much cutting is done, how much stone is used, how much tile is used, and yet you want to produce a beautiful product.

I think it's advantageous for a waterjet company to have some design professionals in it. My company has three programmers and three artists now, and we're hard put to keep up with what's coming through the door.

Smiga: I think Harri brings up a good point, which reflects the two dimensions that are going to develop with waterjet. One is as a commoditized cutting tool--cut anything for anyone-which is a business, and it's a business for many people.

And then, as Harri’s pointing out, there is the waterjet's use as a tool for supporting the stone and tile and architecturally related trades. What is exciting, and also touches on what Bern was saying about all the advancement, is that the machine has evolved. Now the charter for us as a group in this conversation is to take the standards by which we use the waterjet for the stone trade to a new level. That's the exciting frontiersman ship available to us.

Roundtable Conference: Waterjet Technology - Continued

Continued from

When I was in school, they used to ask, "when is automation going to take place in the construction industry?" The closest example we could give was of a remote-controlled bobcat. That was about it, then, but we're here now. The industry is actually in a situation now where the contractor, the designer, the distributor, the specifier and the architect are applying automation to architectural surfaces fabrication. Other than manufacturing, it just hasn't been done before, I don't think.

Ward: what's also driving the whole waterjet industry as a whole is that the equipment can be purchased and targeted at a specific industry, and yet be almost guaranteed that there's going to be so many spin-offs in so many other fields, that income is going to be generated from all sorts of areas.

As that happens, and as more money comes into those businesses, those businesses are becoming more efficient, leading to greater affordability in the price of waterjet work.

Aalto: in the beginning, I found that there wasn't anything that people didn't want cut into something. But you can't be in a state where you're always getting into new things. Even though waterjet can go into all those different areas, I think a company has to choose three or four areas that it becomes good at, and then go into those areas, develop them and become a leader in those areas.

Going back to architectural work, my company deals on three levels: we get designs from architects and designers and owners-they're