Anyone given any thought to what a drawing is? Take a shot at defining it. I did. It’s an expression of visual close study. Study of what? A model.

Visual Close Study. Call it ‘VCS’.

The idea that those expressions are to remain locked only in their centuries-old form of expression, and externalized from the digital model, after 3 decades now of ubiquitous digital modeling… Wow. That’s really something remarkably unimaginative.

Here’s some imagination, and it’s being developed open source now so anyone can integrate it into any modeler app. It’s also designed with an open gateway that includes input from any model source (any method of generation) and (optionally) any source of extra graphics including pencil drawn and AI generated drawings.

Here’s the site for the dev project proposal: https://tangerinefocus.com. Announcement of the GitHub project is forthcoming later this summer.

The proposal site includes also a page on co-evolution of generative modeling and VCS equipment, which may interest some readers:

VCS and Generative AI: a co-evolution

The open source proposal outline, spec, and partial demos (much better, is coming soon) is here:

Visual Engagement with Modeled Worlds

Trapped in an unimaginative loop

The industry remains trapped in an extended period of lapsed/stunted imagination, specifically in areas of primary importance to complex visualization, the engine of thought itself, the kinds of media that support that engine, and their evolution for better cognitive support. See here, for concise overview of this issue:

https://tangerinefocus.com/an-engine-of-thinking/

Why we’re stuck

There is a straightforward reason we’re stuck. It has everything to do with a slogan that shortcuts reflection. A thought-terminating slogan.

The history of AEC software development is a history of, well, movement, from software used for the creation of drawings, which are so called ‘2D’, toward software used for the creation of models, which are so called ‘3D’.

And because numbers succeed each other in order, from 1 to 2, from 2 to 3 and so on: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, …100, 101…

We automatically recognize that 2 is progress beyond 1, and 3 is progress beyond 2, so, we take this as signal of progress. It makes for the end of thought on the matter. It’s reductive. We don’t ask what drawings are, or what models are. We just say, 3 is better than 2.

But mapping the numbers 3 and 2 to the concepts of model and drawing respectively, well, the mapping doesn’t hold, the way we think it does when we think about it automatically, reflexively, without really thinking about it.

When we actually think about it, we see things for what they are without this incidental mapping of the numbers 2 and 3

To be fair, the mapping is attractive. The slogan is seductive. It takes some effort to untangle the issue and see the problem. We get derailed from what things actually are and see something reductive and off target instead.

The actual situation is that:

• yes, the real world is Cartesian in X, Y, and Z, so, 3-dimensional (OK, sure, if you’re a certain kind of physicist or mathematician there are limits to Cartesian mapping but those distinctions make no difference in most AEC work, or in ordinary daily life)
  
• yes, digital modeling simulates visual spatial environments in 3 Cartesian dimensions and a 4th for space-time. Yes.
  
• but, modeling arrived on the scene not after the arrival of digital computing but many millennia before in the form of physical modeling and the ever-present mental modeling (and do note: no digital model has ever meant anything to anyone, not even impressionistically, without adequate mental model formation in tandem.)
  
• No, ‘drawing’, the expression of visual close study (VCS), is only incidentally ‘2D’. It is not fundamentally 2D.
  • Drawing is incidentally 2 dimensional for two reasons:
    • Models are primarily mental in their nature. They occupy Cartesian space in our minds. This is indisputably true. Adequate interpretation and understanding of any digital model requires adequate mental model formation. If anyone doubts this, it’s not difficult to design a falsifiable hypothesis about this, and an experiment to test it.
    • And because people are not mind-readers, we cannot convey VCS expressions held in our minds, to anyone else, and they’re poorly articulated there anyway, and so we rely on some medium:
      • VCS expression (drawing) traditionally is articulated on paper, or things paper-like, and, the “normal direction” of view, i.e., perpendicular to and in parallel projection against, some volume and plane of interest within a model, is actually productive. The normal orientation is revealing.

I think there is no need to belabor the background on this. Let’s move on. There is no FUNCTIONAL constraint locking visual close study (VCS) expression to planar, flat expressions.

The appearance of digital modeling makes a difference though. Digital modeling is a progression, not from 2D to 3D. But from mental model to digital model.

To be more precise. It’s a progression from mental modeling to mental modeling supplemented and assisted by the digital model.

And that’s a new ground, a different kind of soil, more fertile in some ways, less in others, within which to plant, and develop, and make use of, visual close study (VCS) expressions.

And doing that is vital, absolutely. We cannot think clearly, or thoroughly, or beyond superficially, without doing this.

We did not progress from 2D to 3D. Rather, models and visual close study (VCS) expressions are in a continuous loop that is the basic observable dynamic of thought itself:

the wide environmental expanse of models mental and digital, are one pole in the engine of thought that -is- the interplay between that pole and the other pole: the articulate expression of the act of visual close study (VCS) within those models. VCS in it’s traditional form of expression is technical drawing as we’ve known it.

The form of VCS expression will evolve in new ground.

Disparage or undermine either of the two poles in the engine of thought, and thought decays, all the way to zero if you push either pole down that far.

While drawing automation has a role and is useful to the extent defined in automation discourse, to leave it there, as if it’s an answer to old-schoolers who just can’t move on from 2 to 3…, that’s disparagement.

Yes it’s good to automate. But it’s not enough. And if it stops there, it’s just disparagement not only of one of the two poles, of the engine thought, but both.

So, there’s more to the story, and work to be done.

Software development must finally overcome this 30+ year lapse of imagination. Let’s not waste another 30.