OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models

Absurd notions — about the demise of technical drawing in architecture, engineering, and construction — trample over discourse since 2004, and overlap with decades of inconsequential development of the most common software applications in AEC.

The situation is stagnant.
It starts with the absurd notions. 

Drawing is not in demise; abundant evidence shows otherwise. Drawing quality has declined though over the last 20 years, accompanied by inadequate digital modeling typically. We’re dealing with demise but of a higher order, not of drawing but of things greater. And logically attributable to decades of inattention to the nature and purpose of drawing in AEC software development.

Discourse needs to catch up, to reality.
A return to fundamentals is overdue.
Start, again — as was well known in former times — by understanding what drawing is.

Software development will follow.

Drawing is the vehicle for looking with intent — at models mental, physical, and digital — and showing that you did. 

What is looking with intent, at models? What is the intent?

The answer, in a list, is here: https://tangerinefocus.com/2026/01/04/looking-with-intent-and-showing-that-you-did/

The short form, here: look-with-intent-and-show.1.png

The idea of dispensing with that is self-defeating and counterproductive. It’s not unlike refusing to believe that recorded sound ought to be synchronized into silent film. Many did refuse to believe that including Jack Warner himself, in 1926, 28 years after the first machine demonstrating that function in 1898.

And of course, AEC has not dispensed with the vehicle for looking and showing at all. Far from it. But what the software industry has done is this:

The form of expression, of the vehicle for looking with intent — at models — and showing that you did, is kept locked in a form of expression that predates digital modeling and computing itself by centuries.

The vehicle for looking with intent — at digital models — and showing that you did, looks and feels exactly like the vehicle for looking with intent — at mental models — and showing that you did.

21st century software applications do nothing to develop the form of this essential vehicle. In fact, software as we know it is designed to reinforce stasis and prevent such development.

This is mostly unwitting because it simply never occurs to developers of these products: 

• To ask what drawings are.
• To recognize that drawings are the vehicle for the core work of AEC professions (they’re not “just dumb lines and arcs.“).
• To ask what the core work of AEC professions is.
• To recognize that a model — mental, physical, or digital — is not that vehicle, and why it’s not.
• To imagine the possibility of using digital modeling as an engine of evolution in the form of expression of the vehicle for looking with intent — at models mental, physical, and digital — and showing that you did.

To be fair, some steps toward evolution have been taken in AEC software.
Scroll down and see block [2.].
The steps have not reached the core apps, yet.

The steps already taken are just a baby’s first steps.
See block [3.] below, for description (and specification) of what athletic mature steps would look like.