OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models
for Visual Close Study of digital models
Drawings belong in models where they’ve always been, in the mental model.
They’ll evolve in form in the digital model.
Coming up alongside many centuries of mental modeling, digital modeling entered the AEC software scene first in 1987 (ArchiCAD), almost 40 years ago now in 2026. Digital modeling remained niche until Autodesk’s acquisition of Revit in 2002, which began digital modeling’s mainstreaming, now ubiquitous.
That’s not the whole story, a story still unfolding.
No later than 2004, those attending the LFRT returned home with ideas about the end of drawing.“Let’s drag this industry by hook or by crook into the future (digital modeling); drawings are archaic!”
I remember this as if I’m Bogart in this scene in Treasure of the Sierra Madre:
“Badges?! We don’t need no stinking badges!”
That’s how they felt about drawings. They had models now. So they didn’t need no stinking drawings anymore. This became a mantra for many years and is still repeated today. It’s nonsense though. Drawings are equipment for looking at models, any kind of models: mental, digital, physical. Because we have the cosmos, or a digital model of the cosmos, that’s no reason for abandoning telescopes. The situation indeed is precisely the opposite. And so it is in AEC with models and drawings.
They’re equipment for looking at models, and looking with specific intent. With what intent specifically? This is rarely discussed but I discuss it here:
Looking with Intent.
Showing that you did.
(for looking at models)
Equipment ?! We don’t need no stinking equipment!
That is manifestly not the case.
We need it.
And that equipment is evolving.
See block 2 below.
I invented that.
And that’s neither the beginning nor the end of the story.
1. Drawings in Mental Models
Drawings belong in models. It’s where they’ve always been. For good reason. From the first time anyone scratched out a drawing in sand, on a cave wall, on papyrus, they instantiated that graphic in-situ where it really is, in the mental model in formation in their minds. An interplay was underway.
2. Drawing-Model Fusion (2012)
With the popularization of digital modeling by the 1990s, technical drawing continued as before in its usual role, while instantiation into the model continued as it always had as mental exercise only, unaltered from V1.0 until I invented the automated fusion of drawings in digital models in 2012.
Fusion, …like recorded sound in (formerly) silent film.
3. Equipment for Visual Close Study in Models (2024)
An evolution in technical drawing’s form. Now that drawing resides in-situ within digital models (see V2.0), its form of expression should evolve.
From our blog
Looking with intent and showing that you did
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 