A progression is underway:

Here are two ideas, about (thought/thinking) and (sight/looking), that cannot be separated without making thought incoherent:

• If AI is going to do actual AEC thought, then maybe we oughta think for 2 seconds about what AEC thought is.

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

What is that intent? (what is drawing?)
And what is AEC thought?

Essentially they are the same thing, the same activity with the same motivation, assisted and expressed in the same medium, with the same outcome resolving the same purpose/intent: to get the core non-optional essential work of AEC done:

The core work of AEC is:
developing models and looking at them in ways that facilitate assurance of their fitness and adequacy

Here’s what that means in practical terms.
Please do not skip past the cyan text on black background in 2 columns on one page, here:

Notice the loop, or interplay, in the 1 pager above.

The intent really is about getting ourselves into this loop.

• What we see and look at informs what we think about.
• What we think about informs what we see and look at.

The set of drawings is the expression of this loop, both the active experience of it, and a tangible record of it.

The idea of dispensing with that is self-defeating and counterproductive. Like abandoning telescopes for the cosmos. It’s also like refusing to believe that recorded sound ought to be infused (synchronized) into silent film. Many did refuse that including Jack Warner himself in 1926 even 28 years after the first machine demonstrating the fusion of sound into film in 1898:

In September 1926, Jack L. Warner, head of Warner Bros., was quoted to the effect that talking pictures would never be viable: “They fail to take into account the international language of the silent pictures, and the unconscious share of each onlooker in creating the play, the action, the plot, and the imagined dialogue for himself.”[146]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film#Commerce

Inevitably though, AEC has not dispensed with the vehicle for _looking with intent at models_, drawing.

While misfortunately, it is AEC software that keeps drawing caged in a form of expression that predates digital computing (and modeling) by many centuries.

As if software companies are aware neither of the purpose of drawing, nor that the digital model will take its role inevitably in the formation and form of this fundamental activity: looking with intent at models.

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.

So?

Well, the core work of AEC is developing models, and looking at them in ways that facilitate assurance of their fitness and adequacy.

This was true 500 years ago, as it is today.
It makes no difference whether models are: 

• mental models only, or 
• mental and physical, or 
• both of those plus digital

So, the looking matters
It isn’t to be left to chance,
isn’t to be downplayed,
certainly isn’t to be wished away.
And the form of expression of this looking (and the record of it), ultimately is not going to be left stuck in its ancient form only, unaltered by digital modeling.

So, a reminder:

• What is drawing?
• What does it mean “to look”?
• What is a model?

What is drawing?

Drawing is an instrument (the instrument) for the close study of models, for model evaluation:

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

Why does this matter?
Because it points to:

• What is the core work of AEC?

The answer is found in the core relation, a dynamic of interplay between drawing and modeling:

The core work of AEC is:
developing models and looking at them in ways that facilitate assurance of their fitness and adequacy

Again, we look for clear reasons, listed below.
We look, with specific intent:

What does it mean to look?

• That, above, is looking with intent, and showing that you did.
• That’s what people are looking at and what they’re looking for, when they look at AEC models. It is their intent, when looking. 
• And it is why AE firms invest the majority of their resources doing so. Looking in these ways, for these things, is primary, fundamental, and non-optional. Other, machine-enabled evaluation methods, though some are important, are secondary and ultimately optional.

This is intentful looking.
A word about a word:

• Intentional is being aware that we’re making a choice.
• Intentful is taking a particular choice, from a range of options, with the aim of achieving a specific outcome/state of affairs. I.e., “we are doing [X thing] because of [specific reasons] with the intent of achieving [very specific Y] as a result.”

^{https://betterbusiness.substack.com/p/intentful-vs-intentional}

What is a model?

A model always has been and remains the environment within which the act of looking with intent is expressed and realized. 

The digital model must also be (as the mental model is) the environment within which the act of looking with intent is expressed and realized. 

Repeating:

The model must act as host for the core work of AEC and its professions: looking at and evaluating models as they develop.

Model utilization must rise in quality

1. Underutilization of models must be solved by software that increases model utility. Software will eventually re-orient itself to support the use of models for what they’re best suited:
   • being the environment within which architects, engineers, and builders visualize.
   • Specifically, the model must be the place where AEC professionals activate and express that particular kind of looking that not only just happens to be the AEC industry’s most heavily invested form of (though it is usually not thought of as such) VISUALIZATION:  the set of drawings embodying the act of looking with specific intent at models.

The  F O R M  
of our equipment for looking 
W I L L
E V O L V E :