TANGERINE FOCUS

a lens for looking at models

A progression is underway:

V1.0 Drawings in Mental Models

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

From the first time anyone scratched out a drawing on a cave wall, they instantiated the graphic where it is in-situ within the mental model in formation in their mind. An interplay was underway.

V2.0 Drawing-Model Fusion (2012)

I invented the automatic fusion of drawings in digital models in 2012. See the story here: Drawing-Model Fusion 2012

Fusion, …like recorded sound in (formerly) silent film.

With the popularization of digital modeling by the 1990s, technical drawing continued in its usual role while instantiation into the model remained unaltered since the time of cave painting (V1.0), done by mental exercise alone, unassisted by the digital model.

(OPEN VCS) V3.0

Using digital models to evolve the form
of expression, of the vehicle for looking with intent — at models mental, physical, and digital — and showing that you did.

Not only a fusion, but an evolution in form that surfaces the best of both media (model and drawing), in a new form of expression greater than the sum of its parts.

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 this looking, is not to be left stuck only in its ancient form, unaltered, not extended 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 in the relation between drawing and modeling.
Again:

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

We look, for clear reasons listed below, with specific intent.
See the cyan text on black background:

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’s 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.

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

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.