there’s a part of the solution that’s rarely talked about (so far). It involves putting blame where it belongs: with software companies. More specifically, on their failure to recognize the essential difference between drawing and modeling and their fundamental interdependence. I describe this here: Drawing, to Draw your attention and with more detail on the scope and limits of, respectively, drawing and modeling as media, here: Legal implications of models and drawings.

But that’s preface. I’m blaming the software industry for not recognizing drawing and modeling difference and interdependence, sufficiently. When it’s recognized — and very recently 7 different software companies (the first of many more to come) finally have begun to recognize it — when you do recognize the essential differences between modeling and drawing, and their fundamental interdependence, then software design becomes very different; it becomes driven by the idea of fusion, fusion of drawing in-situ within models, thus empowering AMPLIFICATION of the distinctive function of each (drawing and modeling), and the amplification of their interplay, which is where (in interplay) thinking happens and understanding grows. << the purpose of media 

Note the analogy to the fusion of sound into silent film, the amplification of the distinctive function of each and the amplification of their interplay, and, interplay: the engine of thought and understanding.

That automatic fusion of drawings in models started in 2012. I mention the 7 software applications now doing that automatically here: Tangerine Media Innovation Spec 2018.

As drawing-model fusion continues to grow in the industry, taken up by more software companies, decades-long intractable problems begin to fall away. Because the best of both drawing and modeling are retained as a matter of course together in fusion. The required essential qualities of drawing — e.g.: “I say, “here”, that what should be shown “here” is shown here, and, nothing that matters is missing here; I affirm it” — are retained, and amplified. While the high value of modeling is presented/delivered WITHOUT the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about who is claiming what about what, where. FUD, by the way, that can only be addressed by the act of taking a closer look somewhere and articulating an affirmation, an act otherwise known as: “drawing“.

Software/media that does the fusion, of drawing IN models, as a matter of course during model and drawing development, will, naturally, present this fusion at delivery milestones, with all the benefits of each (modeling and drawing) intact, and amplified, and with the negatives of each (drawing: decontextualized abstraction) (modeling: FUD) not only mitigated/assuaged, but actually dissolved, evaporated, gone.

That’s not all though. Once drawing arrives in-situ within models as standard/ordinary/simple software capability, then drawing itself, as a medium, is going to evolve, radically. I describe a framework for that evolution (of drawing, the form of its expression), in a (free) book that I wrote last year. Download links here: Tangerine Media Innovation Spec 2018.

Chapter 3 is a specification for software developers. The rest of the book is commentary from my experience building BIMs and construction drawing sets over the years.