Lets distinguish models from drawings. Models are spatial whole environments.

Their medium is mental ^model, physical ^model , and more recently digital ^model . With computers and software, to mental and physical models the digital medium has been added, not as a replacement for physical and mental models, but as a supplement, as an assist.

So what then are drawings? Drawings are fundamentally different from models in the following primary sense:

Drawings are not wide, expansive, whole (and fuzzy) things like models are. On the contrary, drawings are articulating acts of narrowing focus within a wider environment. Drawings are attention-focusing technique. They narrow from everywhere to somewhere, and they articulate something that matters, whatever it is that matters to the author, and they do it in an economical and symbolic way. The form of drawing has been constrained for centuries by limits that are both psychologically fundamental (innate) and pragmatic.

The form of attention-focusing technique has remained stagnant even as digital modeling tech has accelerated and advanced for decades. There is no reason for continued stasis in the FORM of attention-focusing technique. It’s been stuck where it is largely due to the failure of imagination of industry and software companies.

TGN _{(to be announced later)} is a step into the future FORM of the expression of attention-focusing technique.

TGN abandons some of the prior limiting conventions of the FORM of drawings, while absolutely retaining and elevating the principle FUNCTION of drawing: the act of narrowing focus, and showing something that matters CLEARLY.

There is a second reason that the form of attention-focusing technique has stagnated: Many people make a mistake. It is an ideological mistake. They believe that models REPLACE drawings. This is a fundamental thought error, a massively counterproductive error.

The mind simply does not work on the basis of model only. Cognition is not happening at all when only wide, expansive, environmental wholes are present. The mind at work is engaged with THAT, but at the same time it engages with attention-focusing technique. Importantly, it is not one or the other; it is both. Always. What cognition is, well, nobody knows, but we can observe something evident in the basic dynamic of cognition:

Cognition is an INTERPLAY between WIDE and NARROW, between ENVIRONMENT and FOCUS, between WHOLE and PART. Thinking happens, and UNDERSTANDING GROWS in the back and forth, IN THE INTERPLAY.

That being the case, it is missing the point to assert that models replace drawing. Rather, as the medium of model evolves, so too the medium of narrowing focus (“drawing”) must evolve. New software development must supply the rigging, the technique, needed to articulate a FOCUSED NARROWING CLOSER LOOK, in order to establish:

• the FOCUS pole of the
• ENVIRONMENT<<–>>FOCUS interplay dynamic of cognition itself 🙂

Stay tuned…