OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models

This is the second in a series of posts.

Part 1 was here:

JUST AS DRAWING is FOR CLOSE STUDY OF MENTAL MODELS, TGN is FOR CLOSE STUDY OF DIGITAL MODELS.

In that post I wrote,

JUST AS DRAWING is FOR CLOSE STUDY OF MENTAL MODELS,

TGN is FOR CLOSE STUDY OF DIGITAL MODELS.

VISUAL CLOSE STUDY

The idea that digital modeling, appearing 30+ years ago, is a suitable replacement for visual close study (drawing), is an idea that falls down as soon as it starts walking.

It’s incoherent. How could visual close study, of an environment, be replaced by an environment?

A silly idea.

But what is visual close study? What once was obvious is long forgotten. So let’s review. I start at the beginning with the basics…

I, like everyone, cannot distribute my visual attention evenly throughout an environment. It’s impossible. Our minds, and our perceptual equipment don’t do that.

They just don’t. Presumption that they could, or someday would, is unfounded. This is so fundamental that anyone proposing otherwise can entertain themselves without practical consequence.

We are not omniscient.

Our awareness is not omnipresent.

Forgetting to account for the general conditions of perception, is unrealistic and counterproductive.

We can’t distribute attention everywhere, evenly. We have peaks and valleys. We have moments/locations of high intensity awareness, attention, concern, interest; …we focus attention. The rest is peripheral.

Where we focus attention, we gain higher intensity awareness.

Why do we do that? Or, how do we know where to put our attention, where to invest our concern with higher perceptual cognitive energy, more intensity of focus?

That goes to the nature of being. It comes from experience. Something in the environment, mediated by experience, tells us that something matters. So we go there, to locations where things matter more. We pay attention there, we reflect, and articulate.

As we do that, at various locations, we’re learning, educating ourselves, and not only about whatever it is we’re paying close attention to. This behavior, this action, teaches us something about the periphery too.

There is an interplay, in our heads, between the peaks and valleys..

You could call that interplay, if you’re inclined to call it something, THINKING.

Let’s focus on the focus though. Where we focus our attention, what are we focusing on?

It sort of depends on the domain. Let’s compare two domains: architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) and …fiction novels. They have some things in common, and important differences making the comparison worthwhile.

Comparing AECO and fiction novels

In both domains, writers and readers operate in a medium. Some form of media intermediates, serving authors and viewers alike.

Let’s say you’re a writer. You write fiction novels. You’re Stephen King. 

Your media is the book.

You write in it. 

Others read it.

The book mediates. 

You, King, take things from your mind and put them in the book.

Others read your book, take things out of it, and build their mental model from what they took from the book.

The book has structure. It has page numbers, chapters. It has form, narrative flow, foreshadowing, etc. Reader and writer both participate in this. They supply anticipation, they recall memory, they observe texture, mood, dialog and so on.

This is communication. A world is imagined, and conveyed. Doing this requires form, and active engagement.

There are aspects of this that are unique to fiction novels. And aspects unique to technical domains like AECO.

Finding the differences between these domains is not rocket science.

They’re very different: different media, different environments, a different kind of engagement, and very different kinds of tasks relentlessly demanded by the environment in AECO, compared to the mental model you make of what you will from reading Stephen King novels.

In architecture, engineering, and construction, understanding adequate to the task is a matter of professional obligation (including legal obligation), and a matter of life and death. While on the other hand, you can read The Shining at your leisure. Or watch the movie. Without consequence.

CLEAR THINKING, CLEARLY CONVEYED

It’s not a matter of leisure, nor making of it what you will, in technical domains. Overall, what has to be conveyed there is adequate thought. The mind has to be well and truly engaged in the creation of technical environments — models of buildings, machines, power plants, roads and railways, dams, airports, hospitals, and so on — and their interpretation, whether these models are mental, physical, or (and) digital.

Adequate equipment supporting that engagement is not optional.

Adequate thought is demonstrated in the outcome, consideration of which includes:

• An adequate conception of the whole of the project. Thought is developed such that the whole and the parts of the project form something coherent, functional, aesthetic, sound, efficient, and so on, measured by criteria typical for the project type, and by unique criteria deriving from unique conditions.

• CLARITY: Authors and viewers alike, of modeled environments, require the clarity that comes from, first of all, things having been made clear, and next, from author affirmations of what is made clear. Adequate, dual use equipment is required, for making things clear, and for making affirmations with regard to what’s clear. Traditionally, the equipment is technical drawing, in its conventional form.

• So for example, where VISUAL CLOSE STUDY is made, at various locations throughout an environment, a number of very straightforward affirmations are made, including:

• “What I am studying (closely) at this location, and articulating, is, first of all, a location in the environment at which I invest high intensity attention, concern, and interest (mine). I put my focus here.” Note that this, already, matters a great deal: a (legally) responsible professional designates a locus of professional attention.

• Affirmation is made: “Here I invested my focused attention and close study, and I affirm that what is shown here meets my professional standard of care; everything that should be shown here IS shown here. Nothing that matters, here, is missing. I affirm it. You can rely on what you see here.”

• And things of this nature. Basic things. Without these, an environment fills up with doubts and fog, the fog of unclear thinking not brought to adequate conclusion and lacking therefore also the necessary affirmations. It goes without saying that the consequences of fog impend on model authors and downstream model users alike, in different ways, none of which are good.

Paying attention through VISUAL CLOSE STUDY (VCS) is not optional and not replaceable. On the contrary:

VCS is an irreplaceable component of THINKING.

And … an irreplaceable component of BEING EFFECTIVE at all.

So I propose a question.

The AECO industry transitioned over the last 30+ years from models mental and physical, to models mental, physical, AND DIGITAL.

Let me emphasize that please. The transition was not, and is not, from drawings to models.

The transition is from mental (and physical) models, to mental, physical, AND digital models.

Drawing was not replaced. Cannot be replaced. Will not be left behind.

But it will evolve.

This transition has not brought, and cannot bring, the replacement of visual close study (technical drawing), because models, no matter their format, are environments, while drawings are equipment for visual close study, of environments.

The reason one cannot replace the other is obvious: these are completely different things of different purpose/function, and they’re mutually interdependent, inseparably so.

The question:

Should visual close study (technical drawing) remain permanently confined to its traditional form of expression, the form that drawing has embodied for 500 years (longer, actually) before the appearance of digital modeling software, digital computing?

Or, rather, should we develop an evolution in the form of expression of visual close study, and develop that evolution IN the DIGITAL MODELS? Should the form evolve, to take advantage of the capabilities supplied by the digitally modeled environment?

And if the form of visual close study evolves properly, would this not be a boon to model usage and utility?

Would it not spur quicker access to clarity?

Would it not supply greater energy to thought itself?

Would an enhanced expressive form of visual close study, expressed in-situ within modeled worlds, not help us better look, see, reflect, think, interpret and understand the environment and what we’re trying to do with it as we develop it or use it? Would it not make our thought, and our affirmations clearer?

Is it not important for software to better equip us for making things clear?

Is this not after all a primary role of software in general?

The question answers itself.

Visual Close Study of course has to evolve. The fact that it hasn’t is unjustified. It’s the result of a persistent blind spot in the industry.

TGN IS EQUIPMENT FOR LOOKING

I wrote a development specification proposing and describing specific evolution in the form of visual close study within digitally modeled environments of all kinds.

The proposal is at my website:

TANGERINE: TGN is equipment for looking

It’s about ENRICHING DIGITAL MODELS WITH VISUAL CLOSE STUDY IN ITS HIGHEST FORM (technical drawing) AND UPGRADING THAT with EVOLUTION IN DRAWING’S FORM OF EXPRESSION.

SUMMARY:

There are fundamental reasons that technical drawing isn’t replaceable. It can evolve though. The real barrier is that mental models, digital models, and the real world, are all in the same category: they’re all ‘environments’. 

While drawing is something else entirely, not an environment. Far from it. Drawing is ‘equipment for looking at environments’, for close study.

Now, to say that 2 or more environments (mental, physical/real, digital) combined together (like in XR), is a replacement for ‘equipment for close study of environments’, just doesn’t make sense, even though it’s been said for decades now.

I propose instead an evolution in the equipment for looking — at,  for close study of — any combination of environments. I have a website specifying the evolution of this equipment: https://tangerinefocus.com  The equipment can be used with or without AR/XR.

I’m seeking interested professionals in AEC and any and all software companies who want to develop better equipment in their apps for close study of models. I give these ideas away for free. Anyone can use them. I’m available to help anyone design their implementations.

NEXT POST

Part 3 in this set will include:

• opportunities for software development organizations to develop the evolution of visual close study (TGN)

• opportunities for user happiness from more effective visual close study, the happiness shared among model creators and downstream users alike:

• A better assist to clear thinking

• More effective and adequate model creation, with confidence that comes from making things clear (and knowing when they’re not)

• Lower stress from higher clarity

• Faster more comprehensive insight, by putting things in plain sight. Making all project participants more insightful through supply of easier access to what’s been made clear

• Better communication, better interpretation, better understanding of the project in whole and in part

• Reduced waste of project resources. More time getting things right where they matter in the model, and less time wasted modeling things that don’t, makes a difference for everyone’s well being.

• Some new details of the visual close study VCS (TGN) proposal not yet included elsewhere:

• TGN templates library
• Automation on front and back end:
  • Automatic upgrade of any set of technical drawings to TGN and
  • Automatic (algorithmic) placement of VCS (TGN) rigs throughout a model even without existing source drawings 
  • Automatic 2-way conversion of any technical drawings upgraded to the TGN form of expression, and the reverse, from TGN to conventional drawing.
  • Opportunities for machine learning, ‘DeepQA’, against VCS (TGN)-ENRICHED DIGITALLY MODELED ENVIRONMENTS

Until part 3, I end with a quote from Peirce:

How to Make Our Ideas Clear

Charles S. Peirce

Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302

Whoever has looked into a modern treatise on logic of the common sort, will doubtless remember the two distinctions between clear and obscure conceptions, and between distinct and confused conceptions. They have lain in the books now for nigh two centuries, unimproved and unmodified, and are generally reckoned by logicians as among the gems of their doctrine.

A clear idea is defined as one which is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it is met with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it is said to be obscure.

This is rather a neat bit of philosophical terminology; yet, since it is clearness that they were defining, I wish the logicians had made their definition a little more plain. Never to fail to recognize an idea, and under no circumstances to mistake another for it, let it come in how recondite a form it may, would indeed imply such prodigious force and clearness of intellect as is seldom met with in this world. On the other hand, merely to have such an acquaintance with the idea as to have become familiar with it, and to have lost all hesitancy in recognizing it in ordinary cases, hardly seems to deserve the name of clearness of apprehension, since after all it only amounts to a subjective feeling of mastery which may be entirely mistaken. I take it, however, that when the logicians speak of “clearness,” they mean nothing more than such a familiarity with an idea, since they regard the quality as but a small merit, which needs to be supplemented by another, which they call distinctness.

A distinct idea is defined as one which contains nothing which is not clear. This is technical language; by the contents of an idea logicians understand whatever is contained in its definition. So that an idea is distinctly apprehended, according to them, when we can give a precise definition of it, in abstract terms. Here the professional logicians leave the subject; and I would not have troubled the reader with what they have to say, if it were not such a striking example of how they have been slumbering through ages of intellectual activity, listlessly disregarding the enginery of modern thought, and never dreaming of applying its lessons to the improvement of logic. It is easy to show that the doctrine that familiar use and abstract distinctness make the perfection of apprehension has its only true place in philosophies which have long been extinct; and it is now time to formulate the method of attaining to a more perfect clearness of thought, such as we see and admire in the thinkers of our own time.

How to Make Our Ideas Clear Charles S. Peirce
Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302. https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%201878%20Make%20Ideas%20Clear.pdf