Tech evangelists in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry continue their reverse idiom:
They don’t:
“snatch victory from the jaws of defeat”
“to win at the last moment possible, when it had previously seemed certain that you were going to lose”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/snatch-victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat
They snatch (self) defeat from the jaws of victory.
And they drag this defeat out over multiple decades.
In slow motion replay through 20+ years now, and with no end yet in sight, they guarantee self defeat by situational misframing, and category error, as they repeat the following slogan, rhetorical question, pseudo-imperative, or what is it?, an apparently confident (in the manner of ChatGPT) assertion without load-bearing thought supporting it:
“What if there were no Construction Drawings (CDs)? Why do we keep thinking automating CDs will solve a/the/any problems?”
Whatever it is, whatever the question is, it undermines the modeling endeavor itself.
The response to “What if there were no CDs?” is:
Then:
- there would be no answer to the essential questions below (in 2 and 3) and
- the engine of thought that develops understanding adequately, beyond superficial, will sputter and stop, the engine disengaged.
Reflect on the function of technical drawings, a function inseparable from models mental and digital. The function is multifold:
- Any single technical drawing is an expression of the act of looking somewhere specific within a model mental or digital, the act of visual close study (VCS) there and the articulation of this close study.
- There at that location, we evaluate, is everything that SHOULD be shown THERE actually shown there? Is anything that matters THERE missing?
- Finally at some point after the long work of model development and review, someone with authority (experience, knowledge) to do so, AFFIRMS the status of the questions in (2).
- Along the way, an INTERPLAY is engaged, in our minds, between:
- a set of expressions of visual close study (VCS) at various locations of narrowed attentive visual focus within a model
and - the wider expanse of the whole of the modeled project environment.
The interplay is a back and forth continuous dynamic. There is good argument that this, the interplay, is the basic observable dynamic of thought itself, that the wide/narrow (environment/focus) interplay is the machine of thinking at work, the engine of thought.
The idea that one side of the interplay can either be discarded or stuck in a non-evolving centuries-old form of expression and externalized from the digital model is simply self-defeating and counterproductive, maximally.
I draw your attention to item 4 in particular and emphasize it. For 20+ years now of marketing and development of digital modeling software in AEC, VCS has been left largely undeveloped.
This undermines the modeling endeavor itself. The engine of thought itself is left underpowered.
This is significant.
And it really is obvious:
If a company invents the automobile, unhitches the horse, but fails to design, manufacture, and install a motor… and blames others, that’s well and truly analogous to what AEC software corporations have given us.
Think about this.
These, above, are pragmatic reasons for evolution in VCS (visual close study) equipment, new and better equipment for looking, new and better equipment for expressing and articulating visual attentive focus, within digital models of all kinds in the AEC industry.
There are fundamental reasons for this evolution too, reasons foundational at a deeper level. I dig into this a bit here: https://tangerinefocus.com/an-engine-of-thinking/
It doesn’t matter how models are generated; the outcome is always the same:
In AEC and similar industries, models are highly complex visual spatial environments that impress on us fundamental cognitive burdens and pragmatic realities the sum of which shape our sense-making imperative, our generalized need for adequate interpretive power in support of complex tasks in very complex environments.
This is all about human cognition, perception, and understanding, natural intelligence (NI), actual intelligence, human intelligence (HI).
But with regard to ‘AI’ too:
No matter the manner of model generation, whether models are computationally generated via directed graphs, or whether they’re made by ‘generative AI’, or, made by natural intelligence, ‘NI’ (stick built by human hand), or whether they’re made by device via photogrammetry, or laser scanning, gaussian splatting, NeRF’d, etc., software development serving AEC remains naïve of the burdens and realities placed on everyone engaged with models, 5+ decades in.
VCS and Generative AI: a co-evolution
https://tangerinefocus.com/vcs-and-generative-ai-a-co-evolution/
Different industry but the insights here are applicable in technical media too, in AEC:
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 