Here is an interesting video about what happens when presentations are considered by viewers to be clear, concise, and easy to understand. (It’s not what you think, and it’s not good):
(So) What about drawings? If we have 2 versions of them, both are same in information, but one is clear, concise and easy to understand, but other is opposite?
They’re not easy to understand. Everyone says so. What people forget is that models also are not easy to understand.
It takes effort to understand things that are complex. No one should expect that understanding an AEC project can be easy. It takes a lot of effort.
It also takes a system of human engagement that works to make what otherwise would be an impossibility to understand adequately, possible and do-able.
That doesn’t mean the process is “clear, concise, easy to understand”.
But it also doesn’t mean that the system is less clear than it can be, nor less concise nor less easy than possible.
The video suggests that what’s needed is a system that moves people away from lazy non-engagement that easily breeds self deception about understanding, toward something that makes them engage enough that they do understand. Something that requires enough effort and challenges their lazy deception enough that they no longer feel it is easy, clear, or concise, but does make them learn.
A set of drawings IS a system of engagement with models mental, physical, and digital.
They’re internalized within mental models. OPEN VCS will internalize them in digital models and evolve their form of expression:
There’s a good (not so good) reason that VCS equipment for visual close study has not been normalized yet within digital models, 3, 4, even 6 decades in now, depending on where you set the first milestone, since the start of digital modeling development.
If you’re a BIM software developer, or a company that develops BIM software, you may not like the reason because the reason is you.
You are the problem. I know you’ve been pointing the finger at users the whole time. But it’s you. It’s always been you.
And you have no counter argument.
Someone was just comparing GPS and BIM and asked when was the last time you unfolded a paper map while driving, as a way to criticize those in AEC who, while having digital models, still make drawings.
But, would a model of the world alone, streamed to mobile devices have done the job?
Um, obviously no. We still have maps. The model of the world, or the world itself, is not enough. We still say
“I’m here and I want to go there.”
And a map is made and shown to us progressively and turn by turn.
BIM, for 25 years (or 35 for some), is pretty much stuck at the most idiotic of all possible places. Software companies have given us a model of our project, and then told us to generate old-school maps of them while some enthusiasts clang on like a grinding bottom bracket:
“the model is everything, no maps needed.”
Our situation is not anything like GPS/Maps, because the software developers in BIM are really dim. And the users are left LOST.
Borges saw it already in 1946:
… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
– Jorge Luis Borges: On_Exactitude_in_Science (1946)
I said BIM developers are dim though, didn’t I?
And you have to admit that’s true, don’t you?
What kind of developers, to use the GPS analogy, would put satellites in space for location tracking, build a digital model of the world, stream it on demand to mobile devices, AND OMIT TO INCLUDE ANY MAPS FUNCTIONALITY OTHER THAN PRINTING TRADITIONAL MAPS, AS IF ON PAPER?
That’s DIM.
DIM-WITTED.
REALLY EXTRAORDINARILY SO.
30+ years of stupefying counter-productivity. You have to eat that, software companies. It’s YOU. It WAS you. It still is YOU. You are the problem. You’ve made a mess of an entire industry.
You need to atone. You need to fix this.
Here’s how to get un-lost:
OPEN VCS, equipment for visual close study, is an open source development project that combines technical drawing and digital modeling in fusion, with evolution in form that brings out the best of both media in a new expression greater than the sum of its parts.
OPEN VCS is intended as codebase ready for implementation in all digital modeling apps in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry.
Industry outcomes from models well equipped for visual close study (VCS) will surpass outcomes from models lacking VCS equipment. Traditionally, VCS equipment is externalized from digital models, as technical drawings in their traditional form.
OPEN VCS is the future of technical drawing:
More of the story of Google Maps:
Google Maps launched February 8th 2005, almost 20 years ago. I remember using it then, a couple years before the first iPhone.
In 2005 we no longer needed those map books from gas stations, or those auto club (AAA) pre-order trip books you’d order weeks before your trip. They’d map your trip for you, and mail you back a book of relevant maps with door to door turn by turn directions just for you, just for your trip.
So in 2005, I can do that ‘myself’: I remember doing this. I tell Google, I’m here and want to go there, and … ta da!… I get a set of maps at a legible zoom, and turn by turn directions in a list on a page or 3 or 4 pages.
So I’d print that on paper, staple the paper stack, and take the printed maps and directions into the car, and if lucky I’m not driving alone, so a navigator could read those and call out the turns, in time!
Google Maps ran on a variant of the Mercator Projection (a flat map) but in any case the world model is detailed, more now but already in the beginning. A mobile version was released in 2006 but GPS integration didn’t come until November 2008. So a lot of people had 3 years to have fun printing google maps on stacks of papers.
In total it looks like for just short of 4 years, people were doing that, printing PDFs of maps or printing them on paper. Looking back you could call that 4 year period a rut. The tech was stuck in a rut for 4 years, which is not that long, really.
After that the tech evolved with maps streaming to your phone and GPS position powering real time turn by turn. No more PDFs and no more paper. The visualization / navigation / mapping experience was redesigned, integrated directly into the world map, and streamed to your device.
Look at us in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. Our apps have their own equivalent of nav maps. They’re different but similar. They’re called technical drawings. They express things not about a whole project but about certain narrowed views within it. So they’re kind of like maps.
In AEC these have been stuck in a rut for over 30 years now. We’ve had elaborate digital models of our projects for 30 years and still today the only option given to us in these apps is to print traditional drawings as if on paper.
No imagination is applied to this at all. No development is done. No possibility recognized. No vision of what visual engagement with models could look like if it were integrated within models, like Google Maps did once it came out of its 4 year rut. It put the orienteering internalized within the map, not ONLY externalized for printing as if on paper (PDF) or, on paper.
A 30 years stasis in AEC software.
In a rut with no end in sight.
Our wheel’s in a ditch.
And we just sit there.
For 30 years.
And counting.
And these developers are not embarrassed.
They need to be.
It’s pathetic.
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 