In all of the last 20 years hearing about the elimination of drawings, I’ve yet to see anyone advocating that even once say what drawings a r e .
In this blog post I list some Facts about drawings, and also list 5 primary Functions of technical drawing:
It’s self evident that these functions are not and cannot be handled by models alone, not without some equipment built into them for carrying out and expressing these functions.
The fact that software development has not yet addressed these essential needs only shows that we thought wrong. The AEC software industry is misguided.
The error started decades ago with everyone confusing the basic categories.
We saw drawings and then we saw digital models and we thought,
“ah… that’s the progression, drawings are the past and models are the future.”
The fact is there are two progressions, not one.
- The first is from mental models to digital models.
- The second is from conventional drawings to OPEN VCS (or something like it).
The majority of AEC users DO recognize this. But software development is obstinate, guided by misconception, unable to hear (see) the reality right in front of everyone’s eyes.
Getting models modeled right, and adequately interpreted, requires constant review through a lens that allows coherent, sustained, articulate review with some kind of stability of where to look, over long periods of time, and where to conduct review over and over again.
That either requires a 500 year old format for visual close study (VCS) that we all know as technical drawing, or, finally, some day, an evolution in the form of expression of VCS within the digital model, like OPEN VCS.
The “abandon drawings” mantra and those enchanted by it are entirely missing the point. They always were and always will be. And that leaves everyone else stuck with an ancient vehicle for carrying out the functions of technical drawing unaltered in any way by digital modeling.
Leaving the industry stuck there is counterproductive and self defeating. It undermines, among other things, the digital modeling endeavor itself.
This is why we proposed and specified OPEN VCS and are developing it open source for use by everyone in every modeling and model-handling app, environment, platform, and format.
We have an experimental code base this year, for OPEN VCS, after many years of my explaining, talking, rambling, writing, and knocking on doors of software houses.
People answer the door but invitations to come in and work have not yet happened, not since my earlier proposal where that did actually happen:
Today, OPEN VCS proposes to carry that concept much further, leapfrogging the earlier work and rendering it obsolete while addressing the major design flaws (mine) in the earlier work, AND supplying the functionality open source this time, to help everyone.
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 