To keep people trapped either in unequipped 3D models, absent equipment for expressing and developing clarifying attentive focus within them, or, locked in flat model views that are effectively no different than any kind of technical drafting we’ve had for hundreds of years before computing, is missing the point entirely and throwing away tremendous opportunity..
To get to clarity through focus means putting a lot of things in second place. Yes, you know the secondary things are there, but you demote them vis à vis things that have to be brought to front of mind.
If you’re designing a building, a ship, a machine, or an aircraft, designing any complex thing for construction or manufacturing, what’s really happening is that:
- you’re formulating a mental model of the thing,
- that mental model is fuzzy, and full of gaps and inaccuracies, and
- you’re shepherding the model from its inadequate state to something functionally adequate.
This is true whether you’re developing a digital model accompanying the mental model or not. You can easily prove this to yourself. No digital model has ever meant anything to anyone, beyond superficial barely grazing understanding, without adequate mental model formation.
Adequate mental model formation is done through focus, and focus brings clarity to mental (and digital) models in formation.
What AEC professionals do
Here I attempt to describe the core work of AEC professions, the primary work that architects and engineers do, the core work of AEC, architecture, engineering, and construction, A and E on the design side, C on the build side. Keep in mind that while C is building, they’re formulating mental models through visual close study first, prompted by the media delivered by A and E.
Very soon after project start, an AEC digital model quickly exceeds already our cognitive grasp. This is demonstrated by our declining ability to answer even basic questions about it, like:
- is it done yet?
- is it good enough yet?
- is the model forming a coherent functionally successful whole?
- is there good fit among the physical items modeled?
- are any physical items that matter, missing? Where? Where not?
- is the model good enough in some regions and not others?
- where are the regions that are good enough?
- does anything signify to anyone the useful distinction between regions that are good enough and all other regions that may not be?
Focus is needed.
Focus
1: to concentrate attention or effort
focus on the most pressing needs
2: to adjust one’s eye or a camera to a particular range
Newborn babies cannot focus for several months.
A systematic framework for focus is necessary.
Technical drawing is that framework.
Primary functions of technical drawing:
- At informative locations within models mental, physical, and digital we develop sustained expression of our act of clarifying attentive focus. That is, at, let’s call them, locations of visual close study or V-C-S.
- At V-C-S locations in models we conduct physical evaluation of the model. The evaluation is mainly a check against omission of physical items in the model, and also a check for good fit among the physical items present (see what Vitruvius said about good fit at the link).
It takes thoughtful sustained effort to develop these checks during model development and also during construction. Models start from nothing and grow into what they become. The checks are done all along the way in a process of using the engine of thought (or, thinking). See (4). - Physical and good fit evaluations at V-C-S locations conclude with affirmation of model QA/QC (quality assurance/control). Who affirms what, where, is made clear. This supports accountability.
- Successful expression of visual close study, V-C-S, sets out the context/focus array that we can call the 2-pole engine of thought itself. The engine is an observable cognitive dynamic formed as an interplay between the wide expanse of a modeled environment (the FIELD), and the narrowing act of our attentive FOCUS within it, at V-C-S. locations.
- In this interplay between environment or world and attentive focus, field and clarifying close study, between the model and the medium of visual close study (technical drawing), thought happens and understanding grows.
- The two poles, (WIDE/narrow) (FIELD/focus) (MODEL/vcs), are as distinct from each other as the COSMOS and a /lens for looking at it, as the UNIVERSE and a /telescope, They’re not in any way the same kinds of things and of course are mutually irreplaceable.
- Finally, visual close study supplies the courtesy of drawing attention to things not to be missed in the model.
clarity
b: the state of having a full, detailed, and orderly mental grasp of something
She remembered that day with surprising clarity.
Employees are looking for some clarity [=understanding] on the company’s new policies.
The first step is to ensure you have clarity of purpose. I’ve been shocked how often people who started an enterprise seem to forget their original purpose.—Jacob Harold
… juggling so many creative balls at once that it’s amazing he has such clarity of thought.—Hannah Stephenson
“… You suddenly got a moment of clarity and you go, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ …”—Ozzy Osbourne
c: the quality of being easily seen or heard
Those dual 12-inch subwoofers … may produce volume, but the key to a good sound system is clarity.—Jim Kerr
Displayed as a negative image for greater clarity, the stars look like grains of pepper sprinkled on a white tablecloth.—Andrew Chaikin
A personal story
I used a software made by the same people who today make Qonic (an excellent, modern in 2025, modeler) all the way back in the 90s. Even then, so long ago, that software, it was called TriForma, was rigorously model-centric. It’s what got me drawn into digital modeling and model-automated drawing. I worked at firms that used this software, thinking all along that what we were doing was normal, standard practice. How wrong I was. Turns out I didn’t know much about standard practice, only what was standard for me, where I worked..
We worked in the model relentlessly. If you watched us work you’d say, hmmm, looks like some intense concentration there. And you’d be right. We were well and truly engaged with the model, from within the model, all the time, all day long, every day.
Direct engagement like that set the mind in motion. The effect is that the model gets built right, through and through. It works because we can think things through, all the way through, in a serious way.
We had freedom. We’d set up the visual focusing conditions we needed at areas of high interest in the model, to work effectively, getting the modeling work that needs to be done, done. Later, by the way, I did something to amplify this in-model focus:
I shouldn’t forget to say that these models also generated, through the software, very satisfactory construction drawings, automatically. What matters about those automated drawings is that we looked at them to assess the quality of our work, the quality of the modeling. The drawings were, yes, just flat graphics, and they were externalized from the digital model (but not from the mental model). The point is that we were not forced to do the modeling work through those drawings. We just looked at them to evaluate what we did in the model. And then we returned to the work in the model.
Later by 2004 or so when Revit marketing took over all discourse, we were told that what we were doing was archaic, obsolete. That dictum and judgement was the precise opposite of true and useful. But TriForma did disappear. Such is the power of brand loyalty and marketing.
I did that work for 12 years, all the modeling, done in the model. The external drawings, used to discern the quality of the model. Then I went to work for that software developer (rather, for the company that acquired TriForma from its initial developers). Because of this, working with other software, I never used Revit. Since I first started with TriForma in 1996, 29 years went by faster than anyone not on this side of the tunnel looking back can imagine.
It’s surprising to look back and realize something I didn’t know all this time.
Very recently I’m using Revit software now, and, wow, I had no idea, that it locks you into flat views of the model for most of the day every day.
I had no idea, all this time, that this is what most people are doing.
Sure you can open a 3D tab in Revit and fly around through the model there, but that is superficial engagement just skimming the surface of understanding the model. The heavy lifting work of building the model, and looking at it as you build, Revit forces that into flat views.
How this is considered even remotely like what the marketing rhetoric said for decades I have no idea.
That work, holding visual focus within the model, bringing clarity where it’s needed for the concentrated effort of developing the model from within it, that’s what we did already in the ’90s.
In other software. With in-model focus together with real time all the time access to the wider model context. How? Because we always worked in the model. We were never restricted from tilting camera orientation to really see in context what we’re working on.
That’s what we had, way back then. It’s what we did.
And that was wiped away. Erased. Forgotten? Mostly never known by most of the industry.
It is sad.
It does mean though that the future is wide open. To say the least.
Wow.
Hauntingly beautiful play by Jimmy Page in 10 Years Gone:
Where’s the beauty in 25 Years Gone?
When models are digital and mental, not mental only, the necessary equipment for clarifying focus within models, must be present, in the digital models.
Otherwise, we’ve been kidding ourselves for 25 years.
To keep people trapped either in unequipped 3D models, absent equipment for expressing and developing clarifying attentive focus within them), or, locked in flat model views that are effectively no different than any kind of technical drafting we’ve had for hundreds of years before computing is missing the point entirely and throwing away tremendous opportunity.
There is a way out though.
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.
first lines of:
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…
How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Charles S. Peirce
Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302.
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 