How do we perceive things, and very complex things?
What things?
The world around us and everything in it.
Whether walking around in everyday life, or engaged in professional work on projects in architecture, engineering, construction, industrial design, manufacturing, shipbuilding, power plants, dams, and all such things, precision instruments, furniture, plant process facilities, etc., you name it…, the methods we use to perceive and understand, are essentially the same. It’s only a question of the degree to which the method is applied.
The engine of perception and developing adequate understanding, is the same.
Let’s illustrate what this means and “prove” it, to some extent anyway. The goal here is not really to prove anything but to provoke thought (yours) on the matter.
What matter? The matter of what’s going on when we’re engaged in the work of perception of things very complex.
Look at these snapshots starting from my kitchen sink:
Those 7 snapshots are more than enough for some things to start to happen.
Here’s one thing that happens.
I’ll show you another image and you know where it is.
You’ve never been in this place, and yet from a few snapshots you ubicate other images, you know where they are. You know where this is:
That might seem trivial if you’re in the (modern ?) habit of finding all things trivial, but this already points at something fundamental in the nature of human perception (not just human; it’s likely in play in feline perception too, and any other sentient being that finds its way visually):
You’re building a mental model
The only possible way that you can fit the last image above, knowing where it is relative to the other snapshots, is if you’ve been and continue to be engaged in a perceptual exercise of building a mental model of the space close at hand.
My claim in this post is that, you are doing that, and that everyone is always doing that.
You can prove it to yourself by locating that cat (the second one, or the first for that matter) in the space of the mental model you’ve put into formation already from only partial and even scarce and fragmented information (the previous snapshots).
This is the first of several claims.
The mind is set in motion by partial information, and puts itself to work building a mental model. From this mental model, orientation first of all becomes possible, and further along, thought and understanding can develop, grow, and proceed.
Another claim is something about the character of the mental model put in formation and how it’s held onto.
This again is to provoke thought on the matter, your thought. Take a second and think about the character and quality of this mental model, and what it does.
The mental model has a recognizable character: “fuzzy”, but acting as a staging area for thought
The mental model is always rather fuzzy, incomplete, full of gaps, inaccuracies and errors, and yet it acts as one of the primary poles in a multi-polar engine of thought. That is, an engine of interplay between poles, an interplay between the fuzzy whole of an expansive and environmental mental model, and, a set of clarifying attention-focusing glimpses within it.
You can put this to the test yourself. Think about the mental model formed from the images above, or, test it with something you believe yourself to be well familiar with. Contemplate the mental model of your bicycle, or car, for example.
Seriously, how adequate is that? Would you say that:
- it is highly accurate and fairly free from gaps and errors?
- Or is it rather fuzzy, incomplete, full of gaps, inaccuracies and errors, and yet acting in some fundamental way in support of thought and perception?
Here you’ve proven to yourself already that the latter is not only nearer the truth of what’s going on in human perception of things very complex, but that the former is so far off target it can be dismissed and retired from consideration. The former has no overlap at all with the actual cognitive apparatus of perception. Perception just doesn’t work that way. We do not absorb complexity whole. The mind just doesn’t work that way.
I wrote about this a couple years of ago here:
Some of that post still holds up and is worth reading. Other parts of it I’d state differently now. The thoughts have evolved a bit and were only coming into view from a distance when I wrote that (they were fuzzy).
Let’s talk about these glimpses or snapshots. What is their character?
That’s really hard to say in general. That’s understatement. It is extremely hard to say.
The exercise above with the 7 + 1 snapshots is only a very partial illustration, of part of the observable dynamic of thought and perception. It’s not a bad illustration if you go through the exercise, if you participate in the mental model formation it provokes. That’s the point of it. But, what about ordinary daily life walking from your kitchen sink, around a corner, out a door and into you back yard? Or returning from outside, through the house, into the kitchen for some coffee?
We’re not snapping photographs and storing those in memory somewhere inside our skulls. And nor are we storing a continuous and complete totality of the whole of our experienced reality.
By some activity of our cognitive apparatus, we have set in motion the formation of a mental model, and, we are, somehow, able to retrieve certain clarifying glimpses of it as needed in support of certain tasks.
Not all tasks are the same, so here enters the question of degree, the degree of adequacy, sharpness and quality of the mental model, and the degree of clarity supplied by the relevant and retrieved as needed, glimpses, snapshots, or, call them: moments of attentive visual focus within the otherwise fuzzier visual environment. By fuzzier of course we mean something like: those regions or events or moments or things in our visual environment that we allow to slip beneath our visual attention, or not to rise above attention’s periphery.
How we’re able to select from everything within the environmental field, to selectively narrow focus to what’s relevant to tasks at hand is a mystery and I will not attempt to get into that. Simply observing, that task-relevant focus is happening, is of abiding interest, and more than enough here.
Let’s return to the idea above as a whole, and extend the thought:
You’re sharpening an otherwise fuzzy mental model and recalling task-relevant clarifying moments of attentive visual focus, to a degree adequate to the tasks at hand, and no more
Conservation of cognitive effort. We don’t waste effort. We’re efficient. We do cognitive work to the extent necessary.
You can get quite a lot done with a very fuzzy mental model of your bicycle. Right? You can ride it. You can go places. You can steer it, pedal it… This is different from designing a bicycle that doesn’t exist yet, imagining it, developing what it is to become, engineering it and manufacturing it.
Riding a bike, and designing one, are very different tasks.
You can get quite a lot done indeed with a fuzzy mental model of your kitchen, house, and yard, and the streets that get you there. If you’re designing a house, and building it, that requires a different level of model clarity and a much more systematized and devoted regime or method of concentrated attentive visual focus.
I’ve talked about the latter many times before in this blog.
Please check out the list here, of the kinds of things going on in systematic concentrated attentive visual focus and model formation, during the design and construction of complex things:
Here’s an excerpt:
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 and digital model of the thing,
- that model is fuzzy, and full of gaps and inaccuracies, and
- you’re shepherding the model from its inadequate state to something functionally adequate.
Basic Questions
Very soon after project start, an AEC digital model quickly exceeds our cognitive grasp. It’s just too much to hold in mind. We experience a 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.
First of all, recognize the difference:
- The broader field
- The narrowing focus
The interplay between those sets the mind in motion.
As it is for all fields, so it is in AEC design and construction.
Drawings are the expression of and vehicle for, five primary actions, behaviors, and functions of AEC professionals revolving around model review:
Model Review: technical drawings are checks, against omission, and for good fit. And, they’re one stroke in a 2-stroke engine of thought, or one pole in a two-pole INTERPLAY that IS thinking.
(1) Attentive Focus or Visual Close Study (VCS)
At informative locations within modeled environments (within models mental, physical, and digital) we develop and express our act of attentive clarifying focus. Let’s call these locations, locations of visual close study (V.C.S.).
(2) Checks against Omission and for Good Fit
At V.C.S. locations in models we conduct physical evaluation of the model. Physical evaluation consists mainly of two checks:
- A check AGAINST OMISSION of physical items in the model (checking that everything that should be shown here at this V.C.S. location, is shown here; nothing that matters, here, is missing), and
- A check FOR GOOD FIT among the physical items present (define good fit however you like; Vitruvius defines good fit here).
Checks for omission and good fit are the QA/QC and interpretive work carried on through project design and development, and continuing during construction.
(3) Affirmation of (2)
Omission and good fit evaluations conclude with AFFIRMATION of model QA/QC. Who affirms what, where, within models mental, physical, and digital, about omission and good fit, is made clear. This supports accountability.
But preceding accountability, these checks and affirmations are supporting something more fundamental and more generative: coherent thought itself, thought applied to the process of making our models clear, building up our own understanding of and confidence in our own models, and then conveying that to others in a way that’s receivable. Clear thinking clearly conveyed… One can affirm, or assert, that at these locations, the primary checks have been made, that professional standard of care, is met.(4) Drawings in models (mental and digital) set the mind in motion
Checks and affirmations are made at an already, first of all, narrowed set of locations within a model, not ALL locations, but representative ones. Everyone is free to take whatever they can, and want, from all other locations within the FIELD of a model, but at these locations affirmation is made. The narrowing comes first. Otherwise one creates an engagement with infinity problem that makes fools of us all.
The narrowing sets out the necessary peaks and valleys of attention. The difference, like a voltage drop, sets the mind in motion, gets the perception engaged, makes meaning, delivers coherence, makes sense of things.
Visual close study within models, our narrowing focus within a FIELD, is our deployment of a context / focus interplay that is the engine of thought itself. Thought is an interplay between our expansive perception of a modeled environment (the FIELD), and our narrowing act of attentive focus within it, at V.C.S. locations.
From this engine comes adequate project understanding and functional competence. In the interplay, thought happens and understanding grows.
There are two poles in dynamic interplay (which is thought):
(WIDE ←→ narrow)
or
(FIELD ←→ focus)
or
(MODEL ←→ VCS)
The two poles are as different from each other as the COSMOS and a ←→ lens for looking at it, as mutually distinct as the UNIVERSE and a ←→ telescope. These things are not in any way the same kinds of things, and are mutually irreplaceable.
It should occur to no one, that one obviates the other.(5) The Courtesy of Drawing Attention to what is not to be missed
Finally, expressions of attentive focus through visual close study supply the courtesy of drawing attention to things not to be missed in the model.
What’s drawn by any drawing?
Your attention.The applied thought functions, the 5 described above, fairly well represent the core cognitive workload of AEC professions. Have a look at the digital model and drawings automated from the model, below, for demonstration of these 5 primary cognitive actions, behaviors, and functions of AEC professionals.
If you want to review some examples, of both mental/digital modeling, and acts of attentive clarifying visual focus (technical drawings) within such models, both are linked on the same page. Just scroll down a bit to the drawings, and video of the model, here:
So what?
Well look, these are the observations of someone trained in architecture design, and later in software development.
Earlier, these thoughts led to this work:
Please indulge a list of assertions:
- It is no surprise that the cognitive apparatus at work in perceiving the world around us in support of everyday tasks — as is the case when finding the shower or the coffee pot, or walking outside for some air in the garden — is the same cognitive apparatus functioning in the same manner as when the mind is at work designing a building or an aircraft. The difference is only a matter of degree and intensity, and a formalized structure, and media, supporting this degree of intensity.
- Our cognitive apparatus is what it is and works the way it works. It involves an interplay as described above, an interplay between a relatively fuzzy and inaccurate mental model and a set of moments of clarifying visual focus, attentive close study, of the environment, at particular moments/places. The interplay between wide and narrow, environment and focus, is the mind at work. In that interplay, thought happens and understanding grows.
- There is no alternative. We do not absorb (complex) environments whole (and they’re all complex). We just do not have the cognitive apparatus for that. Maybe some other beings on some other planets do, but we simply do not.
- Advocating for the elimination of drawings (in AEC and similar professions) is advocacy for the undermining of thought itself and understanding, pulling the rug out from under the mind. It is the most counterproductive idea ever introduced into such professions, a category error of mind-boggling counterproductive self-defeat. Drawings are a lens for looking at models closely, and setting the mind in motion on the task of evaluating and developing those models, interpreting and understanding them every step of the way along the path of their development and actualization.
- No digital model has ever made any sense at all, to anyone, without adequate mental model formation underway.
- Superficial model understanding gets underway effortlessly via the most fundamental behaviors of the human (and animal) cognitive perceptual apparatus, in support of everyday ordinary natural tasks.
- In support of more complex tasks, the same perceptual equipment acts in the same way (we have, basically, one cognitive apparatus) but to greater depth and degree, of:
- mental model formation, through,
- greater intensity of visual focus at moments/locations of high importance within the wider expansive whole of the mental model.
- The glimpses/moments/locations of visual focus (let’s draw this out with emphasis) are always perceived where they actually are, in-situ within the mental model, else they are not perceived. Rather they are uninterpreted abstractions.
- The general (there are exceptions) lack of fusion of these glimpses, where they are, within digital models in most of today’s digital modeling software in AEC, is an oversight that undermines the core work of AEC professions. I mean, software development should be focused on the core work of the professions; yet, still in 2025, the most commonly used software applications in AEC continue to fail to do this.
Instead they perpetuate only the enforced separation, of attention-focusing close study of models (i.e., drawings), and the models themselves, forced only into separate media, left to be put into fusion, necessarily, by mental exercise alone, entirely unassisted by digital modeling or drawing software.
In other words, the situation is absurd. - Some exceptions (my invention) to (9) have arisen since 2012. Like the fusion of recorded sound into silent film 100 years ago, which is no slight to the value of either of those standing alone, put into fusion, something else happens. The form of each is transformed, and a third medium is made in combination, with expressive power amplified, and a creative experience gained that is greater than the sum of its parts alone.
- The earlier exceptions since 2012 are a baby’s first steps. Growth, development, evolution yet to come will turn those first steps into olympic class athleticism. One has to think about how, and what that would look like.
See here for the next steps:
https://tangerinefocus.com/visual-engagement-with-modeled-worlds/
Technical drawing is an instrument for helping you pay attention,
and,
for showing that you did.
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 