Some time ago after thinking about it for many years, decades, after many half starts and balks trying to scratch at it, I put it down like this. This is what thinking through your design, means, described on 1 page in 2 columns, cyan on black background:
Note the interplay above, which is thinking.
Almost all the software in AEC for the last 30 years has made no use at all of the digital model in participating in this interplay that _is_ thinking.
Even when software does bring the digital model into the interplay that is thought, still there is something fundamental going on that’s never talked about:
No digital model (nor physical reality itself) has ever meant anything to anyone, without an adequate mental model in formation.
Anyone can verify this with the simplest thought exercise in 2 seconds:
- Try waking up in the morning and walking to wherever the coffee apparatus is in your house, without an adequate mental model of your environment in place and accessible. You won’t make it to the coffee otherwise.
The mental model is put into formation, and sharpened by this exercise, the wide-narrow (environment-focus) interplay in the cyan text on black background above.
Almost all AEC software omits the digital model from this exercise entirely, leaving the interplay to be carried out as mental exercise alone with no assist whatsoever from the digital model.
What a STRANGE state of affairs after all these decades.
To summarize:
That text above, the 1 pager, describes the shape, nature, form, intent and dynamic of AEC thought.
It says what it means to think about your project, to think it through all the way through.
That’s the core work of AEC professions.
Not coincidentally, it’s also the purpose of a set of drawings.
Thought is a long duration interplay or loop of awareness, back and forth between:
- the wide contextual expanse, the environment, of an imagined project while imagination gets and remains underway. That is to say, a model (mental, physical, and digital), which always is a vaguely-defined(fuzzy)-but-becoming-adequate(sharper) setting/place.
and: - the narrowing act of intentful attentive focus within the environment, within the model. The intentfulness (purpose) of attentive focus in AEC is outlined in the text above, the 1 pager.
The set of drawings is the expression of this loop, both the active experience of it, and a tangible record of it.
By the way, this interplay between the expanse of a wider environment, and the act of narrowing attentive focus within it, is the same in all fields indisputably:
To be a historian, or a doctor, or a tennis player, or a builder, or anything else, you survey the whole field, which itself is a narrowing. Your survey is not the entire field. It’s part of it. And within the scope of your survey, you narrow your attentive focus within it, intentfully. In the interplay (loop) between the field and your focus, learning happens, understanding grows, and the field survey expands…
Interesting fact:
Misfortunately, it is AEC software that keeps drawing caged in a form of expression that predates digital computing (and modeling) by many centuries.
– drawing will escape the cage1
As if software companies are aware neither of the purpose of drawing, nor that the digital model will take its role inevitably in the formation and form of this fundamental activity: looking with intent at models.
A word about a word:
- Intentional is being aware that we’re making a choice.
- Intentful is taking a particular choice, from a range of options, with the aim of achieving a specific outcome/state of affairs. I.e., “we are doing [X thing] because of [specific reasons] with the intent of achieving [very specific Y] as a result.”
https://betterbusiness.substack.com/p/intentful-vs-intentional
Let’s draw a bridge from this to today’s AI.
That 1 pager that outlines what AEC thought is, will presumably overlap with the intended reach of Artificial Intelligence. Because thought is (maybe) the product of intelligence,
If the expectation is that AI will do AEC thought, then we should expect software industry discourse about AEC thought, about what AEC thought is…
But so far this 1 pager is among very few attempts at thought about what AEC thought is. It appears as if the 1 pager is about all there is, that the store shelves are otherwise empty of description of what people are actually thinking about, when they think, in AEC.
This absence of thought will likely limit AI scope expansion. If it were to expand much into actual AEC thought, the discussion would have to start, and a lot of software development would have to follow from it.
As Paul Burchard, PhD says:
Philosophy precedes both science and engineering.
We’d have to recognize a number of things:
The intentfulness of AEC thought:
“We’re taking particular choices, from a range of options, with the aim of achieving a specific outcome/state of affairs. I.e., “we are doing [X thing] because of [specific reasons] with the intent of achieving [very specific Y] as a result.” –Ibid.
But before that, at a deeper level there is just the mechanical philosophy of it all; look at point 2 (of 5) in the 1 pager:
It takes a lot of discernment.
The stakes are higher than in Mathematics Clay Prize-winning problem solving. If a building fails, people can die, while it’s likely that no one is put in mortal danger by unsolved Millennium Prize Problems.
There is also Terence Tao’s point about the negative desirability of using machines for this work (thought):
Nevertheless, let’s imagine that a machine does this work, that it thinks, that it does AEC thinking.
In that case, are drawings still needed?
Well, I think you can see from the discussion above, it’s apparently already a nonsensical question.
If thought is both of these together:
- an expansive spatial visual environment of developing form, and
- the act of attentive intentful focus (drawing) within that field/environment
And if those are brought together by thought, which is something no one can explain but that exhibits an observable dynamic of interplay, a contemplative loop between:
- the field/environment (model), and
- the act of attentive focus within it (drawing)
Given those observations, we can also see this:
- the set of AEC drawings is a lens for looking at models with intent, and this lens for looking is the observable expression of the loop, both the active experience of it (of thought), and a tangible record of it.
Don’t forget:
Astronomers have a lens for looking at the cosmos and need I really say that the cosmos is no argument for abandoning telescopes?
– It’s too bad, in AEC I have to say that the cosmos is precisely the argument for having telescopes.
Do not reverse this.
And do not get caught arguing with proponents of complete nonsense.
And likewise,
Get out of this cage:
AEC software keeps drawing caged in a form of expression that predates digital computing (and modeling) by many centuries.
As if software companies are aware neither of the purpose of drawing, nor that the digital model will take its role inevitably in the formation and form of this fundamental activity: looking with intent at models.
– drawing will escape the cage1
AEC Thinking Machine
Let’s just say it will happen.
When it does, the lens for looking with intent will be in play, in the machine, and will be needed by everyone involved in trying to figure out what the machine-made model is, and whether it’s adequate or not.
Machine intelligence or not, this industry, AEC software, has to get out of the cage, and bring this lens for looking at models into the 21st century.
It’s just fundamental. It’s not something we’re gonna “grow out of”, or “advance beyond“. That’s nonsense. Astronomers do not “advance beyond” telescopes.
They do, continuously strive for better telescopes.
There is no counter-argument against absurdity.
There is just reality:
One more thing that really calls for looking at thought in another way entirely, from David Bohm with a distinction between thought and intelligence, very different things; a brief clip here from a Bohm talk that really has to be included in any discussion of AEC, any kind of creative development, and any consideration of thought and intelligence:
TANGERINE FOCUS 