Looking with intent, and showing that you did
If we identify what people are actually doing when they’re developing and interpreting technical drawings, we’d be close to recognizing the problems addressed by the core work of AEC professionals. If we’re hungry and need to eat, we can make a spear, throw it into a wild boar, clean, cook, and eat it. There are…
Focus Devices in Hybrid Data: Usefulness in Design Thinking and Communication
Unpacking from a move and found a book with my paper in it from 2014. Still nice I think. drawing-model fusion since 2012 (like fusion of sound in film) – 26 videos It’s not that this stuff was done, and automated, and so long ago. It’s what it suggests that’s yet to be done. Everything…
If you ask the wrong questions and answer them correctly, where does that get you?
You can think of this at the scale of life in general, or narrow it down to some specialized area of interest, any area you like, including my particular interest: the last 4+ decades of software development for (AEC) Architecture, Engineering, and Construction. I’ll jump into the subject again of course, with some points in…
What’s going on when we’re engaged in the work of perception, of things very complex
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…
What is (forget artificial) Intelligence, and to what is intelligence applied in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction professions?
I start with a really brief review of 40 years of software industry rhetoric about technical drawings: First, drawing was about placing and trimming lines and arcs. Then by 1995 it was about automating drawings from 3D models. By 2003 it was common already to hear calls for abandoning drawing altogether, “because models”. Stop here…
Wile E. Coyote with falling anvil moment
I’ll just start at a random spot here. That common belief, that a clash-free model is a good quality model, is a belief sitting way out past the frontier deep in a terrain called absurdity. The idea that checking that 2 or more things don’t occupy the same or near space, somehow equates to eval…
Eliminating Drawings – and the challenges of doing so
Eliminating drawings undermines thought itself. It’s doubtful that pulling the rug out from under thinking, should be framed as challenging. It’s something else entirely. Has anyone promoting the idea of eliminating drawings over the last 20+ years put any thought into what drawings are? Before devoting themselves to their elimination? In the 90s when I…
Human understanding of complex things and how that develops, is more interesting than ‘AI’
It’s way more interesting. In Architecture, Engineering, and Construction we’ve always had models. And we still do. They’re mental models. No digital model means anything to anyone without an adequate mental model in formation. And that happens through exercise of equipment for visual close study, of those models. That is, exercising the cognitive functions described…
The problem with time travel
Through a remarkable set of circumstances, the relevant facts of which I’m not at liberty to discuss, I have just this weekend availed myself of the no doubt highly unique opportunity to take my pick from among an abundance of affordably priced used Time Machines, in the future, and used it to go back and…
Achtung Baby
Some notes on thoughtfulness. On thinking. What is it? Project development and delivery, in architecture, engineering, and construction, is about building models (mental and digital, and physical models) and QA/QC’ing those models by developing and issuing a set of construction drawings. The drawings are a continuous QA/QC process. What QA/QC means in project development and…
You have to be able to focus to get to clarity
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..…
Robert Snyder of OPEN VCS smiling with a humanoid robot servant
Someone kindly had an offline discussion with me which brought out something worth clarifying. Meanwhile someone else messaged me today: “Grok: Show Robert Snyder of OPEN VCS smiling with a humanoid robot servant.” To clarify, I am not saying that all sets of drawings achieve these functions (see facts and 5 functions at the link…
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OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 