OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models
for Visual Close Study of digital models
Work, and Tools
From my experience working at Architecture firms, the primary task of AE professionals (architects and engineers) is the development of a coherent project model (mental model and digital model).
The quality/adequacy of that model is pushed forward and developed through systematic visual close study of the model through the “lens” of a set of technical drawings. Those drawings are checks:
- for coherence of the whole
- for “good fit” among the physical items present, and checks
- against omission of physical elements that matter.
AEC software (most of it) today still in 2025 keeps these two things, models and drawings, in enforced separation instead of in fusion together in the digital model. This is counterproductive to the primary professional task/goal: development of an adequate model, and achievement and ascertainment of that through a vehicle (medium, lens) designed for visual interrogation of the model with intensity over a long period of time.
These two things (the model, and the lens for looking at it) must be brought together and they are, but only by mental exercise alone with no assistance whatsoever from digital modeling or drawing tools.
This is self-defeating and counterproductive, obstructive of the primary work.
V1.0 Drawings in Mental Models
Drawings belong in models. It’s where they’ve always been. For good reason. From the first time anyone scratched out a drawing in sand, on a cave wall, on papyrus, they instantiated that graphic in-situ where it really is, in the mental model in formation in their minds. An interplay was underway.
V2.0 Drawing-Model Fusion, Digital (2012)
With the popularization of digital modeling by the 1990s, technical drawing continued as before in its usual role, while instantiation into the model continued as it always had as mental exercise only, unaltered from V1.0 until I invented the automated fusion of drawings in digital models in 2012.
Fusion, …like recorded sound in (formerly) silent film.
V3.0 OPEN V.C.S. Equipment for Visual Close Study in Models (2024)
OPEN V.C.S. is an evolution in FORM, the form of expression of technical drawing. Now that it resides in digital models, it’s form should evolve.
Resolving the relation of drawings and models
Drawings belong in models. It’s where they’ve always been, in the mental model.
They’ll evolve in form in the digital model.
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OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 