OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models
for Visual Close Study of digital models
Drawings belong in models where they’ve always been, in the mental model.
They’ll evolve in form in the digital model.
Work, and Tools
From my experience working in Architecture firms, I take it that the primary task of architects and engineers is the development of an adequate project model (mental model and digital model), the quality of which develops through visual close study through the “lens” of a set of technical drawings.
Drawings are checks against the model.
They’re checks for:
- Coherence of the whole (the whole project)
- Good Fit among the physical items present
and checks against:
- Omission of physical items that matter
Most AEC software still today in 2026 keeps these two things, models and drawings, in enforced separation instead of in fusion together within the digital model.
This inhibits achievement of the primary task: development of an adequate model. The model and the lens for looking at it must be brought together in fusion. And they are, but only by mental exercise alone, completely unassisted by digital modeling software which to date (with few exceptions) offers no assistance whatsoever.
Better equipment supporting the core work of AEC professions — with the model well and truly equipped for review, at the center of its own review — will come eventually.
And by the way, what is review, really?
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 (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 Equipment for Visual Close Study in Models (2024)
An evolution in technical drawing’s form. Now that drawing resides in-situ within digital models (see V2.0), its form of expression should evolve.
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OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 