Many people can’t imagine a world where buildings are built without drawings.
But why? Are drawings a perfect method of communicating and documenting a design? Why do people in the AEC industry love drawings so much? And why do people defend the concept of drawings so strongly?
The purpose of this blog post is to discuss how drawings are far from ideal, the biases people may have to wanting drawings, and to open minds to other possibilities.
Drawings: Far from Ideal
One should not make the mistake that a group of experts ever sat down and made the informed decision that a drawing was the perfect and ultimate method of communicating a design.
Drawings as we know them exist because of constraints and almost everything about how drawings look is a compromise.
The media was constrained to paper, which nowadays are sizes which conform to an ISO standard with sizes based on a surface area of 1m2 and at a ratio of root 2. There are many standards related to drawings, I should know, I’ve read and implemented many of them, but how much value are they really adding?
The restriction of space means details must be crammed in and scaled down. In fact, the ability to communicate a 3D design in a small 2D space is so limited that people have had to come up with almost a whole new language and symbols system.
To show depth, different line thicknesses are needed. To show types and cut lines funny little dashed and / or dotted lines are used. Child-like hatch patterns are needed to demonstrate things like bricks, blocks, and insulation.
When you get into the world of engineering, the symbols become weirder again. Fancy triangles for valves, ying yang symbols for rising and falling pipework, and let’s not get started on reinforcement drawings.
Drawings can be so abstracted from the real world that it takes a lot of education and experience to transform them into a mental picture of what something actually physically looks like. An awful lot of design intent can get lost going from one person thinking in 3D, drawing it in 2D, and then someone mentally translating it back to 3D again.
It is hugely ironic that many 3D authoring tools allow you to model in 3D because that’s the most natural way of thinking, but then encourage you to forget how useful 3D is and squash everything back to 2D again.
Drawing bias
Perhaps the rise of 3D perhaps makes people feel under threat. Many people in the industry have dedicated many hours to learning about and practicing the “art” of drawing creation.
Maybe with the decreasing relevance of this skill set, people feel the need to defend drawings to a greater degree than is necessary.
There is certainly a rose-tinted glasses nostalgic aspect. LinkedIn is littered with people clammaring for the good old days when apparently project drawings and designs were always perfect, and having rooms full of people hunched over drawing boards was the pinnacle of engineering.
There is some merit to the argument that drawings are already familiar to people in the industry, but this quickly becomes a “we do it this way because that’s how it’s always been done” type argument and promotes a closed mind set.
Open minds, not PDFs
Okay, I will admit there are some situations where a “drawing” can be useful. And I’m purposely not giving any specific solutions or alternatives because my aim here is that I’d like people to really think about drawings before defending them.
For example, I’m a big fan of schematics because they can communicate a complex system in a small space, but even schematics are probably best referred to as diagrams, because they are intentionally abstracted from physical reality.
But, if drawings as they are today didn’t exist, and you were tasked with coming with cresting a method of communicating an AEC design, is a 2D paper drawing really what you would come up with?
With all the technology available today, such as databases, 3D graphics engines, tablets, even just the internet, surely there is a better way. No dominant new method has yet emerged, but there’s certainly strong signs of an AEC future that doesn’t involve drawings to anywhere near the same extent as they are currently.
Ask why?
What I’m asking is for people to ask themselves “why?” when it comes to drawings. Why do we have drawings? Why are drawings the way they are? And most importantly, are there any alternatives?
If you can ask yourselves these questions and you’re satisfied with your answer, then that’s fine. But, if like me you aren’t satisfied, if you think things could be done differently, then I believe that is a big step towards changing the AEC industry for the better.