Organizations are everywhere, yet their underlying rules and cultures are largely invisible, often complex, and inherently difficult to understand let alone change. This new exploratory course teaches information visualization methods in order to analyze and characterize organizations in the context of specific challenges, with the goal of ultimately strategizing for change.

We are all exposed to multiple organizations, involuntarily or by choice, including but not limited to governmental, educational, religious or corporate organizations, as well as many others. Many organizations are nested within others, with lines blurred and bi-directional forces enacting impact. Burton and Obel defined an organization as “…a social unit of people with a relatively identifiable boundary that is structured and managed to meet a collective goal.” (Burton and Obel, 1984). Organizations are systems with cultures, and their governing forces are mostly intangible. How might information visualizations contribute to deepening a collective understanding of how organizations work?

The core hypothesis of the course is that design as a discipline, with its unique methods, outcomes and cultures, can be leveraged to describe, visualize, understand and ultimately transform complex organizations. To understand this claim more in-depth we will venture on a journey that at times will resemble a studio (albeit without the space and with much lower intensity), at other times will feature workshops and discussions, lectures, or site visits. The course will be a real time experiment, because our ambition will be to leverage a set of methods borrowed from the design disciplines in a context that they were not conceived for. This ‘methodological hacking’ will touch upon a variety of tangentially important fields including systems and organizational theory, organizational behavior, and psychology. These fields will be approached through readings, lectures and guest presentations, always through the lens of design. While theoretical foundations will be emphasized throughout the term this is ultimately a project-based class, which is how the various divergent strands weave together into strategic visualizations of the intangible.

There are numerous potential projects that would be suitable to build related analytical and visualization skills. Given this particular moment in time, our project this year will be Harvard University itself, a highly complex, decentralized organization with unique organizational characteristics at a scale that makes change particularly difficult. Harvard as a procedural and cultural system is being challenged through a range of societal developments, including the rapidly shifting disciplinary fields it seeks to contribute to, and the increasing tension between the University’s decentralized approach and our increasingly connected world. While Harvard is our ‘project site’ the learning outcomes are not dependent on it, as the ‘site’ is interchangeable. Students will learn generalizable approaches and methods suitable to analyzing and characterizing organizations through visual means, to model and visualize these systems, and by doing so advancing theories of change.

There are no prerequisites for the class. The instructor hopes for a group of collaborative students from various disciplines and from inside and outside the GSD. As an experimental seminar students should expect the unexpected, be willing to adopt to change, and enjoy diving into cultures and value systems that are foreign to their own.