This assignment is about developing a taste for the relational design and process aesthetics of organisations. All students develop a design for an organisation, with a metaphorically informed organogram as driving medium.

The assignment consists of several chapters:

• Organisational metaphors (=> of biological, military, scientific, religious or other nature; drawing organograms) For next week: come up with three to five types or (hybrid) metaphors of organisations and draw their organograms. Collect inspiring organograms, or other process maps.

• Relational design (=> hierarchies, agencies, affordances, deliberate differences and similarities, relations between humans and non-humans)

• Process design. This part focusses on the procedures for acting as an organisation:What are the spatial and temporal characteristics of the organisations’ behaviour ? How are decisions made? To what external stimuli does the organisation react? Who/what  works with what information? What processes are documented ? Which aren’t ?What are the interesting constraints ? Students make flowcharts of the major actions the organisation should be able to perform in response to certain internal or external stimuli.

• Communication, both externally and internally. This part focusses on the medial characteristics of the organisation.  Its tools. senses, sense prothesises, languages or sign systems for both communication between different elements that are part of the organisation, but also between the the organisation and (designated) elements of the outside world

• Goals and/or effects. Counter-intuitively, only when the students have developed their taste for interesting, beautiful or horrific organisations, and have come up with possible forms and processes, they start to decide on the desired goals and/or effects of the organisation.