Visualization of Autodesk’s organizational ebbs and flows

This one did the rounds over the holiday and so I expect many of you will have missed it (unless you also happen to read Jeremy's blog). I'm still finishing up some work that I'll hopefully be able to unveil during the coming weeks, and I thought I'd post this in the meantime.

Autodesk Research has published a pretty amazing visualization of Autodesk's organizational evolution over a period of four years, from May 2007 to June 2011. Like many nodes in the tree who remained static during that particular period, it can come as a bit of a surprise to see just how dynamic an organization such as Autodesk can be.

There's obviously a human side to this that the visualization clearly doesn't tell, where people have had change forced upon them for various reasons. But the visualization is nonetheless interesting and (dare I say) beautiful.

In the YouTube comments, Justin Matejka from our Autodesk Research team described the technologies used to make this visualization as "straight Java for the data processing, GraphViz for the graph layout, and Processing to render the resulting graphs."

7 responses to “Visualization of Autodesk’s organizational ebbs and flows”

  1. Constantin Gherasim Avatar
    Constantin Gherasim

    Hi Kean,

    This is really beautiful, it looks like an extraterrestrial form of life, or something 🙂

    Do you have any idea if this should be interpreted as a 3D visualization (kind of an old dandelion), or it's strictly a 2D representation?

    Looks 3D to me, but I just want to make sure I'm not too imaginative 🙂

    Thanks in advance,

    Constantin

  2. Hi Constantin,

    Good question - when I watched it I assumed it was overlapping 2D, but I suppose it's possible it's flattened 3D. 🙂

    Posting a question via YouTube is probably the best way to get a definitive response.

    Cheers,

    Kean

  3. Hi Kean,
    Impressive indeed, especially when a company is acquired or during the re-org.

    Did you find your own point?

    Cheers

  4. Hi Loic,

    I did think about taking a screenshot and labeling an arbitrary node in the graph "I am here". But that would have been pure speculation - I don't know enough about the data to even hazard a guess.

    I was in the same role in the ADN team during that entire period and I suspect that corner of the org would seem like a little island of relative peace and calm. 😉

    Regards,

    Kean

  5. Hi Constantin, glad you liked it!

    It is a 2D visualization, but the overlapping transparent nodes and edges in the force-directed layout do give it a 3D sort of feel.

    Thanks,
    Justin

  6. Cool - thanks for stopping by, Justin! 🙂

    Kean

  7. Constantin Gherasim Avatar
    Constantin Gherasim

    Thanks for the info Justin 🙂

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