Design practice is, at its core, representational work. Designers make sketches, journey maps, system maps, concept models, diagrams - visual and conceptual representations intended to change how people see the systems they inhabit. Design's own literature on this representational work is extensive; Schön's (1983) "reflective conversation with materials", Lawson's (2006) account of how designers think through drawing, Pei and Self's (2022) treatment of design representations as central to practice. Yet as far as I can tell, this literature rarely connects to Kenneth Boulding's The Image (1956), which provides perhaps the most explicit theoretical account of how such representations actually work on the people who encounter them. His central proposition is that what determines behaviour is not the world as it is, but the world as the individual perceives it - "my subjective knowledge", as Boulding puts it, or "what I believe to be true" (Boulding, 1956, p. 6). The Image is not a passive reflection of the environment; it is a structured representation that filters incoming information, assigns value, and shapes action. Messages consistent with the Image are absorbed; messages that contradict it may be rejected, may cause minor adjustments, or - in rare cases - may produce what Boulding calls a revolutionary change. Most of the time, the Image resists fundamental revision.
In Boulding's terms, these representational tools are interventions at the level of the Image. They offer new information, new frames, new ways of seeing the system; when they work, they work precisely because they change someone's Image. The stakeholder who sees the patient journey laid out end-to-end, or the programme board that confronts a map of what the system actually does rather than what it claims to do, are experiencing Bouldingian Image revision whether or not anyone involved has read the book. Paparone (2008), analysing metaphoric sensemaking in military planning, makes a complementary point: the metaphors and visual representations through which people apprehend their systems are not incidental to those systems but constitutive of them. I explored this in Metaphors for Working with AI.
But there is a question Boulding raises without fully answering: what happens when the Image is not merely cognitive - not merely a model that can be updated by better information - but is serving a function that resists being updated? This is precisely the territory that David Armstrong's (2005) concept of the "organisation-in-the-mind", developed within the systems psychodynamics tradition, was designed to address.
Boulding's Image and Armstrong's organisation-in-the-mind
Both Boulding and Armstrong are concerned with the internal representations that shape how people relate to and act within organisations. But as Lawlor and Sher (2021) make clear, the two concepts differ in a way that matters for anyone whose work involves offering organisations new representations of themselves.
Boulding's Image is primarily cognitive. It is built up through experience and information; it can be restructured by new messages; its relationship to reality is one of correspondence, however imperfect. The Image has a value dimension - Boulding is clear that the value system stands at the gate, filtering what is admitted - but the basic mechanism is informational. Better maps, better data, better representations can, in principle, reshape the Image. This is the assumption that underlies most design practice: if we can show people the system as it actually is, rather than as they imagine it to be, behaviour will change.
Armstrong's organisation-in-the-mind operates differently. As Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 17) describe it, the organisation-in-the-mind is "the picture which all organisational members and others will have in mind when interacting across boundaries". This picture is not primarily cognitive; it is emotionally invested, shaped by projection and introjection, and maintained through unconscious processes. Members of organisations carry internal images that are structured by the same mechanisms Klein (1946) described in individual psychic life: splitting, idealisation, denigration, projective identification.
The good department and the bad department; the idealised leader and the vilified one; the part of the organisation that "works" and the part that "doesn't" - these are not empirical assessments but psychic positions, maintained because they manage anxiety. The critical difference, then, is that Boulding's Image can be updated by information, whereas, on this reading, Armstrong's organisation-in-the-mind is defended against information that threatens the psychic equilibrium it maintains.
A case in point: the closed system as defended Image
A recent experience brought this distinction into focus. I have been working with algorithm developers whom I have been trying to encourage to take a more situated, human-centred perspective - to consider the system in which their algorithms will operate, and the needs of the users and stakeholders within that system. No matter how many times I attempt to show them the open nature of the system, many of them react with defensiveness, hostility, or denial. They insist that their role is to focus on one closed element; they do not wish to see, or engage with, the complexity of working within an open system.
In Boulding's terms, I was offering them a new Image - a representation of a larger, more complex system than the one they had been working with. The new Image contained more information; it was potentially richer more accurate of the wider social reality we live in, or in which their algorithms need to function; it would have supported better decision-making. But it was refused. The value system at the gate was not merely filtering for relevance; it was filtering for bearability.
Read through Armstrong's concept, the algorithm developers' Image of their system as closed was not merely a cognitive model that happened to be incomplete. It was an organisation-in-the-mind serving a defensive function: by maintaining the boundary of the closed system, they were protecting themselves from the anxiety of unbounded complexity, from responsibility for outcomes they could not control, from the recognition that their technical work was embedded in a social and political context that exceeded their expertise.
As Lawlor and Sher (2021, p. 22) observe, "organisations have relationships with one another, long before actual meetings between their representatives take place. Members of organisations have shared mental maps of their internal relationships and of their environments. These may consist of phantasies or clear ideas based on intelligence". The algorithm developers' shared mental map - their collective Image of a closed, controllable, purely technical system - was precisely such a phantasy: not irrational in the simple sense, but serving an unconscious purpose.
The distinction reframes the diagnostic question. The cognitive systems question is: how do we provide better information so that the Image can be updated? The psychodynamic tradition asks a different kind of question: what anxiety is this Image defending against, and what conditions would be needed for its holders to tolerate a different one?
Implications for design's representational work
Design researchers spend much of their time making representations - maps, models, diagrams, frameworks - collaboratively or reflexively, and offering them to organisations. The implicit theory is Bouldingian: better representations produce better Images, which produce better decisions. As Armstrong and Rustin (2019) argue, this assumption is incomplete, because representations do not enter a neutral cognitive space. They enter a field of emotionally invested images, some of which are defended precisely because they simplify, exclude, or distort.
A journey map that makes visible the patient's experience of fragmented care is not merely informational; it is a threat to the organisation-in-the-mind that maintains fragmentation as a defence against the anxiety of holistic responsibility. A system map that shows how technical and social subsystems are coupled is not merely useful; it is unbearable to those who have organised their professional identity around the boundary between them. In Beyond Technomagic I argued that technomagic beliefs persist not because organisations lack information but because acknowledging the real constraints would require confronting what the organisation cannot bear to know. In Algorithm Archaeology at SCÖ the attempt to map a system that resisted being mapped, or preferred an abstract "Image" or representation, was itself diagnostic - each layer of specificity peeled away more of the ambiguity that held the project together, and the fact that the system could not be made concrete without dissolving its coherence was the central tension that I, as a designer revealed, or the programme group was defending against. In Owning the Problem Space I argued that design has the potential to threaten, or ellicit defensive responses because it demands transparency about what is not known and through representation creates specificity or visibility about what is, or the tensions between different images or representations that a project group, or programme or organisational culture contain.
The Boulding-Armstrong comparison provides a structural account of why some representations land and others provoke these emotional or ambivalent responses. A representation consistent with the existing organisation-in-the-mind - one that confirms what members already believe, or that simplifies in ways that support existing defences - will be absorbed smoothly. A representation that challenges the organisation-in-the-mind will provoke anxiety, and the anxiety will be managed through the available defensive repertoire: denial ("that map doesn't reflect reality"), attack ("the methodology is flawed"), displacement ("we need to focus on the real priorities"), or - most commonly in my experience - quiet absorption without direct confrontation or acknowledge. The map goes on the wall, the report is filed. Nothing explicitly changes.
The value system at the gate
Boulding himself came close to this insight, though he did not develop it in psychodynamic terms. He wrote that "at the gate of the image stands the value system demanding payment" (Boulding, 1956, p. 13) - incoming messages are not admitted to the Image freely but are filtered through a value system that determines what is accepted, what is rejected, and what produces revolutionary or disruptive change. But Boulding's value system is essentially rational: it reflects preferences, priorities, and beliefs about what matters. The psychodynamic tradition suggests that the value system at the gate is also - and perhaps primarily - a defensive system: it filters not only for relevance but for psychic safety. Messages that would produce intolerable anxiety are refused entry regardless of their informational value.
This has practical consequences for design. It means that the quality of a representation - its accuracy, its elegance, its comprehensiveness - is a necessary but not sufficient condition for its effectiveness. The sufficient condition is the capacity of its recipients to tolerate what it reveals. And that capacity is not a fixed property of individuals but a function of the containing environment: the relationships, structures, and holding conditions that make it possible to confront difficult realities without retreating into defensive simplification.
Paparone's (2008) analysis of metaphoric sensemaking in military planning makes a complementary point from outside the psychodynamic tradition. They show how the dominant metaphors through which military organisations understand their environment - machine metaphors, organism metaphors, brain metaphors - constrain what can be thought and therefore what can be done. The choice of metaphor is not innocent; it is a form of sense-making that includes and excludes, that makes certain aspects of reality visible and others invisible. What Paparone describes cognitively, the psychodynamic tradition explains motivationally: the metaphor persists not only because it is cognitively convenient but because it is psychically necessary. The machine metaphor persists in military planning - and, many other bureaucratic contexts aside - because it manages the anxiety of operating in a complex, uncertain, human environment by reducing it to something controllable.
Representations as diagnostic instruments
Boulding's Image is a more powerful concept than cognitive systems thinking has generally acknowledged, because Boulding himself was reaching towards something that exceeds the cognitive frame - the value system at the gate is his way of saying that information alone does not determine what the Image admits. Armstrong's organisation-in-the-mind, developed within the systems psychodynamics tradition, takes what Boulding started and adds the dimension the cognitive account lacks: an explanation of why Images resist change even when better information is available, and what that resistance tells us about the system.
For design practice, the implication is that representational work is rarely purely informational. Every map, model, and diagram enters a defended space, and the response it produces - acceptance, resistance, absorption without change - is itself data about the organisation-in-the-mind it has encountered.
References
Armstrong, D. (2005). Organisation in the Mind. London: Tavistock Clinic Series.
Armstrong, D. & Rustin, M. (2019). Social Defences Against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm. London: Karnac.
Boulding, K.E. (1956). The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Lawlor, D. & Sher, M. (2021). An Introduction to Systems Psychodynamics. London: Routledge.
Lawson, B. (2006). How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified (4th ed.). Oxford: Architectural Press.
Paparone, C. (2008). On Metaphors We Are Led By. Military Review, 88(6), 55–64.
Pei, E. & Self, J. (2022). Product Design and the Role of Representation. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Schön, D.A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.