In the scenario of this book, on the first working day of 2027 the regional director of Nordvik Region is handed one page. Nordvik Region is a regional public authority in a Nordic member state of the European Union, with about 6,000 employees and about 450,000 residents; it is one of the two fictional organisations in this book, and everything said about it is illustrative. The page carries a grid of five columns and four rows and eleven coloured marks. It shows where in the Region software acts without a person approving each step, how hard each action would be to undo, how many people it touches in a year, with whose permissions it runs, whether anything outside the software limits it, who has put their name to it, and how the Region would know if the controls had stopped working.
The page is drawn in Contour, the notation of this book, and this chapter teaches it. Chapter 3 defined in words the landscape it draws. Here I read one mark aloud, explain each of the seven dimensions, then show the frames, the views, what the notation leaves out and how to read any landscape in a fixed order. The chapter ends with pen and paper: Contour is designed so that it can be sketched on a whiteboard, and the renderer makes the sketch exact, not possible.
Start with the grid. The five columns are autonomy levels, from Level 0 Advisory on the left to Level 4 Autonomous on the right: the further right a mark sits, the more its software does without a person approving each action. The four rows are reversibility tiers, from R1 Reversible at once at the bottom to R4 Irreversible at the top: the higher a mark sits, the harder its actions are to undo. The top-right cell, Level 4 Autonomous at R4 Irreversible, is shaded faintly and labelled "the empty corner". Here it is empty.
Primary topics explored
- A first mark, read aloud
- Why seven dimensions, and why these
- Columns: what the AI may do
- Rows: what it would take to undo
- Size, colour and shape
- Diamond, seat and baseline
About Landscape
Landscape is a companion to The Transformed Architecture. It examines what happens when artificial intelligence takes the manager's chair: algorithmic management of direction, evaluation, consequence, development and care, the effects on people, the management of AI agents, Europe's legal answer, and how to design an accountable AI boss, for European enterprises and public authorities.
It builds on the conclusions of Architecture as Code, AI Governance, AI Platform and Security, AI Red Team, AI Threat and The Transformed Security Architect.
Executives, line managers, HR and people leaders, works councils and trade unions, public employers, architects and AI governance leads, data protection and legal officers, procurement and programme leaders, and risk, compliance and audit.
Gunnar Nordqvist
Conceived, directed and published the books of The Transformed Architecture.
Continue with the full chapter
Chapter 4: The Notation: One Picture, Drawn the Same Way Every Time in Landscape gives the detailed explanations, practical examples and implementation patterns behind this summary.
This whitepaper belongs to “The Test and the Picture” and is one of 26 drawn from the manuscript.