A Gantt chart might make the time-component of a project understandable, but its linear nature often obscures the interplay between different domains, disciplines, and people. Block diagrams allow the components of the projects to be understood in how they fit together, but hide the tasks required to build those components and the order in which they must be built.

Mission statements make clear the "Why" of the project, and its importance, but fail to show the How, Who or What. To truly understand a complex project, these multiple different perspectives must all be reconciled and integrated. In this project mapping exercise, we are going to borrow an approach from architecture, which is to create a layered drawing. In architecture, the complexity of a large building is made digestible through a variety of layered, annotated, visualizations. These layers are then synthesized together into master plans that are able to make many perspectives viewable at once.

We will take this approach to mapping the HBGDki initative. Through an iterative series of meetings, discussions, and prototypes, we layer together the different strands of the HBGDki project into an interactive map that will allow project participants to see how their contributions fit into the whole, team leads to see how their groups interact, and managers to see how their responsibilities and deadlines effect the overall goals.