`Organization construction set´-modeling organizations with visual agents

The author describes a prototype object environment that explores the agency concept via object-oriented programming techniques, expert systems, other artifical intelligence techniques, and the introduction of iconic `visual agents´ as a means of expanding the scope of the visual model world from narrowly focused metaphors to organizations themselves. `Visual agents´ are icons which encapsulate data and behavior of organizational objects including the user. The hierarchical class structure, method inheritance, and message passing paradigm of Smalltalk-80 offer an environment which is itself a good model for the approach. Smalltalk-80, with embedded knowledge bases that provide agents with a limited but functional `intelligence´ completes the approach for modeling organizations