A perspective on city dashboards

Dashboards have long been instruments that display the operation of a system in real time, originally mechanical in nature but increasingly being based on digital monitors that sense how a machine system is performing. We are all familiar with dashboards in cars as instrumented panels that were originally analogue in construction and are fast becoming digital, currently being a combination of both. As computers have become ever more pervasive, dashboards have emerged that do not necessarily relate to an underlying mechanical system but can record information in real time that ultimately might relate to virtual operations. Dashboards usually display information available in real time and are especially suited to routine, continuous measurements that pertain to the underlying system. With the advent of digital computers, information about physical operations could be converted into digital forms and the very devices that were used to monitor the operation of digital computers themselves were the first systems to be used for such measurements. These were often visual being based on oscilloscopes that displayed the performance of the machine, but they were quickly adopted for rudimentary computer graphics. The idea of monitoring human systems is intrinsic to modern medicine, but monitoring human organizations with respect to the behaviour of individuals has only became significant since computers became all pervasive during the computer revolution, which began in the early 1980s. In fact, the first dashboards for managing organizations predated contemporary computers whose screens use part of their memory, and the systems that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s were essentially portals to hand-collected information – some of it displayed in near real time, a little after its collection using teletype-like devices. The most iconic example was the control centre called Cybersyn developed by the cyberneticist Stafford Beer for the left-wing Allende government which came to power in Chile in 1970 (Morozov, 2014). Beer essentially argued that a dashboard-like control room for monitoring the Chilean economy should be set up and plans were made to make this operational using a system of data collection that involved manually harvesting data about the performance of various industries using telex machines. These were developed in a simple form of analogue communications network, but not from any digitally networked set of sources – for in 1970 the notion that computer and communications would converge was in its infancy. The system thus required a fair bit of manual intervention with workers actually monitoring the data daily and physically ensuring it was transmitted by telex. Needless to say, like many of the Soviet attempts at managing such a command economy, the data were always out of sync, notwithstanding the fact that the theories behind the way the economy worked