At Wallkat, we occasionally disappear down a rabbit hole about the history of displaying information. This one came with swivel chairs, armrest buttons and a room that looks ready for departure.How could we resist?
In early-1970s Chile, Project Cybersyn brought together a Chilean team and British cybernetician Stafford Beer around an ambitious idea: use information and feedback to help manage the economy. The wider project remained unfinished, but its extraordinary operations room still captures the imagination. Read about the project.
Seven sculpted chairs sat among walls of displays. Controls in the armrests let their occupants select information on the walls. A full-scale reconstruction, built decades later with contributions from original designers, shows just how striking the space was. See the reconstructed room.
What really interests us is the arrangement: information, concisely and intelligently displayed all around the room, people in the middle, and the opportunity to look up, turn towards one another and talk. There’s something appealing about that. A display can give a group a shared starting point: something has changed, something needs attention, or something is worth discussing in the way that a private dashboard on a users dedicated screen doesn’t, but that the wallboards become even more powerful when met with users who interact with one another.
Beer’s ambitions also extended to public feedback. A related proposal, Cyberfolk, explored how people might signal pleasure or displeasure, including reactions to televised political speeches. It wasn’t a working nationwide happiness dashboard, but the idea of making a feeling visible has a familiar ring for anyone who enjoys an expressive indicator, and if you’ve sat through a call with the wallboard teams you’ll know hoe much we love our emoji powered kpi’s, or “emoji-meters” for short allowing you to say so much more than a number. If you’ve not taken KPI’s for a spin yet, there’s a great guide in the Academy section of the site that’ll bring your wallboards to life in minutes.
Cybersyn’s story is more complicated than a futuristic room. Its wider vision was never fully realised, and work ended following Chile’s 1973 military coup. Still, the imagination behind it gives us plenty to think about. I really wonder what they might have achived with the technology we have today, and I would love to be part of a project like that. For us, the design prompts some enjoyable questions. What deserves the biggest space on your board? What should change visibly when it needs attention? And what might make someone glance up and start a useful conversation?
Your next wallboard probably won’t need seven specially designed chairs. But perhaps it could borrow a little of that ambition.
What would you put on the walls of your own control room?