Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard

There's a distinction between operational control rooms, where there are people with controls connected to real things, and situation rooms, where the outputs are mostly talk. Combining the two sometimes results in an ego trip rather than a useful work environment. An extreme case is the Moscow area electric power control room.[1] It looks like a set from a Bond movie. That was actually built, although the conference room that descends from the ceiling was omitted. The setup makes little sense; the main job of a citywide power distribution control room is coordinating the field workers who are out there fixing things.

For comparison, here's the electric power control room for the entire northeastern US.[2] This has two main jobs - controlling the transmission network, and monitoring and controlling the power market. You can look at most of the same data they are seeing.[3] (It's a slow-loading Flash page. Once you get it loaded, select "Big Picture" to get an overview. To understand it, read "PJM 101"[4])

For a clear distinction between operational and situation rooms, here's NYC's emergency call center, which answers 911.[5] It's a big call center room of cubicles. Each station has three screens and a phone system, but the few big screens around are just showing overall statistics. NYC also has their COMPSTAT room.[6] It's just a conference room with a big screen. There are no controls at the seats.

The first real control centers were railroad signal towers. There's a whole history of those, and it's worth understanding how they managed safety. Early ones had big levers, and early on, those were interlocked. The Bluebell Railway, a heritage railway in England, is big enough to need a full signal system, and it's all antique equipment. Watch this video.[7] About 5 minutes in, you can see someone operating the huge levers to set signals and switches in a signal tower. At 5:18, they pull a big lever, and it moves about an inch and won't move further. They've tried to throw a track switch, and the mechanical interlocking won't let them throw that switch until the track is clear and the related signals have been set to stop. When you design "Internet of things" systems, try to do as well as that 1880s technology.

Military and NASA control rooms usually have a feature rarely seen elsewhere - anyone can view, read-only, anyone else's screen. In the original NASA and NORAD control centers, which used the same Philco hardware, all the screens were analog TVs, and they had a channel selector, so you could view any console's main feed. This is done so that when important stuff is happening on one screen, others can look at it without crowding around the person controlling that screen. Once you have that feature, the need for multiple big screens decreases. A military tactical operations center today is often one modest size big screen and a bunch of laptops.

[1] http://www.archdaily.com/29186/moesk-control-center-arch-gro... [2] http://www.elliottlewis.com/casestudy-pjm.html [3] https://edata.pjm.com/eData/index.html [4] http://pjm.com/Globals/Training/Courses/ol-pjm-101.aspx [5] http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/images/pr/pr_2012_01_05_psac_91... [6] http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/09/23/nypd-dedicates-compst... [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijWNtrvcEVA

Fascinating and insightful article. I would still consider some cases where information is useful.

(a) There are some really interesting community-based initiatives where urban dashboards add value albeit still data-driven. Instead of using Baltimore's CityStats I would consider the Neighborhood Vital Signs indicators [1] as a good example of quality of life indicators.

(b) The dashboard performs a huge role, when considering that information in city governments exist in silos. There was a time when one transport department didn't know what another was doing. It still happens (e.g. Fire agencies not knowing that the metro power was turn off for a good 40 minutes [2]).

[1]http://bniajfi.org [2] http://mayor.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mayormb/pub...

All of the numbers, none of the information.