Here is a short presentation with another perspective on the Cybersyn project which should be of interest to designers and quantitative visualization types: http://compscifi.com/
It argues that the design of the Presidential control room and its simplified visualizations of economic information created an illusion of omniscience and control over the economy by using visual cues from modernist design and science fiction. But behind the scenes, the project was mostly run by humans exchanging data over teletype machines and hand-pasting information to slides.
There's a wonderful example of the project's simplified model of the economy around 7:58. Do you think this captures the complexity of the Chilean economy with enough fidelity that policymakers could have made reliable predictions about the effects of their interventions? (I don't. This is why: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)
I have great hope that agent-based modeling and simulation will become useful tools in economics, but they are only useful when we accept that they are wrong. We should approach synoptic tools like Cybersyn that promise power and control over complex social systems with extreme skepticism.
It argues that the design of the Presidential control room and its simplified visualizations of economic information created an illusion of omniscience and control over the economy by using visual cues from modernist design and science fiction. But behind the scenes, the project was mostly run by humans exchanging data over teletype machines and hand-pasting information to slides.
There's a wonderful example of the project's simplified model of the economy around 7:58. Do you think this captures the complexity of the Chilean economy with enough fidelity that policymakers could have made reliable predictions about the effects of their interventions? (I don't. This is why: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)
I have great hope that agent-based modeling and simulation will become useful tools in economics, but they are only useful when we accept that they are wrong. We should approach synoptic tools like Cybersyn that promise power and control over complex social systems with extreme skepticism.