Futuristic control rooms have proliferated in dozens of global cities. Baltimore has its CitiStat Room, where department heads stand at a podium before a wall of screens and account for their units’ performance. The Mayor’s office in London’s City Hall features a 4×3 array of iPads mounted in a wooden panel, which seems an almost parodic, Terry Gilliam-esque take on the Brazilian Ops Center. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned an iPad app – the “No. 10 Dashboard” (a reference to his residence at 10 Downing Street) – which gives him access to financial, housing, employment, and public opinion data. As The Guardian reported, “the prime minister said that he could run government remotely from his smartphone.”

This is the age of Dashboard Governance, heralded by gurus like Stephen Few, founder of the “visual business intelligence” and “sensemaking” consultancy Perceptual Edge, who defines the dashboard as a “visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” A well-designed dashboard, he says — one that makes proper use of bullet graphs, sparklines, and other visualization techniques informed by the “brain science” of aesthetics and cognition — can afford its users not only a perceptual edge, but a performance edge, too. The ideal display offers a big-picture view of what is happening in real time, along with information on historical trends, so that users can divine the how and why and redirect future action. As David Nettleton emphasizes, the dashboard’s utility extends beyond monitoring “the current situation”; it also “allows a manager to … make provisions, and take appropriate actions.”

In 2006, when Few published the first edition of his Information Dashboard Design manual, folks were just starting to recognize the potential of situated media. Design critic John Thackara foretold an emerging market for “global spreadsheets” (his term for data displays) that could monitor the energy use of individual buildings or the ecological footprint of entire cities and regions. Thackara identified a host of dashboard players already on the scene — companies like Juice Software, KnowNow, Rapt, Arzoon, ClosedloopSolutions, SeeBeyond, and CrossWorlds — whose names conjured up visions of an Omniscient Singularity fueled by data, hubris, and Adderall.

By now we know to interpret the branding conceits of tech startups with amused skepticism, but those names reflect a recognition that dashboard designers are in the business of translating perception into performance, epistemology into ontology. They don’t merely seek to display information about a system but to generate insights that human analysts use to change that system — to render it more efficient or sustainable or profitable, depending upon whatever qualities are valued. The prevalence and accessibility of data are changing the way we see our cities, in ways that we can see more clearly when we examine the history of the urban dashboard.