Professor, MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Lecture University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design”

From September 7th 2023, to February 28th 2024, Hugo Palmarola, Eden Medina, and Pedro Ignacio Alonso curated a major exhibition at the La Moneda Cultural Centre in Santiago de Chile titled How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design, that was followed by the publication of an eponymous book (Lars Muller: 2024). This lecture will present both the exhibition and book, including the curators’ integral reconstruction of Cybersyn’s Operations Room. In order to bring Chile’s industries under the state administration of Salvador Allende’s government, a management system called the Cybersyn Project (an acronym for cybernetic synergy) was developed. Under the coordination of the Technological Research Committee of Chile (INTEC) and the Corporation for the Promotion of Production (CORFO), this project was directed by British cybernetician Stafford Beer in collaboration with a team of industrial and graphic designers led by Gui Bonsiepe. For the Cybersyn’s operating room, Beer requested the efficiency of a war room combined with the comfort of a social club in order to enable fast decision making based on information obtained from the newly nationalized factories. Through the system’s almost real-time data-feed a simplified data visualization could be presented on screens viewed from controlling swivel-chairs built in fiberglass. The talk will outline the history of the original project, highlighting the role of interdisciplinary work in a contemporary reconstruction advancing historical research, scholarship, and curatorship.