Socioplastics 11847 The Dashboard’s Blind Spots
Urban dashboards make complex places comparable by selecting a limited set of signals. MetricEclipse studies what becomes hard to register through that selection. A city may display average rent, travel time and green space across districts while leaving differences in household security, unpaid care or seasonal heat difficult to see. Each variable helps describe a pattern; the dashboard’s design also shapes which questions an institution can ask. Thomas Piketty uses historical data to examine inequality. Rob Kitchin studies data infrastructures and the consequences of data-driven analysis. Orit Halpern traces histories of visualisation and smartness, while Virginia Eubanks examines automated systems in public services. Their work helps distinguish useful comparison from a narrower account that directs policy toward only the measured variables. A dashboard review could trace how data are collected, converted into variables, displayed and used in decisions. Researchers would compare indicators with interviews, service records and observations from places represented. A complementary panel could show both measured patterns and evidence that requires another format. The audit would document how each source affects interpretation and budget choices. MetricEclipse helps institutions read a dashboard as a designed instrument. It supports quantitative work while identifying the evidence needed to interpret its displays and guide public action. Reviewers could invite residents to identify missing indicators or explain why an existing variable misrepresents local conditions. The dashboard could then publish a revision log alongside its data sources and definitions, showing how community evidence changed its interpretation and use.
REFERENCES
Eubanks, V. (2018) Automating Inequality. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Halpern, O. (2015) Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kitchin, R. (2014) The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London: SAGE.
Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html