The dashboard has become the iconic interface through which we understand the coronavirus pandemic. We have dashboards for reported coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, vaccinations, vaccine trials and genetic mapping. These dashboards present information at local, state, national and global levels and are created by government agencies, local and national news organizations, nonprofits, and in some cases, citizen and academic collaboratives. These visual displays are supposed to give us the information we need to act.
Given that the dashboard is one common way for millions of people to engage with and make decisions about the pandemic, we urgently need to understand how these interfaces structure our understanding of the virus — and how they fail to function in some key ways. In fact, covid-19 dashboards are remarkably ill-suited to the complexities of our pandemic reality.
That’s because historically the dashboard has been designed for a reader or viewer who has some power to act.
An 1846 American patent for a sleigh dashboard may well be the earliest use of the term. Affixed to the sleigh, the dashboard provided “more effectual protection from annoyance by the throwing up of snow.” Additionally, Moses Miller (the patent assignee) noted the new dashboard created a more stable and “permanent” fore structure to the vehicle. It became a regular feature of vehicles, such as early cars and trolleys whose dashboards were relatively bare-bones wood or metal and leather barriers that kept debris from being “dashed” up from the ground and onto passengers.
Over the course of car development, that protective barrier, conveniently located at the front of the vehicle, began to house new indicators needed by the driver of the early 1900s. Trolley cable controls and cross-traffic warning lights moved onto the public transport dashboard, and steam, air and fuel gauges moved onto the dashboard and within sight of the driver. With these moves, systems that were housed above, below or behind the driver could be monitored so that the driver could make judgments about driving distance, speed and fluids needs. Similarly, such external factors as oncoming horses or cross-traffic could be signaled to drivers, to enable them to adjust speed and trajectory.
Subsequent innovations brought environmental and entertainment tools within the space of the modern vehicle dashboard as well, allowing drivers and passengers alike to locate themselves in terms of time, space and speed, and — for drivers — to make driving decisions accordingly.
Aircraft, trains and other large vehicles used the language not of the dashboard but of control and/or instrument panels. Airplane cockpits and ship bridges may share certain information and action features but were not historically described as dashboards. Instead, the term reappeared briefly in World War II command centers, where the dashboard was part of a larger map or war room. In these cases, map rooms were being used to command air forces, and the dashboard was an analogue board on a wall that kept track of troop readiness. What was then called "the dashboard” quickly became rebranded as a “tote” or “totalizator board,” which kept track of racetrack betting and payouts.
The larger map or war room, however, had special appeal to mid-20th-century corporate culture, which took up the more benign name of “dashboard” for annual reports that were imagined as enabling industry “pilots” to fly in capitalist battle. As Anne Pezet has shown, by the 1950s both American and French business executives were celebrating the use of corporate dashboards, or “tableaux de bord,” which drew on the military and automotive prestige of the dashboard to enliven paper reporting. These dashboards were designed to give management company sales and production data in both tables and diagrams, thus giving the chief executive and others the ability to see key indicators quickly. As corporate leaders, the readers for these dashboards, much like the auto driver or the air force commander, were empowered to act based on dashboard delivered data.
The digital dashboard draws on metaphorical relationships to vehicular, military and executive dashboards. The notion of a public health dashboard draws on our experiences with real-time instrument information in situations where we have the ability to impact operations. As visualizations of an unfolding pandemic, our familiarity with the idea of a dashboard and its operations obscures the significant delays and gaps in public health metric reporting and the limits of individual action.
Of course, the covid-19 dashboards are not the first example of visualizations of pandemic data. In London, in the 16th and 17th centuries, parish clerks monitored plague infections and deaths, and published their accounting in what was called a “plague bill.” They submitted them to the lord mayor of London and his alderman (regional officials) and then to the British crown and its advisers. These documents allowed the lord mayor and his team to determine who would be quarantined, to dispatch watchmen to the relevant house, and to plan closures or any other measures.
The crown used the information to gauge the toll of the plague on its largest city and the relative safety of conducting royal business within city limits. When the infection rates became too high, the entire court left town for Oxford and conducted business from there. As Kristin Heitman has noted, before the early 17th century, plague bills were closely guarded information designed to give the English government insight into the impact of a virulent disease on the population and the operations of the emerging nation. Public officials were empowered to act, and the information gave them insight they would not otherwise have had.
At the turn of the 17th century, however, the plague bills began being circulated in an entirely different context. Published initially as long, poster-size pages, the bills were hung in public settings. Later, clerks published smaller, single sheets or annual subscriptions that Londoners would carry with them as part of the daily news. While the bills were initially meant to guide those in power, their breakdown of infection and mortality data by locality enabled ordinary people to change their own habits accordingly — so individuals might skip a trip to a local tailor or visit to a friend based on the information. The wealthy might, and often did, choose to leave town much like the royal court. They were able to create or revise an actionable map of London based on the geography of pandemic deaths.
Today’s dashboard visualizations tend to operate at much larger scales, and are far more complex and frequently updated. But in some ways they are perhaps less useful to ordinary people than the plague bills of the distant past. For example, there are data lags of up to 10 days in digital dashboards that are difficult for users to wrap their heads around. Additionally, many dashboards provide global or national level data but not the local data that could actually inform an individual decision about where to go. Some local- and county-level data are available, but not always in the user-friendly format of the dashboard, and certainly not consistently across the country.
Indeed, public health dashboards, like our many covid-19 dashboards, are unusual in the history of dashboards in that they share information but not in a way that allows ordinary people to take action. We might well wish that covid-19 dashboards functioned as both protective barriers and a way to see the information we need to steer ourselves clear of trouble. However, there is little about our current situation that suggests that any one of us are in the driver’s seat of a global health vehicle.