“Dashboard” is a term borrowed from horse-and-buggy land.

It was, originally, the board below the feet of the driver that protected the driver and any “front seat” passengers from the filth kicked up by the horses’ hooves -- which “dashed” against the board.

Dashboards protect us from the filthy details of reality. They show us a nice, neat hierarchy of simple objects, each of which is related to other simple objects in pre-defined and almost always hierarchical ways. That is so not because our problem spaces are two-dimensional and hierarchical; problems almost never are either.

The graphical object in the dashboard has no depth, no meat. It is only ever a doorway, or a window, through which we pass on our way to another doorway or window...and at the bottom of the pre-defined navigational paths, at “ground level” as it were, we will almost always find the tyrant who still constrains our thinking about what is possible: the grid. Rows and columns of alphanumeric tuples.

(Imagine what a game designer would do with a pie chart -- to start with, you could crash-land on it, or fly into it, and discover a whole new world of “depth” in data, without ever leaving the pie segment....It would have inhabitants, probably. A complex system, close to the ground....)

Dashboards show us hierarchies of pinboards with two-dimensional representations more noteworthy for their rendering than their informational content because the market that serves us, as designers of performance management systems, is dominated by a few suppliers who copy one another, as opposed to compete with one another for our spending by innovation.

And we, for the most part, follow along, because we’ve convinced ourselves, in too many cases, that we’re professional users of Tool X, rather than designers of appropriate (and appropriately sophisticated) performance management systems.

We exercise loyalty (on which our suppliers depend) rather than voice: complaining about why performance management has made no significant strides, in visualization, since the days of the executive information system.