Project Cybersyn
Project Cybersyn
!A 3D render of the Operations Room (or Opsroom): a physical location where economic information was to be received, stored, and made available for speedy decision-making. It was designed in accordance with [Gestalt principles to give users a platform that would enable them to absorb information in a simple but comprehensive way.](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/CyberSyn-render-107.png/330px-CyberSyn-render-107.png)
Name
The project's name in English ('Cybersyn') is a portmanteau of the words 'cybernetics' and 'synergy'. Since the name is not euphonic in Spanish, in that language the project was called Synco, both an initialism for the Spanish Sistema de Información y Control ('System of Information and Control'), and a pun on the Spanish cinco, the number 5, alluding to the 5 levels of Beer's viable system model.
System
A fundamental phase of the project was to quantify the production processes in the factories. This began with operational research (OR) engineers visiting the factories and modeling their production flows using a technique that Beer and the local team called "quantified flowcharting". It consisted of drawing a flowchart of the entire production process of a given factory, focusing on the "bottlenecks" of such a process. The connections from one point in the process to another had to be quantified in order to find those bottlenecks. This was a time-consuming process, for which only one OR engineer was assigned to model a given factory. This is likely the reason why, at the end of the project, only about twenty factories were modeled and connected to the transmission and processing system.
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