Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
- ID
- 30841
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 01 Oct 2026, 2:49 AM
- Fetched
- 02 Oct 2026, 12:26 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://unsung.aresluna.org/before-pixels-modular-industrial-dashboards/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 02 Oct 2026, 12:27 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
A photo essay by Marcin Wichary (a designer who has worked at Google, Medium and Figma and wrote a book about keyboards) collecting modular industrial dashboards he saw in German and Polish museums — including an air traffic control display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and subway/light-rail monitoring panels at Fernmeldemuseum Stuttgart. The panels are built from pluggable modules with buttons and lamps that light up to show status, and Wichary openly states he doesn't know much about them and invites readers to write in with details. The post carries no measurements, schematics, part numbers, or dates — it is images plus commentary.
Why it matters
This is inspiration, not an actionable change: there is no version, price, API, or spec here that alters what you build or deploy. If you are designing monitoring or admin dashboards, the one concrete thing worth copying is the constraint these panels enforced — fixed module slots and lamp-based status instead of a configurable grid of charts — but the author himself says he lacks documentation on how they worked, so treat any architectural lesson as a hypothesis to test, not a proven design finding. No Malaysian or Southeast Asian angle is present in the text.
Discussion angle
Physical panels had to be glanceable and fixed-layout because you couldn't reconfigure a lamp; modern web dashboards gained configurability and lost that. Ask the room which of their own status pages would survive being rebuilt as fixed modules with binary status lights, and what that would expose about noisy metrics.