Technology and Collective Memory 

Commemorating the Unidad Popular 

The one thousand days of Salvador Allende’s presidency, from 1970–1973, marked a period of political innovation in Chile. The changes introduced by Allende and his governing coalition, Unidad Popular, also spurred extraordinary creativity in technology and design. I caught my first glimpse of this more than twenty years ago in a footnote that briefly mentioned the Allende government’s efforts to build a computer system that transmitted information in real-time and brought together political leaders and workers.

This technology history, and others from this political moment, have sustained my interest in the Allende period ever since because they show how the innovative merger of socialism and democracy that characterized the Unidad Popular also spurred technological innovation. They show the realities of Chilean life and what those living in the country thought was possible. Moreover, these histories demonstrate how Latin American contexts can give rise to technologies and technological projects much different from those we see in the United States.

Many of the Chilean projects prioritized social justice and the well-being of the most vulnerable members of society. I view these technology stories as a way to convey the diverse approaches that people used to advance Chile’s road to socialism while also illuminating how this political moment made it possible for people to think differently.

Allende’s attempt to bring about socialist change through democratic means attracted world attention as an effort to pioneer a new political alternative at the height of the Cold War. It set in motion efforts to nationalize the most important industries in the country such as copper and coal, increase public housing, improve the standard of living for members of the poor and working classes and protect the welfare of Chilean children through state programs in public health and nutrition. Moreover, these changes would occur while respecting the results of democratic elections and preserving civil liberties such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech.

This political project set the stage for a rich moment in the history of technology. Chile’s efforts to make consumer goods more broadly available to members of the lower socioeconomic classes paralleled its policies for increasing production. From Chile’s assembly lines came the Citroën Yagán, Chile’s low-cost “automobile for the people,” and the inexpensive Antú television, which brought televised political speeches into Chilean homes for the first time. Radio and Television Industry (IRT), a company jointly owned by the Chilean government and RCA, developed plans for a low-cost record player to bring the music of Nueva Canción folk artists such as Victor Jara and Inti-Illimani into Chilean homes.

Color offset printing technologies allowed the government to produce high-quality color posters cheaply, quickly, and in large runs. Graphic designers, working under government contracts, and using offset color printing technology, began creating eye-catching posters that advertised government programs and achievements. The Larrea Office, run by the brothers Vicente and Antonio Larrea, created one of the first such posters in 1970; it read, “Chile’s Happiness Begins with Its Children.” The government distributed 20,000 copies of this poster free of charge and handed them out on street corners throughout the country. In 1971 the National Copper Corporation distributed 100,000 copies of another Larrea Office poster celebrating the nationalization of copper. Such posters helped to create a visual culture that came to define the moment and represented what the government hoped to achieve through its democratic road to socialist change.

La felicidad de Chile comienza por los niños. Design by Vicente Larrea, Antonio Larrea and Luis Albornoz, offset, 1970.

In 1971, the government created Chile’s first state-run industrial design group, known as the Industrial Design Area of the State Technology Institute. It would develop more than twenty projects to improve the quality of life of everyday Chileans, including designs for spoons to measure the rations of powdered milk that the government distributed to children and lactating mothers as part of the National Milk Plan; low-cost durable furniture for homes and schools; and agricultural machinery that would increase the yield of feed for livestock.

Harvester test. Photograph by Rodrigo Walker, 1973. Design by the INTEC Industrial Design Area.

Collectively, these projects sought to change national production from the manufacture of expensive goods for the elite to producing affordable high-quality goods that were accessible to all. The importance of production is perhaps best seen in the government’s ambitious project to develop a computer system that would help it run the expanding nationalized sector of the economy using the science of cybernetics. It included a futuristic operations room that the government built in 1972 at a site in downtown Santiago.

The Cybersyn operations room. Photograph by Gui Bonsiepe, c. 1973. Design by the INTEC Industrial Design Area.

Work on most of these projects ended abruptly on September 11, 1973, when the civil-military coup put General Augusto Pinochet in power and ushered in seventeen years of oppression and state violence. However, a few of these projects found new life during the military dictatorship. For example, the military mounted machine guns on the roofs of Citroén Yagán cars—the Chilean automobiles for the people—and used them for military patrols.

The social, political and economic possibilities opened by Chile’s short-lived democratic road to socialism created a moment of extraordinary innovation and creative diversity rooted in a shared purpose, collective action and the desire to make positive social change. Studying these technological projects reveals both the actions that constituted Chilean socialism and the possibilities this political project opened but that the civil-military coup cut short when it ended Chilean democracy.  

Technology, Memory and Commemoration

In September 2023, I co-curated the exhibition How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Socialism with the Chilean professors Hugo Palmarola and Pedro Ignacio Alonso. The exhibition opened at the Centro Cultural La Monedain Santiago, Chile, and was part of the series of events marking fifty years since the military coup. Located beneath the presidential palace, La Moneda, the Centro Cultural held special significance as an exhibition space. Fifty years earlier the military had bombed the site using Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft, leaving the presidential palace in flames. The Centro Cultural opened in 2006 after Chile returned to democracy.

The exhibition represented a collaboration between our home institutions—MIT and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile—and brought together our diverse areas of expertise, which spanned design, architecture, history of science and technology, and engineering. It built on the more than two decades of research we had conducted individually and collectively and brought different strands of our research together for the first time to tell a more comprehensive story of Chilean industrial and graphic design history during the Allende period.

The title of the exhibition, How to Design a Revolution, framed our historical approach to the material. By bringing together select objects and images from the period, we wanted to show how those working in government offices, workshops, universities and factories were trying to bring about the changes outlined in Chile’s socialist program and how they approached design as a tool for political change. These objects and images reveal the concrete actions taken by those in the past to bring about democratic socialist change and why people thought they would be meaningful. Sometimes the multiple sketches drawn for a spoon design or poster seemed to represent the political process itself. Rather than see people come to the table with ideas fully formed, we could follow their thoughts as they unfolded. We saw them grapple with how best to bring about a desired set of social and economic changes and how their approaches changed over time.

Within the exhibition we developed a series of six “how-to” statements that focused on specific ways that Chileans looked to design to address the political, social and economic challenges they faced. For example, we dedicated a wall to the theme “How to Nourish Childhood.” The wall displayed original sketches for eight different measuring spoon models for powdered milk. Also displayed were the public health posters by the Chilean graphic designers Waldo González and Mario Quiroz describing means to keep Chilean children safe from disease. Other objects included reproductions of the low-cost furniture and toys the government designed for use in Chilean kindergartens and preschools. Collectively, these objects and images tell a story about the importance of children to Chile’s socialist project and the multiple efforts that the government set in motion to improve their well-being.

Final design of spoon for measuring 5 g and 20 g of powdered milk. Photograph by Rodrigo Walker, 1973. Design by the INTEC Industrial Design Area for the National Health Service.

We dedicated another part of the exhibition space to the theme “How to Manage the Economy.” Here we built a functioning, full-scale reconstruction of the cybernetic operations room that formed part of Project Cybersyn—the system for managing the economy—which we placed in the atrium of the exhibition space. The goal of Project Cybersyn was to collect daily production data from Chile’s nationalized industries and make them available to the government for improving economic decision making. The ideals of Chilean socialism shaped the design of Project Cybersyn, most notably by including ways workers could participate in its data collection processes and creating communication channels that preserved the autonomy of individual factories within a state-run economy. While this futuristic project never made it past the prototype stage, it was arguably ahead of its time in thinking about the relationship of data, computation and communication in governance. The reconstruction of the operations room allowed us to share this futuristic vision of Chile from the 1970s with visitors while also making clear that it was no mere utopian dream. It was a concrete space that Chile built as part of a real project for managing the economy.

The exhibition would not have been possible without the support of many of the original designers who donated their time, expertise and material from their personal archives. We are especially grateful to the industrial and graphic designers Gui Bonsiepe, Pepa Foncea, Rodrigo Walker and Fernando Shultz and the industrial engineer Raúl Espejo, who donated materials from their archives and worked with us so that we could create the first faithful reproductions of their work. While the Pinochet dictatorship destroyed many of the materials pertaining to these projects, some survived. In many cases the designers had carried documents, photographs and drawings out of Chile when they left the country for their safety. For example, we were able to locate only one of the original spoons the government manufactured for measuring powdered milk. This spoon had left Chile with its designer, Fernando Shultz, when he fled Chile for Mexico. He then kept the spoon safe in his personal archive for nearly fifty years. Many of the original materials that appeared in the exhibit had similar stories of survival.

Nearly 40,000 people visited the exhibit during its run in Santiago. I overheard older visitors who remembered the Popular Unity period telling stories about the objects and images on display, including the toys that they had played with as children; the covers of books, magazines and records of the era; or the television that they had watched at home. Younger visitors flocked to the futuristic operations room and its depiction of Chile at the technological vanguard. The exhibition also resonated with many of the designers who had collaborated with us along the way. Their projects, which had been cut short and often forgotten, were now, fifty years later, receiving public recognition.

Exhibition Cómo diseñar una revolución: La vía chilena al diseño, Centro Cultural La Moneda, 2023. Photograph by Eden Medina.

Chilean graphic designer Waldo González visits the sketches he drew more than fifty years ago. Exhibition Cómo diseñar una revolución: La vía chilena al diseño, Centro Cultural La Moneda, 2023. Photograph courtesy of the Centro Cultural La Moneda.

The author giving museum visitors a tour of the Cybersyn operations room reconstruction. Photograph by Omar Faúndez.

The reconstruction of the Cybersyn operations room, viewed from above on the exhibition’s opening night. Design by the INTEC Industrial Design Area / Reconstruction by Hugo Palmarola, Eden Medina, and Pedro Ignacio Alonso. Exhibition Cómo diseñar una revolución: La vía chilena al diseño, Centro Cultural La Moneda, 2023. Photograph by Rihn Hong.

Technology and design provided a way for visitors to confront the difficult events of 1973 through a hopeful encounter with the creativity and innovation that Chilean democracy made possible and the sense of solidarity that permeated many of these efforts. While Chileans commonly associate September 11, 1973, with the repression by the dictatorship that came after, our focus on the events of the Allende period opened a space for memories tied to the optimism of that period even as they also evoked a sense of loss. Our exhibition also sat in conversation with other exhibitions then on display at the Centro Cultural; these focused on the destruction of the presidential palace and the human rights crimes that the dictatorship had committed. The histories of design presented in our exhibition offered one of several ways for visitors to learn about Chile’s abrupt and violent transition from democracy to dictatorship, a rupture whose consequences continue to inflict pain and trauma today.

About a month into the exhibition’s run, we placed a book at the entrance and invited visitors to leave their impressions. Some entries were critical of the Allende presidency, which was expected, given how different sectors of Chilean society experienced the period, including the inflation and consumer shortages that worsened as Allende’s presidency progressed. However, such comments were the exception. More common were entries that expressed enthusiasm for learning more about the Unidad Popular period. Some described the exhibition as opening cross-generational conversations.

One visitor wrote, “Thank you for remembering and recognizing the effort of the men and women who worked to build a more just and dignified homeland.” Another wrote, “The exhibition stirred contradictory emotions in me. On the one hand, pride in my activism in the Communist Youth. On the other, dismay over the Chile that never came to be. Let us continue seeking ways to move forward, always keeping our past in mind.”

One man wrote that the exhibition provoked “beautiful and painful memories of my childhood (the wooden train in the exhibition: I had one just like it).” The train also provided connection to the political context of his youth. “Thank you for keeping memory alive. Thank you for not forgetting. Thank you for taking me back to my childhood,” he wrote.

However, entries in the book also showed how the optimism and creativity of the period prompted visitors to consider Chile’s past as inspiration and hope for what might be possible in the future. “Beautiful exhibition showcasing the Chilean reality of those years,” one visitor wrote. “Here’s to a more empathetic, just, and socially conscious Chile for everyone.”