One is an information center where distributed systems can be monitored and control exercised. The other is an art project where one individual distributed an easily copied but meaningless image, a meme, upon the pre-internet world.
Obeya originated in the 90's at Toyota while building the Prius. It is considered a component of lean manufacturing and in particular the Toyota Production System. Analogies have been drawn between an obeya and the bridge of a ship, a war room and even a brain.
Obey is a street art campaign based on a design by Shepard Fairey created in 1989 while Shepard attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology". Fairey later altered the work stylistically and semantically. wikipedia 
