Out of Balance – Interactive data story about income inequality in cities

by Superdot – visualizing complexity @superdot_studio

The Challenge

We set ourselves the challenge of identifying and analyzing data to shed light on global societal issues and demonstrate the potential of data visualization. To this end, the global data set on the incomes of different occupational groups seemed very useful to us. However, we had to invent a new chart type that could convey the message both interactively in an app and analogously on a poster.

Out of Balance – Interactive data story about income inequality in cities 3

The Outcome

The starting point for the development of an innovative chart type was the German term «income scissors» which is similar to the English term «income gap». The so-called scissor chart now makes income differences in cities intuitively visible. With two poster series and an interactive Data Story, the results can be compared directly.

Out of Balance – Interactive data story about income inequality in cities 5

Out of Balance – Interactive data story about income inequality in cities 6

Out of Balance – Interactive data story about income inequality in cities 7

The Impact

The first poster series was one of the winning projects in the competition «Out of Balance – Critique of the Present» by ARCH+ and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. As part of the Vienna Design Week 2020, we presented the interactive data story and a new version of the poster. These projects contribute to the discussion about wage inequality between professions in different regions of the world.