My suspicion was that lower income families are paying a huge percent of their income toward housing, the issue is known as the poverty trap.
I also wanted to show that not only are lesser incomes spending a high percentage (on average) of their income on shelter, but that there are a lot more people in those lower income brackets... median household income in Oregon ( 2006) was around $46,000 / year, which means that half of Oregonians earned less than that amount, while the top range of income for my study was over 200k.. an income that some still consider 'middle class' though it represents only 1.5% of the population at the high end of the range.
The first challenge was sorting through the 56,000 records of data that I had. A lot of time was spent waiting for the computer to catch up to what i had asked it to do. Huge data set for a little macbook to try to crunch! Eventually, I arranged each income grouping ( separated into 15k ranges) into a scatterplot with income on the y axis and percentage spent on the x axis. is a
This is an image of the 60k - 75k income graph
Now the design issues began. My initial idea was to layer each of the scatterplots, using color contrast to show the larger numbers of people in the lower income brackets, and eventually make something that would be interesting to look at, and also convey the huge numbers of Oregonians spending far more than the 'traditional wisdom' of 1/3 of their income on shelter.
Quite pretty, but it doesn't really convey the information. I banged my head on how to make this more effective for quite awhile. The idea I came up with was to print each individual layer onto a transparent sheet of plastic, and separate them so they could be viewed either individually or as a single image, with each layer labeled with its income and percentage info.
For web viewing purposes, here is a version of that concept, thrown together when I found out we weren't having an in person final, so bringing in my tactile object wasn't an option and it didn't photograph well)
Very interesting, but now I decided to go back to the drawing board and create a single image that used my data, but in a way that would clearly and immediately show the issue.
The poster design was full of its own challenges. After spending so long inside the huge mass of information, distilling everything down into simpler and simpler visual concepts was challenging for me. Lot of people tried to say 'bar graph, Jana", but it wasn't until I heard it from my dad that I actually listened.
Here it what came out of the process:
