Master's Degree Final Capstone Project

Scale of Greed is a public-facing data visualization project that uses street art as a medium to illuminate the scale of wealth inequity in the United States. Placed directly in the streets of Chicago, each vinyl sticker design translates the often incomprehensible scale of wealth inequity using visual metaphors and the built environment to connect directly with the lived realities of everyday people. Situated at the intersection of data visualization, political cartooning, and guerrilla activism, the project seeks to make abstract economic disparities tangible, visceral, and unavoidable for everyday passersby.

The structure of the series draws inspiration from many sources: W. E. B. Du Bois’ famous data plates, Charles & Ray Eames’ short film Powers of Ten, and the philosophical framework of dialectical materialism. Viewed in isolation, each of the six sticker designs has its own self-contained message. Viewed as a whole, there is a cohesive three-part narrative. The sequence starts small and zooms out through three increasingly expansive stages: the simplest comparisons of numerical magnitude, an individual’s relationship to labor and time, and the distribution of resources at the societal level.

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Rationale & Personal Connection

The awareness of and anger about economic inequity has long been part of my personal worldview. It has only intensified over the past seven years of my professional career coordinating financial assistance for abortion access in Illinois post-Roe v. Wade. In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, I witness regularly how relatively small amounts of money, often under $200, can completely alter the course of a person’s life. This experience has sharpened my awareness of the structural cruelty embedded in a system where so many people struggle for basic stability while unprecedented wealth is concentrated among a tiny elite.

The issue of wealth inequity today exists at such an extreme scale that it’s difficult for average people to comprehend: from the speed of acceleration, the governmental and media propaganda control, down to a fundamental number-sense understanding of the 1000x difference between one million and one billion. Concepts such as net worth or exponential growth often remain abstract, mediated through headlines and statistics that fail to register emotionally. This project responds to that gap by asking a central question: How can data visualization make the scale of wealth inequity physically legible and emotionally resonant? By anchoring extreme numbers to familiar objects, spaces, and experiences (i.e., time worked, money spent, buildings walked underneath), Scale of Greed reframes inequality not as a distant policy issue, but as an everyday material reality.

Context: Why Now, Why Here?

The timeliness of this project is difficult to overstate. In the tumultuous era of Trump’s second term and slashes to government programs spearheaded by the world’s richest man, political discourse is marked by contradictions and spectacles. At the exact same time, there is a growing cultural reckoning of people waking up to the realities of inequity and rejecting the idea that working people don’t deserve to be able to afford to live with dignity.

The city of Chicago provides a uniquely resonant setting for this work. Chicago has a long and storied history of labor activism and radical politics, from the Haymarket massacre that gave us the 8-hour workday, to the porter strike at the Pullman railcar company town, to the organizing efforts of figures such as Lucy Parsons, Ida B. Wells, Fred Hampton, Jane Addams, and Saul Alinsky.

That legacy continues to manifest physically in the city’s streets, where political stickers, posters, and wheatpaste layers accumulate on nearly every surface. In neighborhoods such as my beloved Logan Square, public infrastructure functions as an informal message board: an analog social network shaped by art, anonymity, and repetition. The choice of this medium for my data visualization capstone project was very purposeful. In an era of digital surveillance and censorship, analog street art offers a powerful alternative. It is accessible, anonymous, difficult to suppress, and encountered unexpectedly. The city itself becomes both canvas and metaphor, reinforcing the project’s focus on the material conditions and lived experiences of everyday people.

Audience Analysis

Because Scale of Greed exists in public spaces, it is encountered by a wide and unpredictable audience. In the early stages of planning for this project, I mapped potential viewers along two axes: how much prior knowledge they have about wealth inequity, and their receptivity to messaging on the topic. This exercise revealed four broad audience segments, ranging from highly informed activists to skeptical or firmly oppositional viewers.

The primary audience I chose to center in my design process is the “low knowledge, high receptivity” group: young adult Chicagoans in their late twenties to early thirties who work minimum-wage or service industry jobs, rent in a high-cost city, and struggle to achieve financial stability despite full-time labor. These individuals may already feel disillusioned with the economic system but lack concrete reference points for understanding the sheer scale of the fortunes that have been amassed through their collective labor and material exploitation.

In terms of data literacy, this audience likely has a basic, functional understanding of charts but rarely engage with formal data visualization day to day. This means that simple, digestible snippets of information are more intuitive to understand than anything that requires extended analysis or statistical literacy. They also typically consume information through digital and social media channels, but my purposeful choice of an analog medium subverts that expectation and confronts the viewer where they exist in the physical world.

Data Sources & Interpretation

The data sources underlying Scale of Greed are straightforward. The primary datasets include quarterly Federal Reserve data on the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1989, as well as snapshot data from Forbes’ real-time billionaire net worth tracker. Supplemental single data points were used in specific places to contextualize income levels, historical trends, and physical size comparisons.

My primary goal in this project was to visualize the sheer scale and magnitude of inequity and the numbers themselves in a way that regular people could relate to. To accomplish this, I utilized proportional comparisons and ratios using the physical environment and the concept of time. These metaphors serve as anchors that translate massive scale differences into sensory understanding.

The ratio for sticker design #3 is based on the everyday experience of spending money. We can all relate to making a very normal $10 purchase out of a very normal $2000 bank account. What would that same proportion of spending be for someone with a $1B fortune? In both examples, the highlighted portion of the waffle chart is 0.5% of the whole.

Sticker design #2 is a triptych that utilizes a physical reference point in Chicago’s built environment. Say Elon Musk’s fortune is the height of the Sears Tower (for non-Chicagoan readers: the Sears Tower was the tallest building in the world until the late 90’s and is truly staggering to behold. Also, we collectively refuse to refer to it by the new name it was given when it was purchased by billionaire investors in 2011.) In that scenario, how big would a normal person’s salary be?

Further note: as of the time of this writing in mid-December 2025, Elon Musk’s fortune has already increased to over $680B in the three weeks since finalizing this design. Everyday people continue to become more and more microscopic daily.

Sticker design #4 tackles the complex relationship between time and labor: if you make a certain amount of money in a year, how quickly is one of these oligarchs making that same amount of money, and how long would it take you to make what they do? This design in particular features an important data caveat that I faced: not making too direct of a comparison between net worth and income. The ultra-wealthy don’t earn wages in the same way that working people do; they accumulate wealth through ownership and manipulation of assets. In this example, I used one specific, documented compensation package as a proxy for income to maintain a consistent and logical framework for the 1:1 comparison.

The ratio underlying sticker design #3 is based on the everyday experience of spending money. We can all relate to making a very normal $10 purchase out of a very normal $2000 bank account. What would that same proportion of spending be for someone with a $1B fortune? In both examples, the highlighted portion of the waffle chart is 0.5% of the whole.

Narrative Structure

Organizing my various snapshots of data insights and visual metaphors into a cohesive narrative structure was a key challenge in the development of this project. I settled on a three-part structure inspired by the rule of threes principle and the zooming-out into exponential growth narrative of Charles and Ray Eames’ famous 1977 short film Powers of Ten. The six stickers are divided evenly across three conceptual stages, each of which stands alone while contributing to a broader cumulative message.

The first stage focuses on numerical magnitude. These designs address the fundamental problem that a billion is an even larger number than many people realize. The second stage shifts to the individual level, examining the relationship between money, labor, and time. These designs use proportional comparisons to show how spending and earning scale differently for an average person versus an ultra-wealthy individual. The third stage zooms out to the societal level, visualizing the distribution of wealth across the population as a whole. These designs confront viewers with the stark reality that a small number of people, enough to fit on a single city bus, control a disproportionate share of collective resources.

The philosophical framework of dialectical materialism underpins the entire project. This theory, based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, posits that people’s material conditions are the main lens through which they think about the world and interpret reality. As such, it follows that connecting ideas directly to those material conditions is an effective way to grasp attention and communicate effectively.

Design & Visual Language

Visually, Scale of Greed draws heavily from the traditions of political cartooning and pictorial statistics. It directly incorporates the clarity and accessibility of ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education) pictograms developed in 1920s Vienna by Gerd Arntz and Otto & Marie Neurath. These icons were designed with the explicit aim of communicating statistical information to broad audiences without reliance on language.

Simultaneously, the use of vintage Gilded Age political cartoons, especially the work of Thomas Nast, channel exaggerated, confrontational depictions of wealth and power. Nast’s ability to render elites as both ridiculous and threatening underscores the political potency of imagery over text. This is well-documented in his infamous conflict with the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall politician William “Boss” Tweed:

“During the fight Tweed said ‘I don’t care what they print about me, most of my constituents can’t read anyway. But stop them damn pictures!’ And even to the many thousands who could read, the facts and figures printed by the Times meant very little compared with the weekly cartoons of Nast. In these he rose to his greatest heights, expressing to the full his imaginative richness and his uncanny ability to render his victims ridiculous yet still sinister and threatening, their expressions changing from time to time, at first sneering, calculating, and defiant; later baffled, apprehensive, and defeated.”

(Murrell, 1938, p. 46)

The influence of W.E.B. Du Bois’ data plates is also especially prominent in Scale of Greed: each sticker functions as a standalone design while contributing to a larger narrative whole. All of my designs experiment with unconventional chart forms inspired by his work, and sticker #1 is a direct homage to his pioneering use of snaking bar charts to show large quantities in a single frame.

The visual system of the entire series reinforces a clear “Us vs. Them” binary. Color choices distinguish regular working people from oligarchs, with cool blues representing stability and trust, and metallic golds and alarming reds signaling wealth, danger, and excess. Typography follows a similar logic, contrasting a handwritten, marker-style font with a bold, money-centric one. All of the charts are intentionally stripped of titles, axes, and legends, relying instead on immediate visual comprehension. This is not traditional data visualization, this is data-informed street art.

Medium & Installation

I carefully considered options for the physical medium for printing and distributing my stickers. The choice of inkjet compatible vinyl turned out to be the most practical option. Stickers allow for rapid, anonymous installation and withstand Chicago’s winter conditions better than traditional paper formats. Unlike wheatpasting, they can be applied quickly without drawing attention, preserving the guerrilla nature of the work. I briefly considered using USPS 228 labels, which are a common and well-established tradition in the street art community, but I didn’t like the idea of incorporating or designing around the label text. It also didn’t feel wise to add what could theoretically be construed as "defacing government property" into this already politically controversial venture.

Impermanence is embraced as a feature rather than a flaw in Scale of Greed. I fully expect that my stickers will be torn down, painted over, or weathered away in the coming months, mirroring the transient nature of information in public spaces. This ephemerality reinforces this project’s urgency: the message must be understood in the moment it is encountered.

Impact & Call to Action

The immediate goal of Scale of Greed is not to prescribe fix-all solutions for wealth inequity, but to provoke recognition. I hope that my designs can give form to an intuition that many people already carry but have not seen quantified. Ideally, the stickers spark a pause, a moment of validation, or an “aha” realization about the sheer magnitude and unfairness of the issue.

Regardless, I did feel it was important to provide an additional touchpoint and opportunity for further education for the viewer. Each sticker includes a link to a small microsite that serves as a secondary layer of engagement: scaleofgreed.info. The site provides data sources, educational resources on economic inequity and Chicago’s radical history, as well as connections to local mutual aid networks and labor organizations. While digital expansion was intentionally limited to remain within this 16-week capstone project’s scope, the microsite offers viewers a pathway to go from recognition to action.

Conclusion

Scale of Greed demonstrates how data visualization can operate beyond screens and scrollytelling narratives dotted with traditional charts. This project is data embedded into the material fabric of a major, revolutionary, beautiful city and the everyday physical realities of its residents. By leveraging street art traditions, historically-rooted visual languages, and carefully framed data insights, it translates abstract economic disparities into experiences that are felt, not just understood. In doing so, Scale of Greed reclaims public space as a site of data-driven critique and collective reflection.

A quote that I encountered on the power of Thomas Nast’s depictions of 19th century oligarchs feels particularly resonant to conclude this summary:

“As one reviews these century-old cartoons, one might be inclined to quote the adage that history repeats itself. But Thomas Nast did not wholly agree–he qualified the maxim by saying that while history might appear to repeat itself, ‘it travels forward like a corkscrew, never returning quite to the same place.’ And how fortunate for posterity that it does move forward, each generation contributing something to what has gone before.”

(Nast, 1974, p. 136)

While Scale of Greed does draw purposeful parallels between this 21st century moment and bygone historical eras, it does not position the present as a simple repetition of the past. Like Nast’s poignant corkscrew analogy, I take comfort in the fact that as structures of exploitation adapt, so too does the language of resistance. I’m proud to contribute this capstone project into a public consciousness built collectively across generations and carried forward through new forms of shared understanding.

Project References

Battle-Baptiste, W., & Rusert, B. (Eds.). (2018). W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Princeton Architectural Press.

Dewey, D. (2007). The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons. New York University Press.

Eames, C., & Eames, R. (Directors). (1977). Powers of Ten [Film]. Pyramid Films; Eames Office.

Encyclopedia of Marxism. Dialectical Materialism. https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm

Forbes. Real Time Billionaires List - the World’s Richest People. (Updates daily, accessed Nov. 21, 2025). https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

Gerd Arntz Web Archive. Isotypes: People. https://gerdarntz.org/isotype/people.html

Hess, S., & Northrop, S. (2017). American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity, 1754-2010. Transaction Publishers.

Murrell, W. (1938). A History of American Graphic Humor (1865-1938) (Vol. 2). The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Nast, T. (1974). Thomas Nast: Cartoons and Illustrations. Dover Publications.

US Federal Reserve System. Table: Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989. (Updated Sept. 19, 2025). https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/

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