Family Portrait
Visual Atlas of Households Census
How have family compositions been changed over time?
How different can families be in many ways?
Census data can be a resource not just used by statisticians, demographers but also by designers whose work enables public access to the unexpected or unaware aspects to help the public understand themselves.
This project looks at a few variations of census data like race, age, gender, etc for people living in Boston since 1860. The data visualizations below show different types of families in Boston. By showing visual representations about family, these images reveal how people connect and also indicate less common family types that many people may not have been aware of before.
Design
The visualization intends to classify individuals within households based on the census question about the individual's relationship to the householder. Over the years, most households were considered as one-family households. For those multi-family households, the census data also has indicator to identify individuals living as a family within a household.
This project explores different visual languages to represent individuals and internal relationships within the family. Through abstract visual representations, contextualizing data brings these representations back to the actual families.
The idea of presenting visualizations within photo frames not only reminisces audiences' personal experiences universally but also makes them feel the intimacy about family imaginations. The family portrait project provides a place for people to take comfort in the fact that their family is not alone.
How to read
Diverse Family Compositions
A couple with three children. 1860
A couple with a son and mother. 1880
A woman with a daughter, a sister and father. 1900
A woman with three children. 1920
A couple with two children and father-in-law. 1920
A couple with a daughter and a sister. 1940
A woman with a daughter and two grandsons. 1940
A woman with a daughter-in-law and grandson. 1960
A woman with a sister. 1980
A woman with a son and a sister. 1980
A woman with two sons. 2000
A man with mother. 2017
Family with Partner
The partner category has been changed considerably in meaning in census over the years. Since 1990, the ACS (American Community Survey) has offered 'Unmarried partner' as a subcategory which intends to distinguish those with a "close personal relationship" with the householder.
According to the Census Bureau's policy, the "spouse" and the householder must be opposite genders. Before 1990, the 'partner/friend/roommate' was a relatively vague category, which referred to non-relatives who live in the household.
A man with a female partner. 1990
A man with a female partner and sister. 1990
A man with a female partner, two children and mother. 2000
A man with a male partner. 2000
A woman with a female partner and a son. 2010
A man with a male partner. 2010
A woman with a female partner and a daughter. 2017
A woman with a female partner, a son and a sister. 2017
A woman with a male partner and parents. 2017
The Data
The data comes from IPUMS which includes U.S. Census and American Community Survey (ACS) microdata from 1850 to the present. The current data of this project, which covers individuals in Boston with demographic information (age, race, sex, and relationship to the head of household, etc).