Unseen Chicago at Chicago Skydeck
A six-screen data visualization installation on the 103rd floor of Willis Tower — augmenting a live map of Chicago with animated layers of data invisible to the naked eye, giving visitors a new way to read the city they are standing above.
Unseen Chicago — six-screen data visualization installation, Skydeck Chicago, Willis Tower.
The Skydeck reopening introduced a new exhibition floor alongside the glass Ledge boxes — a space where visitors could look down at Chicago from 103 floors up, but also look into it. Unseen Chicago was designed for that second impulse: the desire to understand the city as a system, not just a skyline.
As the sole designer on the project, I researched datasets deeply rooted in Chicago's traditions and distinctive moments, then built a visual system that brought those layers to the surface — architecture, movement, culture, and discovery — within a single looping, large-format experience across six screens.
The challenge was data curation as much as data visualization: finding datasets that told genuinely interesting stories to a general public audience standing in front of a wall-scale display, with no prior context.
The Installation
The exhibit occupies a six-screen array on the 103rd floor — the same level as the Ledge. The screens display an expansive, high-resolution map of Chicago that serves as a persistent base layer. Over it, animated data visualizations cycle through over time, each revealing a different hidden dimension of the city below.
The experience is designed for passive viewing as much as active engagement. Visitors who glance at it while moving through the space encounter a different story than those who stop and read the full sequence — the loop rewards attention at multiple depths.
The six-screen array with Chicago map as base — data layers animate across the full width of the display.
Picking the Right Data to Tell Good Stories
Not all data is story-ready. The research phase was about finding datasets that were both factually rich and immediately legible to a visitor with no prior context — someone who has thirty seconds of attention and a city stretched out below them.
The criteria: data had to be distinctly Chicago (not generic urban data), visually mappable at city scale, and connected to something visitors could feel — a neighborhood they knew, a pattern they'd lived in, a fact that recontextualized something familiar. Datasets that were merely accurate but inert were discarded.
Data research phase — sourcing, evaluating, and mapping Chicago datasets across geography, culture, and infrastructure.
Three-Act Structure
The loop is organized into three narrative chapters — Building Chicago, Moving Chicago, and Discovering Chicago — each bringing a different register of the city into visibility. The arc moves from physical construction to human activity to cultural texture, building a picture of Chicago as a layered, living system rather than a static map.
Storyboard structure — Building Chicago, Moving Chicago, Discovering Chicago.
I — Building Chicago
The first chapter maps the physical construction of Chicago — the infrastructure, the architecture, the density patterns that make the city legible as a built object. Seen from 103 floors up, these layers give visitors a framework for reading what they can already see out the window.
Building Chicago — structural and infrastructural data layers animating across the city map.
II — Moving Chicago
The second chapter shifts from built form to human movement — transit lines, commute patterns, pedestrian flows, and the rhythms that animate the city across time. Chicago's grid becomes a network, and the network becomes a portrait of how people live in it.
Moving Chicago — transit and mobility data layers, animating the city as a network of human movement.
III — Discovering Chicago
The third chapter is the most culturally specific — surfacing the data that makes Chicago distinctly itself. Music venues, sports history, public art, neighborhood character. These are the layers invisible from the Ledge but essential to understanding what the city below actually is.
Discovering Chicago — cultural, historical, and neighborhood data bringing the city's identity to the surface.
Visual System
The visual system needed to work at two scales simultaneously: readable as a whole across all six screens, and legible as individual data layers when viewed up close. The palette was built around the night-time map base — dark ground, luminous data — so each layer reads as light being added to a city that is always already lit.
Full six-screen composition — the visual system in context, showing how data layers sit over the Chicago map base.
Outcome
Unseen Chicago opened as part of the permanent Skydeck experience, running as a continuous loop on the 103rd floor alongside the physical Ledge. The three-chapter narrative structure gives the installation a natural pacing that rewards visitors who linger, while each chapter remains independently legible for visitors passing through.
The project demonstrated that data visualization at public scale is primarily a curatorial problem — the design decisions that matter most happen before a single frame is drawn.
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