PPE + Data + Textile

Status: Ongoing

Introduction:

We are in right in the middle of a global pandemic people are now stuck in their home by fear of spearding the deadly virus, the hospitals are saturated, people are dying, and going out become almost illegal and dangerous as we need to cover our face to protect ourself and others. Everyone is watching to see if you respect the rules that gide our new life, now you cannot show your face in public without people looking at you with a judging eyes. How can one realy protect himself ? When even the hospitals are having trouble to gahter personal protective equimpent for their front line staff.

Video made by Myriam

Thus, this project aim to explore personal protective equipment while exposing the cruel data that covid generated on his destructive path with creative patherns. My part is to create engaging and interesting visuals from data.

This project is in collaboration with Miriam Griffiths.

She is currently a master student in fashion and textile at UAL, Miriam graduated from London College of Fashion in 2013 where she studied Surface Textiles and specialised in Knitwear. She aims to create innovative craft clothing that is exciting yet wearable and easy to integrate into your daily wardrobe. The craft of making clothing and textiles has always been a driving force for Miriam’s work and she takes inspiration from traditional techniques and textiles from around the world.

Miriam Griffiths Knitwear is a small-scale luxury knitwear label based in Sheffield. All the pieces are created from high quality locally sourced materials with a focus on using natural materials. All her collections are designed, knitted and finished by Miriam in her studio at Yorkshire Artspace’s Exchange Place Studios. All the knitwear she makes is hand framed using domestic and semi-industrial knitting machines and is hand finished to a high standard.

Find more here

Early Visualization:

Our early data visualization was made looking at ethnic death related to covid. The particular data was tailored to express the population death rates related to their demographic and population based in the UK.

You can find the data here

Here I explored various mean of interpreting the data while keeping in mind of the kniting process and its limitations for colors and patherns.

The first of which are very close to what a classic data graph would look like, and as I explore we get further and furhter from the conventional data visualization.

DataEthic4

DataEthic6

DataEthic3

DataEthic4

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Visualization made in P5.JS based on the ethnic death due to Covid 19. The code can be accessed here

First exploration made by Myriam

Second Visualization:

The second visual exploration we made was with the more classic data science aproach of the heatmaps. In this particular case we also changed the data set to a more relevant one. We are looking at the personal protective equipment (PPE) orders for England. The first image is representing only the total of purchase over the months and days for all the PPE. The second one, the two most purchased items gloves and masks as for the last one it is a representation of all the item, but it is not as visually engaging or informative as the total one.

Total PPE purchase over months

PPE Mask + Glove

PPE All

Total PPE purchase over months

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Heatmap mad in R of the PPE purchase in England

Miriam knited interpretation of the heatmap

Conclusion:

In conclusion Myriam and I explored the relation between data, textil and bring into light the big issue that most contry faced during the pandemic, shortage of personal protective gears, espescialy masks due to our tendency to privitisation as a direct effect of the modialization. In turn this brought about the death of many and especialy those who did not have the luxyry of working from home.