Connected Innovators - Design with Data
At the beginning of this year we were one of five projects to receive funding from the Connected Innovators Programme. The pandemic had totally stalled our practice and this new funding offered us time to reflect on past work, and focus on future plans and new ways of working. We have never had time to think about our creative approach to data or how this might impact the creative direction and narrative within our projects. This has been a refreshing and much needed reinvigoration of our practice.
To get started we designed a survey to understand more about other designers creative approaches to working with data. We had 36 responses and 19 completed responses which resulted in a 53% completion rate. There were six questions, which gave us an overall sense of how respondents used data creatively within their practice, how they collected/translated data and how they articulated that use of data. Certain themes emerged through common use of language and words; such as, experience, narrative and storytelling came through strongly in a proportion of the respondents' approach to their creative use of data. These respondents were working from a more artistic perspective, and expressing meaning, impact, statement and story through their responses. Quotes give a sense of this theme; “Qualitative data is literally embedded into the fabric of my work”; “I find ways to collect data and tell the story in compelling ways which go beyond simply conveying information”... “ I look for new stories to tell and new contexts to test where data experience can be explored”; “Social commentary is used as a pieces’ narrative”.
We found ways to organise the survey data through colour stories, colour used as a way of recognising common themes and the different approaches to data the respondents were describing. This approach helped us to see patterns and to start to feel more confident about collating data, we now had a means to approach visualising data to help us to draw out important information. The survey inspired us to reconnect with MYB Textiles a lace manufacturer in Ayrshire to explore data that they keep at the mill, particularly thinking about how Covid-19 had impacted the production at the mill. We interpreted data from a weave notebook kept by Charlie, one of the specialist Scottish madras weavers. Charlie notes down all the yarn used across the madras looms and the amount of cloth woven, we had the records from early 2020 to now. The ideas were about creating a piece that would highlight the impact of Covid on heritage manufacture, visualising the intangible aspects of the textile industry.
Survey data as colour
We installed a large scale drawing (3.9 metres wide x 3 metres in height) using yarn which interpreted raw data from Charlie’s notebook. The drawing was a way of exploring how we used data and visualised it, showing a year of madras weaving at the mill, the yarn used, the amount of cloth woven across 7 looms and the impact of Covid on manufacture. We are planning on re-working this piece to allow an audience to interact with the work, through sound and projection.
Drawing of madras weaving at MYB textiles over 39 weeks from 2020 - 2021 across 7 looms, showing the downturn in manufacture, the amount of cloth woven and the colour story through yarn.