SEWING AS A DESIGN PRACTICE: DATA Visualizations (2021-current)
Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic my typical digital approaches to making weren’t possible because working on the computer, any longer than I had to, wasn’t viable nor desired. I turned to making analog sewn data visualizations about mothers in the paid labor force, their decline during the pandemic, costs of childcare vs. minimum wage incomes, and what mothers this impacts most. In parallel I wrote about this practice as a feminist act that challenges the technical tools, consumerism, and patriarchal systems in graphic design for my essay, On Designing with Authenticity over Perfection (published in Feminist Designer: On the Personal and the Political in Design, MIT Press, edited by Ali Place).
Workforce Decline During the Pandemic 2/20-1/21 (24 x 20 inches), statistics from a published Gallup Survey that compared the participation rates of women and men with and without children in the US Labor force during the first year of the pandemic (February 2020-January 2021) was used. This data revealed that the number of women with children who left the workforce was much greater than men with children that left the workforce, as well as men and women with no children. The resulting piece is done by hand sewing and consists of intricate patterns arranged in a bubble chart to visualize this difference by scale.
Annual Infant Care Costs compared to Full-time Minimum Wage Salary and the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) in the 10 most “unaffordable” states (13 X 11 inches), uses a form of a layered bar chart. The visualization shows the inequity of both childcare costs and the minimum wage in states where someone working full-time at minimum wage can hardly make enough to pay for one child below the age of 3 to be in daycare. This data is retrieved from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Economic Policy Institute.
Sex Education + Reproductive Rights (16 3/8” X 23” ) This hand-stitched data visualization is in response to the many restrictions put on reproductive freedoms across the US and how sex education factors in. Sex education is determined at the state-level and isn't always mandated, nor does it cover conversations about sexual consent. Data for this visualization was retrieved from SIECUS and Guttmacher Institute.
Working Mothers with Children ages 0-3 (13 X 11 inches), looks at the number of women (with children under the age of 3) working across all occupations compared to those in low-wage (minimum wage) occupations, their marital status and who falls below the poverty line. This reveals that more than half of working mothers with young children in low-wage jobs don’t have spousal support and 33% of them fall below the poverty line. The data is retrieved from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Women’s Law Center.
Restricted Reproductive Rights (17 1/2 x 23 ¼ inches) was made in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade in June 2022. Each state’s reproductive rights’ status (as of June 2022) is compared to the percentage of gender wage gap in each state. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Guttmacher Institute was used in the creation of this visualization that uses a modified form of the radar chart as the structure for the data.
Home Housework in the 1940s This machine sewn visualization communicates data from the United States 1940s census, specifically “persons not in the labor force who are primarily occupied with their own home housework” a question that was asked in the census for the first time. The visualization represents the entire population of persons 14 and older at that time, which was split evenly between males and females. Each half of the visual is dedicated to data representing males and/or females. Black printed squares represent those males in the labor force (79%) and red printed squares represent females in the labor force (26%). The plain squares represent those people that were not in the labor force. Red sewn threads indicate the percentage of females who were not in the labor force but identified as engaged in home housework (76%). And subtle, yet visual, a thin single black thread represents the males who were not in the labor force but identified as engaged in home housework (2%).