This week I have been thinking lots about plastic, Edward Tufte, Data Humanism and data(context)!
We photographed the first 30 pieces of plastic* that we touched in a day. We then recorded dates, times and locations to formulate a dataset.
I couldn’t ignore how integrated plastic was in my routines, and became surprised when something was not plastic!
*For the data collection I decided to focus on what ‘felt’ like plastic rather than check extensively if the materials around me included plastic.
When collecting data, I became interested in the variance of interacting with plastic in personal space compared to public space. For example the plastic architecture on the bus that I needed to touch.
We then worked in groups to collate our images and explore how we could make groupings of our data.
We considered Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher’s photographic work on Typologies, and how we show something new about our photographs through our presentation.
We decided to group our photographs by time with each line representing an hour on our timeline, and the photographs organised by minutes.
We all started the collection of our data on different days of the week at times. To retain these individual narratives in the overall structure/narrative, we added annotations to indicate the individual start and endpoints of each person. We also annotated outside plastic usage to further highlight the differences we found.
As a result, we had a visual outcome that included all of the plastic we had touched and from this, we could find patterns of comparison for busy times, clashes of routines and similarities in what plastic we use.
Presenting the photographs in this way allows for further exploration, and the opportunity to formulate more data sets, ie. how much is single-use plastic.
We shared our findings and presentations as a class. I enjoyed learning from the different groupings that had been chosen and how they inform different narratives about the plastic we touched.
