Making the Case for the Humble Temperature Blanket
This article is a short and sweet version of my thesis report. Thank you to all the crafters, activists, artists and authors I had the chance to speak with over the course of my thesis research last fall, all of whom shaped my thinking on the intersections of data visualization and craft.
A temperature blanket is the translation of weather-related numbers, often daily highs or lows, into rainbow-coloured knit or crochet stitches for a predetermined period of time, often a year. An extremely hot summer day becomes a bright red row of stitches, while a cool, rainy week is immortalized as a stripe of yellows or greens. Often, temperature blankets and similar projects are done to commemorate significant periods of time — some are given as gifts, and many are kept by the maker to forever remember the moments in time represented by the blanket. The temperature blanket becomes a vessel for the love and dedication of its maker.
These types of projects have been cropping up on Pinterest boards, blog posts and crafting forums for about the last decade or so. Some crafters see temperature blankets as an overdone trend, while others prefer projects with more predictable outcomes. And yet, the temperature blanket persists in these digital maker spaces.
As an information designer, how and why we visualize data has become of particular interest to me. For my MA thesis in Design Strategy, I decided to unite my professional passions with my personal hobbies — cross stitch, crochet and sewing being my crafts of choice. I’d been noticing the rise of temperature blankets and similar projects online, and was struck by the beautiful combination of data with fibre. Even though each project I saw often used the same kind of data (temperature highs or lows for the maker’s location), each one was wholly unique in its own right. With temperature blankets, my professional and personal interests collided in a most serendipitous fashion. I set out to uncover why this project has so many crafters in its rainbowed grasp.
My research led me on a meandering path through the worlds of the textile and fibre arts* and of data and datafication. Eventually I landed on the research field of data physicalization. In a seminal paper on the topic, the phrase is defined as “a physical artifact whose geometry or material properties encode data.”¹ So, a temperature blanket (physical artifact) encodes data (temperature) in different colours of yarn (material properties). You can literally wrap yourself in the numbers.
This got me thinking: what other kinds of numbers can be encoded in textile or fibre form? The internet certainly did not disappoint when it came to this query. I uncovered dozens of incredibly beautiful data-driven textile and fibre art projects. If you like politics, you’ll love Roopa Vasudevan’s All-American Girls project, which encodes data from the 2012 US election in cross stitch form. Maybe you’re a sports fan — don’t worry, Reddit user shmajent has got you covered with their sports scores scarf. Or perhaps you’re a new parent — you can take comfort in knowing that other parents experience long stretches of sleepless nights in their child’s first year, as represented by Seung Lee’s Sleep Blanket. If you’re concerned about climate change (and you probably should be), the Tempestry Project provides a way for knitters, crocheters and other crafters to take part in climate activism. These projects, alongside the classic temperature blanket, demonstrate how textile and fibre data physicalizations can be functional, beautiful and deeply personal objects — all based on cold, calculated and impersonal numbers.
But are these numbers as impersonal as we think they are?
Let’s take temperature as an example. There is something so inherently human about the weather. The weather impacts what we wear, how we travel, what we eat, how we feel, and where we can go. Weather is messy — and by nature, humans live messy and imperfect lives in often equally messy and imperfect environments.
To try and make sense of this mess and imperfection, we humans have created systems of problem-solving, decision making and quantification. We devise strict rules and policies to govern this messiness. We create binding contracts to navigate human relationships. We build infrastructure to predict the weather, and invent systems of measurement to evaluate it. To tidy up the human experience, we select, analyze, quantify and reduce it to numbers.
These numbers — a specifically calculated representation of the human experience† — do not carry the same messiness with them as humans do. Numbers have clout, and can influence policies and decisions. We take numbers and data at face value, and often forget about the human experience that went into creating them — even when the numbers are borne from our own bodies and actions.
Textile and fibre data physicalizations are one of the latest responses to this datafication of our world. No two projects will ever look exactly alike because no two projects will ever be made under the same set of circumstances, by the same maker, for the same purpose — whereas data and numbers are intended to be a measurement of the “average” human experience. These data-driven yet deeply personal projects humanize — or rather, re-humanize — the numbers on our screens.
There’s much that can be said here about the power structures behind data collection, curation and communication processes, and about privacy in an age where every action is tracked and monitored. For now, let us consider that the physicalization of data through craft is becoming a way to make the overwhelming amount of data in our world meaningful to us, rather than just meaningful to decision makers and corporations. Knitters, crocheters and crafters alike are turning cold, hard “facts” into beautiful objects that tell personal stories and inspire collective action.
In gaining a deeper understanding of the ‘why’ behind temperature blankets and similar data-driven fibre projects, I have come to realize how important it is to acknowledge the human elements behind data. The humble temperature blanket represents so much more than just numbers. It is a testament not only to the dedication of its maker, but also to the human experience behind the numbers that went into its creation. So keep on stitching, temperature blanket makers.§ There’s certainly more to these projects than meets the eye. Each project captures the quantified human experience in stitches full of life and love.
👋 Want to get in touch? You can find me in almost all the places. If you would like to read more about textile and fibre data physicalization, please check out my thesis or request a PDF copy. If you’ve got the time, I’ve also prepared a list of selected sources that influenced my research and thinking over the course of my thesis.
📓 Additional Notes
*A significant portion of my research into the textile and fibre arts focused on its traditional (and still persistent) association with femininity. Spinning and weaving in ancient times were seen as activities compatible with childrearing,² and embroidered samplers prepared girls and young women for their lives as wives, mothers and servants.³ This carefully constructed historical narrative of femininity has done the textile and fibre arts a huge disservice, particularly with the what is considered art and what is deemed craft. With endless possibilities for income generation, personal expression and mental relief, the textile and fibre arts can and should be done by anyone who is interested.
† I do not wish for the notion of the human experience as I write about it here to come across as generalized or trivialized. There is no singular human experience. Yes, there are shared elements among everyone — birth, death, joy, anger. But no two experiences will ever be the same. In fact, the quantification of the human experience as I continue to write about here is a generalization of the human experience. By reducing individual lived experiences to numbers, we miss out on the perspectives of people who may not be captured by our systems of quantification.
§ Not a knitter or crocheter? Fret not, fellow cross stitchers or embroiderers. Temperature cross stitches and embroideries are possible! Whether stylized as flowers or trees or simply as calendar boxes, the weather can also be captured in needle and thread. The possibilities are endless.
💻 Sources
¹Jansen, Yvonne et al. Opportunities and Challenges for Data Physicalization. Presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, United States, 2015.
²Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. Norton, 1995.
³Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. 1984. I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2017.
