How much can you know about rags? You’ll be surprised!
I recently worked on a project where I designed a dashboard with data on the textile waste that is thrown away by home consumers, especially rags.
This work was done as part of my Master’s degree in Design at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, while completing the course ‘CIRTex’.
I completed this project with the guidance of Emma Margarita Erenst.
I started with general research on textile waste. I read different kinds of articles and found some interesting data. For example, 97% of consumer textile waste is actually recyclable. The average lifetime of a garment is 3–4 years, and many garments that are in good condition are thrown away even though they could be re-used as rags.
This gave me the idea to focus on rags and try to understand more in-depth what people do with rags in their homes.
I started my research by interviewing people. I got to their homes and asked questions like: What types of rags do they keep in the house? Where do they store them? How long do they replace rags? and more.
I also took pictures of rags and where they’re placed in the home. For example, whether they are placed under the sink in the kitchen, bathroom, yard, or in the trunk of the car could impact how these rags are used by homeowners.
After that, I went on to the next step: I built a questionnaire and distributed it to 42 people to get a diverse set of responses on how they use the rags. It was important for me to reach a wide variety of people from different parts of the country, with different ages and statuses.
I got a lot of interesting answers, and I realized there most people hardly give any thought to rags or how they use them. When asked, most people said that they never really sat and thought so much about rags, and didn’t give any importance to it.
The majority, 62% of people, will not turn an old garment into a rag and would rather buy a new one instead — this surprised me because I do turn clothes into rags. Most people will not use another person’s rag. 86% of people throw away the rag even though they could keep using it. The main reason they throw it away? The smell of the rag.
Based on the data I collected, I designed and built a dashboard that is called MY RAG. It addresses consumers like those I interviewed — and the goal is to show them the findings of the data.
In the next step, I’m planning the information on the dashboard to be automatically updated. My aim will be to encourage people to turn clothes into rags.
Here you can see one of the initial sketches. When thinking about visualizing the data, I considered how best to build it, what is important for me to present, and how to divide various data points and insights.
The dashboard is split into two screens. The first and main screen shows the data I collected. At the top left is an explanation of what a rag is. On the right, you can see that most people define a rag as a piece of cloth they bought. Below are insights, such as the fact that a huge majority of textiles (98%) are thrown away in our homes.
Other data reveals:
- The number of times a consumer uses a rag until they throw it away, with most using it less than ten times.
- The main reason people turn old clothing into a rag is that it can’t be donated.
- Most of the rags consumers keep in the house are disposable rags.
- The most common kind of textile people are re-using as a rag is a shirt.
- People purchase frequently rags to sweep up dust.
The second screen is a breakdown of respondents. You can see information about the people who were part of the research.
I hope this helps to understand a little bit more on how people are using rags, and maybe to think twice before throwing a good rag away!
