A Day in Lockdown (A COVID-19 Response Comic)
"A Day in Lockdown" is a COVID-19 Response four-page
comic depicting a day in the life of a family with a child with a disability
during the first UK Lockdown in 2020.
This comic was developed between February and April
2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The comic was co-designed with a
print comic book format in mind but intended for free digital distribution as a PDF.
Co-designed and edited by Francisco de la Mora, Dr Ernesto Priego and Stuart Scott, with art and story by Francisco de la Mora, "A Day in Lockdown" is part of a series of comics resulting from autoethnographic, participatory narrative co-design methods and produced as an output of the City Interaction Lab, Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London.
"A Day in Lockdown" follows "Community Matters: Please Be Kind. (A COVID-19 Response Comic)", a comic by de la Mora and Priego released in May 2020, focusing on an individual's experience of social distancing measures in the context of visual impairment in the UK.
A motivation for these COVID-19 Response comics was the April 2020
creative brief from the United Nations, particularly addressing the “Key
Messages”, including "physical distancing" and “kindness contagion”
(United Nations 2020). The work on these
COVID-19 Response comics has been led by Dr Ernesto Priego, researcher at the
Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London.
As a comic, "A Day in Lockdown" is idiosyncratic and
subjective; it is based on the personal experience of a London family during
the first lockdown, and it does not intend to represent everyone's experiences
nor to make any generalisations. Principles of biographical and documentary
comics and autofiction were followed, and ethical guidelines were followed within
the iterative participatory design process, including reader-testing and the
incorporation of their feedback throughout the life cycle of the project.