Written by: Mia Cooper
One of the most lovely aspects of humanity is our ability to be creative. Art has been used as a means of communication throughout history and across cultures to share stories and convey important messages. This week, we had the privilege of speaking with Eliza Squibb, a textile designer, who focuses on creating collaborative projects that convey important healthcare information. Eliza teaches classes on design for development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s D-Lab, as well as a bio design class at the Rhode Island School of Design; courses that exemplify the power that art and design can hold in many spaces.
Though she has made contributions to all different kinds of projects in the world of art and design, we spoke specifically about her health promotion textiles, which have been implemented in health campaigns in West Africa. She describes her work as visual communication that can be worn by community health workers and patients. Eliza's projects are extensively researched and detail-oriented with the ultimate goal of providing healthcare information in a comprehensive visual format, which is adapted for audiences with low literacy or language barriers. For example, Eliza worked with young adults to create a graphic novel about growing up HIV positive and the importance of antiretroviral medication to suppress the HIV virus in the body. These projects were related to reducing social stigmatization as many public health workers understand that stigma can be a major barrier in accessing healthcare.
Our conversation centered around two design patterns she shared with us: health promotion for cervical cancer screening and the pediatric vaccination schedule. Both pieces were visually stunning, ethically sourced, and provided creative messaging about serious health needs in the settings where the projects were implemented. The first piece we discussed was a “story-telling cloth,” created the with Providence-based nonprofit GAIA Vaccine Foundation, to share important information about cervical cancer screening. Funded by a Grand Challenge Exploration grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Eliza and her team were able to create, research, and implement a cervical cancer screening campaign in Bamako, Mali using the textile pattern for health communication. The motifs in the pattern tastefully depict the HPV virus, a cervix, slogans in French, and a proverb, in the style of West African commemorative prints (Crippin et al., 2022). Eliza shared with me that text on the cloth, which translates to, “it is better to prevent than to cure,” is a proverb in the Malian language of Bambara. The concept of preventing illness rather than curing aligns closely with the idea of screening; it is better to catch an ailment early before it develops into something more serious. Since many women identified with this well-known proverb, it could be used as an educational tool and talking point for the health workers promoting screening services as well as HPV vaccination. To read more about the story-telling cloth, visit the article shared at the bottom of the page.

The second project we talked about extensively is one that Eliza and her collaborators call the “Vaccination Calendar Baby-Wrap”, a textile pattern that depicts the pediatric vaccination schedule, created with artists and artisans in Niger, West Africa. The design uses simple motifs as icons, accompanied by a legend, to depict the six vaccination appointments that happen in the first two years of an infant’s life and the timeframes between appointments. Due to high rates of illiteracy among women in Niger, the goal was to create an easily understandable visual calendar that gives mothers the agency to make important decisions for their child's health. Eliza shared that it took no more than 5 minutes for mothers to learn and understand the calendar with the help of a trained healthcare worker. Each symbol has an intentional placement and story to help notify the mother of what should be done at what time. For example, the pink hearts represent a vaccination. The heart itself, though, represents that vaccines are given with love from the caregiver to the child to protect them from illness. Intentional messaging such as this is what makes these projects so effective. The textile pattern was produced in West Africa in a style that references embroidered baby carrying cloths that mothers typically use in Niger. Sketches for the design, created by Niger-based artists, were tested in focus groups before a pilot distribution program at ten community clinics in the capital city of Niamey.

Eliza’s work represents the power of art in health and the ability to collaborate across many disciplines. The expressive artistic vision that relays important healthcare information represents an exciting path forward. Communication can look like so many different things and the ability to do it through tasteful and useful products is such an important innovation. I was so grateful to talk with Eliza and learn about her work. I encourage all readers to check out the articles linked below to explore more in-depth about the research process.

"The Storytelling Cloth for Cervical Cancer Awareness" - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366339987_A_story-telling_cloth_approach_to_motivating_cervical_cancer_screening_in_Mali
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