City Lecturer, Dr Ernesto Priego, co-authors 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.

By City Press Office (City Press Office), Published

"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. It 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.

Since the comic tells the story of a London family of Latin American background, the comic is also available in Spanish.

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 codesign methods and produced as an output of the City Interaction Lab, Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London.

Dr Priego, who led the team, has researched comics since the early 1990s. As a researcher based at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, he explores the role of comics as narrative, conceptual and speculative design tools and applies user-centred, participatory co-design methods to the creation of comics within public health or social interest domains.

608041"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.

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In the spirit of open access and open science, "A Day in Lockdown" has been licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, allowing reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creators.

The comic is available to download from City Research Online:

English - de la Mora, F., Priego, E. and Scott, S. (2021). A Day in Lockdown (A COVID-19 Response Comic) City Interaction Lab/Symbola Comics, London.

Spanish - de la Mora, F., Priego, E. and Scott, S. (2021). Un día en cuarentena (un cómic en respuesta a COVID-19) City Interaction Lab/Symbola Comics, London.

French - de la Mora, F., Priego, E. and Scott, S. (2021). Une journée de confinement (une bande dessinée en réponse au COVID-19) City Interaction Lab/Symbola Comics, London.