Communication Design for Gender Cultures: A Research and a Design Project for Concrete Actions in the Places of Education.

Abstract

The paper addresses, from the perspective of Communication Design, the issue of the representation of women through the media; in particular it concerns the value of Communication Design research in the promotion of a critical media education (Bellino, 2010) among younger generations. By means of a structured "research through design", the discipline faces the design of new tools (analogical/digital) and new communicative models that can be easily transferable, sustainable and repeatable in educational contexts. According to this perspective Communication Design plays the role of facilitator in the process of visual experience. It's common opinion that in our everyday life we encounter images that describe female figure starting from degrading and stereotypical models: women are depicted in a quite different way from men because the image of the woman is designed to flatter the ideal male spectator (Berger, 1972). We think that a new visual imagery of feminine, new communicative models (beyond aesthetic criteria or sexism) can be diffused and adopted in our society, starting from concrete actions in the places of education. For this purpose, communication design operates from a multidisciplinary perspective (closely related to humanities), for designing dedicated tools, new formats, new artefacts that are able to change the ways of seeing, consuming, distributing images. This could be a starting point to generate positive actions, lifelong learning and active encouragement in our society. This paper presents a structured research that includes experimental activities by the research group "dcxcg" (Communication Design for Gender Cultures) of Politecnico di Milano, Design Department. The group works with the goal to offer a critical view of the forms of representation of genders (female, male…), but also to support, through experimental teaching, the proposal of new models of communication and new opportunities to raise awareness in everyday life (private and public). The goal of experimental teaching consists in the design and in the sharing of a range of communication aids (re-media toolkit), for approaching images: critical tools for analysis, for the deconstruction of stereotypes, for the synthesis of the experience and active participation in the classroom. The aim is the integration of a gender perspective in everyday life and the shared construction of new hypotheses of intervention in the social context.