The Education of Responsible Designers in a Male-oriented Society.

This paper aims to provide a disciplinary contribution concerning the role that Communication Design has and could play in Gender Studies, focusing on the university educational context. The starting point is the issue of the women representation in the media and the resulting need to promote actions aimed at media alphabetization. From this scenario the urgent need to “focus more on vocational training - of the communication designer - and on education activities as a vehicle to fight discriminations and promote gender equality” (European Parliament Resolution, April 2018 - 2017/2210(INI)) emerges. The environment in which we live and form ourselves is full with communicative artifacts (advertising, information, web, TV...) that convey and promote degrading stereotypes towards women, feeding gender inequalities. Media images act on thought, influencing the construction of individual and social biographies and consequently the way they relate to themselves and the community. In this context, the Communication Designer takes on a role of social and cultural responsibility and has the duty to act towards a socially “sustainable” communication. The media message acts in a vicious circle, it draws on and simultaneously influences social reality by orienting thoughts and behaviors of individuals. Communication Design can therefore operate on this circle through communicative actions aimed at increasing the sensitivity and awareness of the designer himself as well as of the potential user. Our contribution is based on these assumptions, focusing on the work carried on by the research group DCXCG — Communication Design for Gender Cultures — in the field of university education. Specifically, the aim is to highlight the need to intervene on design thinking starting from the training of conscious designers, documenting the group’s experimentations in the field of education. The aim of the experimentations is to provide tools for a critical reading of the communication project and contribute to the training of responsible designers, able to design and relate themselves in a society still intensely unbalanced and male-oriented. The DCXCG group is located at the intersection of Communication Design and Gender Studies and works in a multidisciplinary perspective to provide a critical view of the forms of representation of gender and develop new communication models able to act on the quality of the media message – both form and content - as well as on the modalities of distribution and consumption of the same.