PAD. Pages on Arts and Design

14-39

Authors: Francesco E. Guida

Great histories of design and graphic design, both in Italy and internationally, reserve a secondary or minor role for women. Referring in particular to the so-called golden age of Italian graphic design – between the 1950s and the early 1970s – very few female figures have emerged. However, through accurate research on primary sources and original documents, it is possible to identify remarkable profiles, especially in the case of women practising independently or with their husbands, managing their businesses while playing the expected social roles. More than just a list of names and artworks, the paper aims to demonstrate how women designers de facto broke the stereotypes of a male-dominated working field such as graphic and advertising design in post-WWII Italy. Another purpose is to underline how thoughtful use of sources and research methods may lead to a more inclusive rewriting of design history, mentioning less known figures who have full rights to be considered pioneers and role models.

59-87

Authors: M. Àngels Fortea

A research project named Amb mirada de dissenyadora gràfica (From a Female Designer’s Perspective) was developed in 2019. Its aim was to fight for the recognition of the role of female designers in the graphic design sector. Its main objective was to recognize the work developed by the first generation of professional female graphic designers in Catalonia (Spain). This first important female professional group emerged from the first promotions of the design schools in Barcelona, such as Elisava and EINA. These women were born between the 1940s and 1950s, during the Franco dictatorship. As a result, at the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s, the first generation of female graphic designers in Catalonia accessed the professional world. Among them were figures such as Toni Miserachs, Pilar Villuendas, Mercedes Azúa, Tere Moral, Carme Vives, Tere Martínez, Ana Zelich, Mont Marsá, Xeixa Rosa and Pati Núñez. The current paper focuses on this project. Therefore, it’s a research on gender issues, deploying a historiographic methodology combining a literature review with firsthand accounts and oral sources, mainly interviews to some of the most relevant female designers.

110-144

Authors: Chella Quint

From the pun Ad-ventures to the choice of glossy covers over a more DIY feel, Chella Quint’s Adventures in Menstruating zine pastiches the commercial, skewering menstrual product advertising messages and exposing recurring themes of secrecy, whispering, and “Leakage Horror”. Chris Bobel notes in New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation that most menstrual zinesters “eschew the glitz and gloss of corporate mass-produced material, generating instead a homespun and intimate look”, but Adventures in Menstruating emulates the corporate: each cover reimagines past publications where periods were usually absent: comic books, pulp novels, fashion magazines, science journals, war propaganda...This memoir-style case study uses autoethnography and humorously shares the rationale behind Adventures in Menstruating and how the project expanded from zines and craftivism into transmedia companion pieces, going from Ladyfest festivals to Maker Faires to mainstream galleries, seeding menstrual activism ideas within other artists. Zines provide immediacy and agency, underpinning projects that struggle to gain mainstream acceptance through established publishers or galleries. The author credits her community of helpers and tracks the opportunities the work created, showing how zinesters can use their art as activism, and create routes for an artist on the periphery to succeed within the establishment.

170-191

Authors: Valeria Bucchetti, Francesca Casnati

As far as Design is concerned, while the presence of women in the applied arts is historically consistent, the role of women in the technological dimension is still underestimated and their presence still scarce. According to a report about gender segregation published in 2018 by EIGE “in all EU Member States men dominate specific fields, such as engineering and technology”, among the elements that contribute to fuel the gap EIGE highlights “stereotypes, social norms and cultural practices” (Reingarda, 2015) in a culture which is still oriented towards male. From the communication design perspective, the issue mainly concerns the representation of women in the media and the repercussions it has in reinforcing gender stereotypes. This paper aims to provide a contribution regarding the responses that communication design can offer to fight gender inequalities in the area of technologies. At the centre of the reflection is the work of research group DCxCG (Communication Design for Gender Cultures, Politecnico di Milano) in the fields of research and teaching. The contribution will focus on the projects developed by some students in response to the stereotyped representation of women in technologies. The projects represent educational experimentations aimed at strengthening the critical instrumentation of young designers and support reflections around new communication models.

215-230

Authors: Cinzia Ferrara, Francesco E. Guida

On the 8th of November, 2019, the fourth edition of the Aiap Women in Design Award Ceremony took place in Florence at the Tepidarium del Roster’s prestigious space. It has been an important occasion to verify how such kind of initiative has grown over time. An initiative with a recent but already long history and deep roots.

15-40

Authors: Marinella Ferrara, Shujun Ban

This article proposes an analysis of the relationship between women's creative practices in the context of Western world design history. The study, based on a review of the literature, highlights the evolution of the role of women in design, considering the relationship with technology. The result is an excursus of the women maker culture growing trough design from the 18th century up to the current times. During this path, despite the social constraints deeply affecting their life and work, women acquired skill and ability for the gradual achievement of a new individualism, and modernity of behavior for women. The changing role of women making culture was more incisive in the first development of consumption in the 19th century to the consumer society and the breakdown of gender barriers as a very recent history. Due to history, which has profoundly shaped the behavior of women, to date, they tend to have an artistic approach to technology. Current times are characterized by a series of positive processes and actions that reveal social radical change and the emerging of the gender sensitive design approach to pursue.

65-83

Authors: Shujun Ban, Marinella Ferrara

There is a vast body of research exploring the roles women can contribute to design creation and crafting. In the past, historical studies have paid attention to the role of women in the applied and decorative arts, more than the role of women in design and technologies, giving men a more significant role in the manufacturing technological dimension. In recent years, the consumers, as well as the designers’ interest in handcrafting has grown in popularity in Europe, USA, and finally also in Asia, for many different reasons worldwide showing a rich phenomenology. Craft exhibitions, fairs, shows, and web platforms (like Etsy.com) have been making echo to the century Arts and Crafts movement. This new craft movement, characterized by a growing community of young women, has also been seen as a political phenomenon with some aspects related to a third wave feminist do-ityourself. Beyond the political aspects, women crafting has been acquired more and more considerable cultural, social, and commercial values. In this article, we present a systematic analysis of the rich phenomenology of contemporary women crafting with the support of available evidence-based literature concerning the role of women in today’s and future design and production. We organize our findings into clusters describing the key roles that women play in the design creation and crafting. We also put light in the future design connecting women thinking and craft sensibility to new technologies (like 3D or 4D printing ).

110-145

Authors: Anna Mazzanti

This paper aims to focusing on the protodesigner Rosa Menni Giolli and her passion for batik. She is chosen as an example of emancipation and female vitality among several Italian “thread designers” (Papini, 1923) during the third and fourth decade of the twentieth century. She also exemplifies the effects of fascination for Middle and Far East in Italy during the time among the two world wars (’20 and ’30). On the trade, exhibitions and Mediterranean exchanges were easy to find stimuli for Italian textiles in renewing decorative forms, patters, and special makings influenced by distant cultures. Often these external inspirations depend from nationals’ political cultures and colonial exchanges as well from the need of defense artisanal processes against the increasing predominance of industrial ones. In the batik method Rosa Menni found an old Oriental technique that gave her the opportunity to renew her repertoire by combining her artistic inclination with craft, her love for woodcut and precious material such as silk, the experimentation with patters such as colors. She had a large artistic background that gave her strong stimuli: the oriental ones in a different way than they did for artists and designers during Art Nouveau period, for her they became a grammatical repertory for a new process of “stylization by synthesis” (Papini, 1923) that characterized 20s Italian style from art to design. The case of Rosa Menni is also and example for mixing artistic and crafts technicians and a woman of early emancipation. She successfully opened in 1921 her enterprise named Le Stoffe della Rosa and was the head of her-made laboratory which employed several workers.

173-195

Authors: Virginia Marano

Gertrud Goldschmidt (commonly known as Gego) and Ruth Vollmer (née Landschoff) were two Jewish women artists that migrated from Germany to America, due to the advent of Nazism. To contribute to their critical reconfiguration, this article explores their important role as women and refugee artists in representing the bridge between modernism and postmodernism in the context of sculpture and decorative arts. Indeed, combining craftmanship and a fascination with mathematical theories revealed through the drawing’s complexity, the shape’s definition and the value of material, they reinvented the artistic tradition within design approaches. Incorporating aspects of kinetic art, Gego made three-dimensional constructions with which she attempted to challenge the conventions associated with static artworks. Vollmer experimented with wire, steel, and copper mesh to create figural forms that derive from complex constructions of mathematical theories. Even though Gego and Vollmer had no direct impact on one another, they did share the vital New York and they were both influenced by a European avant-garde heritage of Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism. This article seeks to give a new voice to these pioneering women’s artistic discourses, that were extremely inventive in the creation of an experimental design minimalism and a mathematical formalism.

215-239

Authors: Alfonso Morone, Susanna Parlato

The field of ceramic is always throbbing with experimentations of design planning, artistic expressions and handcrafts. Clara Garesio has been capable of expressing herself in all these variations as well as being active in the area of education throughout her career. Born in Turin in 1938, she studied at the “G. Ballardini” State School of Ceramic Art of Faenza, which was a cultural melting pot in the 50s and the 60s. She moved to Naples in 1962 and became part of a cycle of teachers in charge of initiating the G. Caselli State Vocational School for the industry and craftsmanship of ceramic, an institution that advocated the revival of traditional high-level craftsmanship. Naples offered her the opportunity to deal with the old tradition of porcelain crafts from Capodimonte, thus leading to creations that revived and innovated the traditional iconographic heritage. Her production ranged from artistically expressive objects, intended for architecture and public areas, whilst being also committed in designing tile modules, ornamental elements, and crockery shapes. A revisitation of the artist's life will enable us to contextualize her work in the Neapolitan setting and compare it with other design experiences intertwined with the fields of ceramic and craftsmanship.

259-282

Authors: Debora Giorgi, Tiziana Menegazzo

Ezio Manzini defines the project as the human capacity that allows us to read the state of things, recognize problems and opportunities, to imagine how things could be and what new meanings could be created, but above to realize what we imagined. The project, therefore, understood as transformative capacity of reality, necessarily implies to go out of the so-called comfort zone, to give, with a creative and unusual wave, a change. In the Things of Others project, led by an interdisciplinary team of the Architecture Department of the University of Florence, “things” have become the pretext for 40 refugees, to tell a part of their history and their life in their countries of origin. In the Odissee Fiorite format, through the mutual meeting and photography of three everyday objects that express experiences of life and cultures, related to the past, present and future, the artist and visual anthropologist Tiziana Menegazzo highlights the ability of women to do home wherever they are and wherever they come, regardless of their personal odysseys. How they manage, starting from the objects of daily life, to transform their memory into a future project, to be carried out in the care of every day, nourished by hope and tenacity.

306-328

Authors: Marianne McAra, Lynn-Sayers McHattie

The authors present a studio-based approach to inspiring interdisciplinary innovation with young craft artisans in Malaysia drawing on Crafting Futures, a project delivered in partnership between the British Council and The Glasgow School of Art. The Malaysian craft context currently faces a range of challenges that have led to a precarity in communities where craft has historically been a key mode of economic production and youth migration, particularly young women, from villages to urban centres. In response to this, Crafting Futures is predicated on the economic empowerment of young women in South East Asia through fostering innovation and design-led skills for female artisans. A Design Innovation pop-up studio programme was co-designed with Malaysian-based craft experts, and delivered to young craft students studying at the Insitut Kraf Negara, a specialist craft school in Rawang, Kuala Lumpur. Studio-based pedagogy underpinned the programme, with a focus on nurturing creative capacity-building towards cultivating a collective community of practice centred on Design Innovation approaches. The authors share insights surrounding the co-design process of programme development and delivery, where themes around gender, neo-colonialism and cross-cultural collaboration emerged. The authors conclude by discussing the value and impact of participation for the students, and set out directions for future regionally-focused research in the Malaysian craft context.

354-366

Authors: Debora Giorgi

Through a long interview with Brigitte Perkins, a French textile designer who has worked in Morocco for 25 years, we want to present not only the story of a female designer, but also a common story of women through the Moroccan traditional arts of weaving and embroidery, imbued with a very strong symbolic dimension, where the weaving of fabrics, carpets and embroidery are deeply inscribed in Moroccan culture, with economic, social & cultural implications. For many women, these traditional arts allow them financial autonomy, as well as a strong social bond. Between them, they weave relationships, exchanges of knowledge... These arts, transmitted from mother to daughter, through which regional and family traditions are perpetuated, are usually the representation of the deep cultural expression of a feminine world, too often set aside or ignored. Brigitte Perkins comes from the Parisian Fashion scene. In 1995, she founded the Atelier "Tadert Titbirine" in an old caravanserai in the medina of Marrakech, offering and revisiting the old tradition of weaving, with men, and then spinning and embroidery, with women, developing a production of excellence and innovative high-end. The particular character of Brigitte’s project does not only reside in the conception of fabrics and products of remarkable refinement and quality, but above all in the methodologies that she established both for weaving and embroidery, which allow this level of excellence. Convinced that the aim of tradition is not to reinvent the invention itself indefinitely, but to preserve what has been transmitted, Brigitte, by modernizing traditional techniques, has indeed succeeded in perpetuating this knowledge and in restoring the value of a living testimony to a millennial tradition that defies time by mixing the dreams of yesterday and tomorrow.

377-389

Authors: Marinella Ferrara, Shujun Ban

Nicole Hone is a young designer who completed her master's degree in Design Innovation with professor Ross Stevens as the supervisor, at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 2018. Her master thesis is focused on the design of organic performance and the choreographed movement with emerging technologies. Her project Hydrophytes shows the feminine perspective on digital fabrication for designing alive physical objects inspired by research into the biology and synthetic biology to imagine solutions to the climate change problems of the ocean and marine species. Her futuristic creatures are made of multi-material 3D/4D printing and create immersive physical-based experiences through the video recording of their movements. The futuristic function of Hydrophytes encourages thought about the health of our future climate and the role of design in connecting man and nature. During the early stages of his project, experimenting with multi-materials 3D printing, Nicole found that the materials perform smoother and more organically in water as fragile parts are better supported. Having known that there were plans to redesign the National Aquarium of New Zealand, Nicole proposed to have a future-focused exhibition with moving aquatic creatures models that visitors could interact with. This idea, combined with her personal be fascinated with nature, lead to the concept of the futuristic aquatic plants, that include arrow pods, feather nurses, nomadic cleaners, haven flowers. Nicole chose to use PolyJet technology as it is excellent for printing small objects with fragile parts and complex organic forms with internal structures. We interviewed Nicole with questions focusing on her project and women's sensibilities in design and technology.