Women's Role Within Design:
'While most design history and criticism claims to be non-ideological and value-neutral, it is in fact that design has been controlled and produced by men.' - Michael Rock and Susan Sellers, 'This is Not a Cigar', p.45.
'There is a danger that female designers are no longer integrated into an overall picture of design history but rather separated out and glorified as individual, special cases.'
'It is imperative that any analysis of graphic design should endeavor to develop a clearer understanding of communication and social significance.' pg 150
'A new canon of graphic design history must make history accountable not
only in contributions drawn from the mainstream but also those which
have traditionally fallen outside of convention.' This could be relevant
if I decide to go down the route of celebrating past, forgotten
feminists in my practical work. pg 164 - more development of this.
Common Techniques Employed by Feminists Within Design:
'Private experience could be revealed through art [design] in order to influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes' Suzanne Lacey 'The Name of the Game' pg 65. 1970s feminists' view the 'personal is political'.
'Graphic communication represents a chance to develop a powerful voice without having to speak up in public.' Veronique Vienne 'Designers and Visibility' pg 35 Feminists share an understanding and a concern of their audience.
'Graphic design is a collaborative process that uses multifarious juxtapositions of images and texts to address, persuade, and inform its target audience, and depends upon an understanding of cultural codes and visual languages.' pg 151
Feminist theory seeks to understand 'patriarchy and the construction of the feminine.' - Buckley 'Made in Patriarchy', p253
De Bretteville's designs for Everywoman, an American feminist newspaper, involved integrating her interest in feminism into a design which visually created a structure encouraging 'participating, non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian relationships' 'Some Aspects of Design' pg 5 Her work assumes the framework that 'community assumes a central role in the communication process'
Lucy Lippard has written that women in the arts have always been interested in 'expressing oneself as a member of a larger unity, or community, so that in speaking for oneself one is also speaking for those who cannot speak' 'The Pink Glass Swan' p178 - women share a cultural understanding of what it means to be a women, so they may find a common voice through design. Could discuss WD+RU (Women's Design and Research Unit)
'The graphic designer must engage the audience through work and, at the same time, actively involve the reader in the construction of the intended message. The designer must be 'responsive' and willing to explore avenues of discourse through visual images.' pg 160
'The message should be provocative, setting up an argument within the piece itself. The ensuing discussion between the client/designer/audience generates the message.' pg 162 In order to start a discussion, designers need to recognise the needs of the viewer and their particular interests. The design critic 'Richard Buchanan suggests if this approach is adopted, designers 'would no longer be viewed as individuals who decorate messages, but as communicators who seek to discover arguments by means of a new synthesis of images and words.' 'The Ideas of Design' pg 10
'Female designers must take an approach that rejects the notion of addressing a homogeneous audience in favour of addressing the individual.' pg 162. No longer using preconceived ideas of what an audience is and avoiding sexual stereotyping. Feminists attempt to break away from images which 'focus on the way men are often represented as modern, rational, cultured subjects within the context of modernity and women as traditional, irrational, "natural" objects.' (Adkins in Jackson and Jones, Contemporary Feminist Theories, pg 37)
WD+RU created a typeface called 'Pussy Galore' in 1995, which questioned conventional stereotypes and was created as a form of 'propaganda'. ''Pussy Galore' played with the notion of accessibility and used the immediacy of the communication form in its development of commonly used words and isotype forms such as the male and female figures on toilet signs.' They made it interactive which is something feminists particularly use to convey a message. (the purpose of the typeface is to seem ordinary but when paired with certain words/imagery it seems like a female typeface, thus gendering something meaninglessly - more research needed.) pg 162
'The goal of feminism is to change the character of art [design]' Lucy Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan, pg 172. Triggs suggests that graphic design has the greatest potential to create change because of its access to 'highly visible communication networks.' pg 164
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