Author: be_DESIGN

iphiGenia Gender Design Award 2018: Call for Entries

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As of now, the international Gender Design Network/iGDN will be accepting entries for the iphiGenia Gender Design Award 2018. Entries will be accepted from all areas of design: product design, typography, orientation systems, public design, lighting design, new digital and media developments, fashion design, exhibition design, service design etc. But also innovative design and advertising campaigns as well as research projects are eligible – the only essential prerequisite is that all entries must clearly be characterised by gender-sensitive design. The award is as important for society as it is for the intelligent development of design itself. It saw its first, very successful edition in 2017, with the New-York-based company Thinx and the Mindshare Denmark agency from Copenhagen as the winners in the award’s two categories: The iphiGenia Gender Design Award Evolution is given to established or young companies, agencies or other initiatives that explicitly support the cause of gender-sensitive design and whose work unites an all-embracing, convincing approach to this issue with excellence in design and execution. The iphiGenia Gender Design Award Revolution recognises an …

Uta Brandes: “Gendered Spaces. On the Relevance of Gender in Design”, lecture, 13th June 2018, Technical University of Dortmund (Germany)

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The point is to finally acknowledge that the category of gender is also important in the context of design: every product, sign and service we encounter in everyday life, be it by necessity or by choice, will always speak to us also in a gendered way. In our culture, in all areas of our everyday life and all the time, we are shaped by projections of femininity and masculinity. Our everyday life is full of designed artefacts and spaces, of which gender is a part as an essential constitutive and reactive element. Gender clichés and preconceptions may have become more subtle and, at times, less obvious in western societies today, but they have, by no means, been overcome. Using examples from history and from design projects, my lecture will “roam” around categories such as privacy and the public realm and their specific (in)accessibility from a gender perspective: the flâneur and the passante, the phenomenon of waiting in public spaces; hotels and office desks, and, finally, the handbag as a typically female-connoted, contradictory ‘space’ between intimacy …

Uta Brandes: “Places – Spaces – Gender”, lecture, 28th March 2018, HAWK Hildesheim (Germany),

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Lecture, HAWK of Hildesheim (Germany), 28 March 2018: Places – Spaces – Gender. Undulations between the Interior and the Exterior Focusing on the different significance of a range of spaces with regard to their gender-related (in)accessibility. The talk will be about privacy and the public realm, about the city and the flâneur or the passante. Various projects will serve as examples to demonstrate how relevant the topic of gender is (also) in the context of design.

Uta Brandes: Talk at the Sautter + Lackmann bookshop, Hamburg, 21 March 2018

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“Designed and Maltreated Bodies: Gender-Enhancements by and through Design” Gendered bodies are everywhere, each individual has and owns one. Manifold factors deeply influence our bodies, social standards conflict with social reality: desirable vs. despised bodies, social constructions of beauty vs. ugliness and fit vs. untrained bodies … Hosted by the director of designxport, Dr. Babette Peters, Uta Brandes will talk about fashion(dictates), objectified models, cruel fashion designers and photographers, and sexism, also referring to the “me too”-debate.

International Conference: Beyond Change, Basel, 8-10 March, 2018

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International Conference: Beyond Change, 8th-10th March 2018, Basel, FHNW (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz) On invitation by Prof. Dr. Claudia Mareis, co-organiser of the conference Uta will be part of the session “On Gender and Design”, Friday, 9th March, 4 pm-5,30 pm: Moderated by Matylda Krzykowski, and together with Florian Conradi, Berlin University of the Arts; and Roosje Klap, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague/Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht
— they will discuss about Gender and Design. 
Expectations around femininity and masculinity are present everywhere. In this session Uta Brandes, Florian Conradi, and Roosje Klap come together for an informal conversation, with an informal seating arrangement, to discuss gender in design. In three phases, corresponding to history, power, and methods, they will elaborate on the topic, accompanied by exemplary images. How does gender influence design? Why do we find products that obviously cater to a specific gender, even sex? What are the objects of power and what role does agency play in terms of empowerment? How does digitalisation influence this? Does the democratisation of technology create a space for thinking …

“PhD Winter School”, Hong Kong PolyU, 27 February – 3 March 2018

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“PhD Winter School”, Hong Kong PolyU, 27 February – 3 March 2018: Uta Brandes has been invited to this year’s “Winter School” in Hong Kong. Here, the students and participating professors are given the opportunity to engage with scholars on their topics and research fields in a number of formats. Firstly, PhD students have to present their work to a number of respondents. Secondly, I will give a keynote lecture followed by discussions. The third format allows for smaller, seminar-based discussions between professors and students. Finally, a small publication is envisaged, to which each participant will contribute a text.

“arcademy” at Subotron, Lecture Series, Wien, 23 February 2018

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Lecture Series “arcademy” at Subotron, the hub for digital game culture at Museumsquartier Wien (Austria), 23 February 2018 Uta Brandes Body Talk: Representations of Gender Constructions in Video Games We are body, we have a body, we may own a body. And this body as well as its image can be distorted, rearranged, blurred … . This applies to both the body of flesh and blood and the virtual one. The idea of a natural body of humans is as obsolete as it is for a virtual body, an avatar or cyborg. I will position my long-term research on gender in design and its still highly stereotypical ideology of socially constructed male and female roles towards gender representations in video games. In my lecture I will transfer human gender codes to the field of virtual characters and their body designs. By way of example, I will analyse the appearance of genders in some of the most recent games.