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Communication Design today plays a role of social and cultural responsibility. It represents, and at the same time shapes, the society, acting on both individual and collective biographies. An inclusive and sustainable Communication Design needs therefore to be able to take into account the multiplicity and diversity that characterize society, making itself an expression of pluralism and respect. The context in which we live and act is characterized by an enormous amount of media messages which still spread and feed, limiting and degrading gender stereotypes - both consciously or unconsciously. The urgency to act towards a fair representation - free of negative gender stereotypes - is reiterated by the resolution of the European Parliament of 17th April 2018, which highlights the duty of the media "to ensure [.] diversity of opinion and media pluralism, to promote respect for human dignity and to combat all forms of discriminations and inequality by, among other things, portraying diversified social role models [.]" furthermore it "stresses the role of the media as an agent of social change and its influence in the shaping of public opinion and calls on the Member States to promote content on gender equality in public media". Starting from this context we intend to adopt the interdisciplinary point of view of Gender Studies, focusing on the consideration about the representation of the genders and the centrality of the white man, elevated to a "unique prototype of the human species" (Melandri, 2011). The contribution therefore means to focus on the gender asymmetries conveyed by schematic visual representations, specifically the pictographic language. The objective is to highlight how artifacts and communication systems, which are universal by definition and addressed to the whole community - therefore ideally representative of the multiplicity - are strongly asymmetrical and oriented to the male. The subject of study are therefore the visual forms that are part of the pictographic language with an informative and prescriptive function, an area that has well-established origins in the history of communication design, starting from the studies of Neurath and Frutiger. This kind of visual forms are characterized by a high degree of objectivity but at the same time they unconsciously translate models that include behaviours, duties, responsibilities and expectations linked to female and male identity, the subject of social expectations, which allows us to focus our attention around those gender roles to which women and men are encouraged to conform. The observation therefore concerns the forms of schematic representation which permeate everyday life. A both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the gender asymmetries (hierarchies, roles, contexts.) will allow to highlight through which modalities pictographic languages contribute to convey negative stereotypes towards women. The proposed contribution is located in an area of communication design which is historically central but not widely investigated from the point of view of gender studies and which still results strongly unbalanced towards the male sphere. We therefore assume a gender-sensitive perspective to exercise an innovative point of view for the discipline of design (Decataldo & Ruspini, 2014), in accordance with a vision that enhances the multiplicity towards a fair and equal representation of genders in the media context.

This contribution is aimed at offering a disciplinary viewpoint on the "rules without words" for the purpose of investigating "non-linguistic" normativity from the Communication Design perspective. The intention is therefore to examine how Communication Design shapes social reality through the creation or strengthening of social, normative and tacit rules. The focus of the observation are the non-linguistic expressions, rules, that contribute to the development or maintenance of gender-based social inequalities. Specifically, the observation concerns the forms of schematic representation which permeate everyday life and have an informative and prescriptive function, characterized by a high degree of objectivity and addressed to the whole community - both men and women. The contribution inserts itself within an international framework in which the importance of gender equality is central and reaffirmed by the ONU Agenda 2030 and the Resolution of the European Parliament 2018 (2017/2210(INI)).

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.