Visual Design & Gender – norm-creative visual language

Liv-Jenny Sandberg, doctoral student in design, bases her research on the exploration of the visual language and how it communicates and shapes us in our daily lives. By applying norm-critical methods, design thinking processes and artistic research, she wants to explain, show and offer visual changes in the field of visual design.

The design language is often exclusive in different ways and is based on norms about how different bodies and designed objects should look, behave and be presented in order to have value in society. Liv-Jenny Sandberg's research sheds light on the implicit messages in visual communication with the main focus on how men in different professions and cultures are portrayed in pictures. By showing and explaining how masculinity is presented visually in contrast to its real living conditions in a certain area, she aspires to use gender studies to reduce the dichotomy between different genders and thereby create a more inclusive visual world. The dissertation also explores different expressions and techniques as well as their value in visual design. Can you, for example, embroider or hand-draw a masculine advertising campaign without losing credibility or are our norms so strong that we only accept masculinity as something hard, emotionless and technically presented in color tones such as gray, black and white?

The dissertation will be based on three equally large pieces of cake - gender science, design research and artistic research - which challenge, complement but also explain each other. By increasing our knowledge and understanding of visual design and visual language, we have the chance to create a better expanded, more pluralistic and accepting world of images where different emotions, bodies and designed objects are represented. Artistic research offers unique opportunities to visually explain, offer solutions and show alternatives to what we are used to today. The work also encourages more active thinking about who can be a designer and thus be involved in writing the visual language that affects us every day.