Quasar Institute for Advanced Design's "Women/Design" is an exhibition project dedicated to the issue of gender and focused on women's creativity and empowerment that confirms the Institute's constant attention to issues of development and social equality. The projects presented, conceived by QIAD's students and faculty as part of the three-year course in Habitat Design, are intended to promote a critical and equally lucid reflection about gender identities and studies born out of an educational and design journey for the International House of Women. The exhibition is thus presented as a dialogical and formative experiment aimed at redesigning some nodal places of the significant monumental complex for years intended for collective, inclusive and sharing purposes and as an opportunity to display unprecedented visions and design ideas inspired by the themes of women's associationism combined finally with a series of deliberately exhortative and evocative products and objects created within the Quasar Institute's Q-Lab, a state-of-the-art digital acquisition laboratory: augmented, intelligent, irreverent and pop objects characterize the entire collection, which is intended to provoke an action of active reflection on the user.

Projects description

GENEDU'
Contemporary Family Generator

GENEDU' is a family game that helps learning about the principle of gender equality in all its forms and activities, through cards that tell stories whose protagonists belong to families other than traditional ones. The Genedu's box also contains 16 anthropomorphic shapes freely inspired by Carla Accardi's paintings, the composition of which allows children to explore diversity in all its nuances.

INNER BEAUTY
Encouraging mirror made of PMMA

The mirror, made of laser-cut PMMA, takes up the well-known graphic symbol of the female gender inspired by Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty.
The sign depicts precisely a mirror, a tool mainly used to catch a glimpse of pride and outward appearance, making it symbolically suitable to represent the values that were intended to be communicated. The mirror, an object of daily routine, has encouraging phrases on its surface, exhortations to optimism, courage, and self-acceptance, written in lacquer red like
the oldest of lipsticks, a sensual tool that becomes in this case an exhortation to self-determination. Behind those phrases our image, whenever we need it, whenever, if only fleetingly, we brush it with our gaze.
Wooden bread holder that takes up the most evocative symbol of helping others, hands.

MANIERE (HANDS)
Hands speak, with hands we communicate and express our interiority. The word "hand" itself recurs in many idioms that refer to the concept of welcome and union.

MYBOOBS
Wood and polypropylene lantern for female body acceptance.
The object made within the Q-Lab intends to provocatively but also ironically address the issue related to self-acceptance. The lantern consists of a base made of four layers of laser-cut plywood assembled together. At the top, a polypropylene sheet accommodates the texture while in the center, the tealight candle is meant to evoke the theme of the hearth as a symbol of community.

Project for the design of the restaurant/cafeteria of the International House of Women that aims to answer the present questions:

How to design a space for women in which they can recognize themselves?
How to design a space that relates to associationism?
How to design a space that dialogues with feminism?

LANDSCAPE

The analysis of all the cloisters of ancient convents present in the district of Trastevere, Regina Coeli, Santa Cecilia, San Giovanni dei Genovesi, San Cosimato, in relation
also to the natural environmental context (Tiber and slopes of the Janiculum Hill) and that of the historic gardens (Palazzo Corsini, Villa Farnesina and Botanical Garden) gave rise to the project of redesigning the green spaces of the International House of Women.