Gender equality in focus at Tbilisi Design Festival

“Design has a unique power. It makes ideas visible and accessible, so it often has a much stronger impact on the audience. Accordingly, its importance in bringing forward topics such as gender equality is significant. The creative industry as a whole helps us remind people of the challenges related to this issue and empower them.” This assessment of 29-year-old graphic designer Meri Chikadze well reflects the role that design and the creative sphere in general play in actualizing gender equality and women’s rights, in delivering valuable messages to a wide audience.

UN Women cooperates with the creative industry in Georgia in partnership with the Ad Black Sea International Festival of Creativity and every year tries to diversify this direction. One of the new initiatives of cooperation was the Tbilisi Design Festival held on 16 May, during which UN Women hosted the workshop ‘Creative Resistance Lab: Symbols for Equal Futures’. Meri Chikadze was one of the participants of this event.

The meeting was moderated by Polish art director and graphic designer Martyna Wędzicka-Obuchowicz. Martyna is known for her innovative approaches to visual identity and poster design. In addition, she actively supports the increase of women’s representation in the field of design and is the first female graphic designer from Poland to be a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). Martyna’s outstanding projects ‘ME MYSELF & TOUCH’ and ‘Design Like a Girl!’ call on designers to fight stereotypes, support equal pay and promote gender equality.

Martyna kicked off the workshop in Tbilisi with an inspiring speech and talked about how graphic design can unite people around the idea of creating a fair and equal future. In the next part of the event, the participants created logos around various topics on gender equality under her mentorship.

“When the author tells you about the works directly, you look deeper into the processes, to get information about the technical and emotional part of the project or the results,” Meri Chikadze observed after the meeting. “This part of the workshop turned out to be the most inspiring. Martyna Wędzicka’s formula of how to analyse the problem - step by step, uniting the points of contact and conveying it in a relevant way in the design - turned out to be invaluable.”

The Tbilisi Design Festival, held for the second consecutive year, is another example that the partnership between UN Women and the creative industry will continue. The collaboration is part of the UN Women Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia regional programme “Women’s Increased Leadership for Resilient and Peaceful Societies”, funded by the Danish Government.