DI_OPEN: DISCOVERING COMMUNICATION TOOLS FOR YOUR ENTERPRISE

Presentation

In an information society, it is not enough to be a good designer.  One must also know how to express this fact.  Being a design professional does not imply knowing how to write effectively, and today an important part of client relations takes place on the Internet: web pages, e-mails, cover letters, dossiers…
  All too often in the design world we worry too much about a concept or an aesthetic discourse, neglecting the narrative discourse: the one that has the specific information our clients need to know about us.
  And if we are also setting up our own project/studio/company, we lack the perspective we need to communicate and offer our services.  Also, it is very important that the writings we use to present ourselves to the world reflect exactly the enterprise or business idea that we wish to convey.
  In this course we will deal with the problems that poorly organized or poorly written business communication can cause, and we will give the students tools so that their written communication can better complement their work and improve their digital reputation.
  Course objetives

- Students will learn to use writing as a tool to develop ideas. - They will learn to organize information in any kind of text: websites, newsletters, cover letters, dossiers… - They will be able to summarize their business with a paragraph, with a sentence, with a slogan. - They will find their own expressive style according to what it is they wish to communicate.  That is, there is a cause-effect relationship between a project's content and the written way it is presented.
  Program

- First steps prior to a communication project: the written word as a tool to clear up our ideas:
               What do we want to say?
               What values do we want to convey?
               Who is our audience?
               How do we want to communicate with them?
  - Communication for our businesses is a creative act.  Phases in this creative process:               - Word vomit: how to use it to extract essential information             - Rewriting.             - Text structure.             - Correcting style.
  - Finding our own style.  Creative identity through our writings:

            - Syntax
            - Rythm
            - Word choice
            - Punctuation
            - Structure
            - Synthesizing our business with a paragraph, with a sentence, with a syntagm: our value offering
            - Creative answers in our written communication.
  Course dynamics

This course is designed to be emminently practical.  We will work with the writings that students bring to class and with those dealing with the projects they have in mind: web pages, cover letters, newsletters, etc.
  The professors  will offer theoretical guidelines and will break down the work so that the students can see for themselves how a written text works.  In each class students and professors will publicly analyze several examples and work in small groups to find ways to improve them.
  Thus the participants will be able to take their experience to their own work and evaluate it to find out if they have been able to say what they want to say, which is the first step towards effective communication.   Professors

ANTONIO JESÚS LUNA |A philologist from Córdoba, since 1996 he has lived in Madrid, where he began doing editing work for publishing houses such as Alfaguara, Debate, Alianza and Lengua de Trapo.  From 1997 till 2004 he worked at Espasa Narrativa as a literary adviser and style corrector, work that he continues to do from time to time for smaller independent publishers.  Together with Marisol Oviaño he runs Proscritos La Editorial.  In the field of cultural management, since 2005 he coordinates several literary activities at Casa Encendida (Madrid).  Additionally he has presented hypermedia literature projects at the internacional poetry contest Cosmopoética.  As a professor, he teaches a course on editing text within the Master in Cultural Management at Universidad de Córdoba, and he has given writing classes for digital environment at DIMAD (Matadero-Madrid)  with Marisol Oviaño, with whom he has also founded Textolia: auditing and course in written communication for businesses.  He is currently the editor of the magazine ROOM Diseño.   MARISOL OVIAÑO | Despite having studied advertising, throughout all of her professional career she has worked closely with the written word.  She began working in the publishing world in 1984 (Akal, Espasa, Lengua de Trapo) and in 2000 she founded www.proscritos.com to offer a literary advising service to new writers.  Proscritos has allowed her the opportunity to be on the front line of literature on the Internet.  In 2007 she published Seduciendo a dios [Seducing God], by El ejército del futuro, a book that proved to be a pioneer in what is beginning to be called post-literature.  For the last two years, the Spanish Literature chair at Universidad de Córdoba, Pedro Ruíz, has chosen this book for his students to read so that they might study the influence of new technology on literature).  Her experience on the Internet has led Marisol Oviaño to the occasional class at seminars at Universidad Autónoma and in conferences at La Casa Encendida, Instituto Cervantes, and at Universidad de Córdoba.  She has also been a guest speaker in different congresses on cultural management, literature, and the Internet.  She teaches creative writing workshops, and also offers courses to businesses on how to improve their written communication, leading her to found Textolia with Antonio Jesús Luna.

Groups: 20 students max.

Geared towards: Designers and architects with small businesses or those thinking of starting their own business.