HYTP1080 Visual Communication as a Way to Improve Working Life Skills (2–3 cr)

The nature of today’s communication is overwhelmingly visual. Our communication practices are mediated visually, including photo and video creation and sharing, video chatting, and the visual language of emoticons, GIFs, and emojis. The everyday choices we make are based on what we see. Thus, also the way we present ourselves or communicate visually should be carefully considered, particularly in a working life context.

The Visual Communication course intends to strengthen the visual literacy skills of the participants and to help them navigate in the overwhelmingly visual contemporary life contexts. The skills that the students develop in this course will help them become strong visual communicators and powerful and intelligent visual consumers. Visual learning occurs via experience rather than solely through knowledge acquisition. Thus, this course is designed in a format of ongoing visual activities and collaborative feedback sessions, along with more theoretical introduction to visual culture studies, visual literacy, image interpretation, presentation of visuals and elements of visual ethics.

On completion of the course students will

• gain basic knowledge about the role of visual communication in today’s society
• improve their competency in visual literacy, that is, visual reading (image interpretation), visual writing (image creation) and visual thinking skills
• learn to use images ethically and purposefully. 

Target group:

Undergraduate or graduate students; studying for degrees in social sciences, culture studies, anthropology, psychology, law, political science, languages, communication, music, sport and health sciences, business and marketing or related fields. NB! This course is a Forthem short term mobility period, so priority for admission is given to students of Forthem-alliance partner universities.

Modes of study:

Lectures, group work, exercises during class and workshops (for 2 ECTS) and a personal project (for additional 1 ECTS).

Assessment:

Active participation and homework (for 2 ECTS) plus individual project (for additional 1 ECTS). The course is evaluated with a grading scale from 0 to 5 (0=fail, 5=excellent).