Visual Story Telling. The Queneau’s “Exercices de Style” as a Visual Language Learning Tool

Letizia Bollini

doi:10.3390/proceedings1090931

Abstract

The paper discusses the importance and role of visual story telling skills in the field of non-designers education as an effective ideation and expressive medium. It presents the process and results of an experimental design workshop held as a warm up activity inside the Visual Design and Visual Communication and Interface Design classes at University of Milano-Bicocca since 2002. The Exercises de Style written by Queneau are the field of exploration of the intertextual translation from text to graphical representation using principles and rules of the visual language.

Highlights

Visual story telling has become one of the most important strategies and tool in the field of communication
In partnership with the DiSCO-Computer Science Department
The role of drawing and other representation technique is an issue to be further investigated. It is the previous knowledge of visual language rules borrowed both from the rhetoric culture and from art history. Among many another approaches to teaching the basic elements of representation and the visual language, these workshops give students the opportunity to move from a well-known context, a text, to explore a new field of expression

Summary

Introduction

Visual story telling has become one of the most important strategies and tool in the field of communication. There are even less educational curricula—both in the high school and at the university—in which drawing and visual design are learned and applied as a meta-language to produce ideas and to share them, on one hand, and as a design field of communication artifacts production, on the other. At the opposite, where project culture is the primary focus, drawing is one of the most valuable items taught as an essential basic skill and, at the same time, a pervasive one. It is the method and the knowledge tool of the existent context. People have been expropriated of a language practiced in childhood, abandoned according to a learning system that pushes in the background this kind of skills, settling them exclusively as innate and not learned or trained personal talent

Non-Designers’ Visual Design Classes: A Case Study

Variation as an Expressive Research

Practicing Intertextuality

Visual Rhetoric Exercises

Conclusions