This course is dealing with essential visual skills needed for communicating, prototyping and leading teams in firms.

While communication is getting more electronic and complex, visual forms of communication provide managers with important skills and advantages in today’s business. They enable senders and receivers of information to faster and better communicate, allow better understanding of communication and information and tend to resonate longer and better with the audience.

In this course students will learn and master essential visual skills, which they will then transform to the business setting. This course is especially targeted at future managers that will have to communicate and lead teams in small and agile business settings.

There is a maximum nonattendance quota of 20% in this course. Students overcoming this threshold will not receive a positive grade.

Students who have signed up for this course but do not show up in the first session without noticing via email at kmu@wu.ac.at will lose their seat in the course to other students on the waiting list and be ranked last.

Teaching formats include:

• Lectures
• Individual work and presentation
• Group work and presentation
• Discussion and joint work in class

This is a very hands-on course in which students will learn essential mastery skills in order to apply visual skills in many different business settings. Thus, the grading components refer to so-called mastery projects of which four are individual and two are group components.

• Database of business icons (individual, 10%)
• Database of business structures (individual, 10%)
• Sketch note (individual, 10%)
• Persona or prototype tool (individual, 15%)
• Business tool (group of 2-3 people, 25%)
• Wireframe tool (group of 2-3 people, 20%)

grading scale:

< 61% = 5
61% - 70% = 4
71% - 80% = 3
81% - 90% = 2
91% -100% = 1

All mastery project will have to be handed in electronically (based on physical visuals; i.e. scanned) two weeks after the last session of the class.