Master Meetings

Online Communication Design

The course analyzes the very concept and practices of design of hypermedia. It covers the full project lifecycle, starting from a benchmark analysis followed by the very initial stages of user requirements elicitation and engineering, up to the definition of information architecture, design, and prototype production. Different strategies of user requirements’ elicitation will be presented, ranging from more formal ones – interviews, focus groups, etc. – up to more creative ones, entailing co- or participatory-design. In particular, a model called URL: User Requirements with Lego will be presented and discussed. The role of communication will be particularly emphasized, stressing how inadequate communication exchanges might be at the very origin of project failures. Examples and Group Projects will focus on the financial sector, whenever possible.

Financial Communication

The course will help students to

• Use foundations of communication theory and finance to understand financial communication as social interaction between multiple stakeholders around investment activities and as information flow affecting investment decisions.
• Understand the interaction between firms and financial markets in terms of signaling and disclosure, taking into account intermediaries and other stakeholders.
• Focus on valuation as the core of the communicative interaction between firms and financial markets, appreciating the synergy of qualitative (narrative) and quantitative information in firm valuation
• Appreciate the importance of business narratives for the financial markets and how they change from start-up, to IPO and through crises.
• Become familiar with some of the most common and important genres of financial communication.
• Use both the finance and the communication scholarships to understand financial communication problems.

Multimodal Rhetoric

The course offers a rhetorical approach to multimodal communication, looking into the integration of visual rhetoric (moving and static images) and verbal rhetoric (spoken and written words) including text layout and montage. Students will be introduced to the toolkit for the analysis and design of persuasive multimodal messages that the art of rhetoric and argumentation theory offer in combination with insights from modern multimodal discourse analysis and semiotics.