“eRTFs” (Enriched Text Formats) Online, continuous and present writing in Art and Design

The ‘Screen Writes’ Symposium explored the purposes and practices of writing as practice for BA students engaged in visual communication, including graphic design, advertising and animation. The idea of a symposium sprung from the new ‘writing and blogging’ course for Level 1 students at the London College of Communication (Mark Ingham, with Andrea Mason, Linda Stupart, Andrew Slatter and Harriet Edwards): this will be critically analysed. The emphasis more generally is on writing practices emergent from studio concerns in line with the ethos of the Writing PAD project and its subsequent network. There will be time to discuss and exchange across roles and institutions in this symposium.

The ‘Screen Writes’ symposium is intent on exploring a number of interconnected areas related to graduate attributes. Firstly, the role of creative writings in relation to voice and identity through the daily and weekly practice of making the student’s writing public using online presences, in this case a practice/theory blog. This allows the students to see writing as going from being a fairly passive, summatively driven activity, to one that is in constant formation.

Secondly, it will explore the inherent mix that writing has with image and graphics in visual communication practices. This includes the surveying of tools and techniques employed when using online presences and how these can be used in such things as peer-to-peer learning. The idea that design and media students are writing with images will be analysed and challenged at this symposium. It will explore the possibilities of writing from images, writing with images, writing to images and writing against images. The beaten paths of these long and often debated relationships in academic writing will be taken off track to see if the clichés that surround these interactions in academia can be torn apart and reworked into more productive dynamic exchanges.

Thirdly, the potential of such practices to create a presence in social medias with a view to professional purposes, or how blogging, and indeed tweeting, can link the students to communities and prospective avenues beyond the university, will be scrutinised. Students have been encouraged to think about their online presences in a number of ways. As a digital note book/sketchbook where ideas can be drafted, edited, reworked and published. It also made the students think about who they were writing for in a professional context.

Fourthly, the articulation of the place, and merit of such practices within the wider design curriculum will be discussed. This will be in relation to employers wanting to see, not only a finished portfolio website that is demanded by the profession and academia, but a blog type site that also show the thinking, mistakes and the processes through to the making of final works.

• Organisation
• http://ctslccbaani1.wordpress.com/
• http://ctslccbaad1.wordpress.com/
• http://writingdesignctslcc.wordpress.com...