The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, AI-assisted studio work, studio access, and lab/hardware safety.
Late work and extensions#
Studio Briefs 1 and 2, Final Planning & Ideation, and the Final Project are all due at noon on their listed date. Work submitted late loses 5% of the available mark per day, up to five days, after which it is marked as not submitted — because a crit is a fixed event with an audience in the room, and a project that isn’t ready to show on the day hasn’t met the brief yet regardless of how the mark is calculated.
Extensions are available for illness or misadventure, requested before the deadline where possible. Ask the teacher running that week’s crit, not the convenor directly, unless the request concerns the convenor’s own session. An extension moves your submission deadline; it doesn’t move the crit itself — if you can’t attend the session, arrange to present in the following week’s studio time instead.
AI-assisted studio work#
AI tools are allowed anywhere in the process — ideation, code, generated
assets, fabrication files, debugging — with no part of the pipeline
off-limits. The only requirement is disclosure: name what you used and what
it was for in a README, commit message, or your submission notes,
declared plainly rather than left for a marker to guess at.
This is deliberately unrestrictive because every brief in this course resolves to something physical at some point — an object, a mechanism, a projection onto real material, a circuit that actually runs. An AI tool can write code or generate an asset, but it can’t attend the crit, wire the board, or make the thing work in front of an audience on the day; that part of the round trip stays yours regardless of how much of the digital half was tool-assisted. What’s marked is the finished piece against the brief and the judgement behind it, not whether a human or a tool typed a given line.
The one line that isn’t negotiable: work presented as running at a crit has to actually run, live, in the room. A recording of a tool having made something work once, shown in place of the thing itself working now, doesn’t meet any brief in this course.
Lab and hardware safety#
Weeks 4–6 and 10 put you in the electronics bench and the fabrication lab.
- Electronics (Arduino weeks): never power a board from mains directly; use the bench supplies or USB. Check polarity before connecting a battery. Report any component that gets noticeably hot to a tutor and stop using it.
- Fabrication (week 10): laser cutters and 3D printers run supervised only — a tutor starts the job after checking your file. Safety glasses on whenever the laser is running, no exceptions, including “just checking something.”
- Either lab: no eating or drinking at the bench. If you’re not sure a material is safe to cut, print, or solder, ask before you run the job, not after.
Anyone not following the above is asked to stop for the session; a second instance is a conversation with the convenor, not the tutor on duty.
Studio access#
Enrolled students have swipe access to the studio at any time it isn’t booked for another class — check the space’s shared calendar for booked slots. That includes evenings and weekends: a project that needs another few hours doesn’t have to wait for next week’s session.
After-hours access doesn’t extend to the higher-risk activities above. The laser cutter, 3D printer, and mains-connected electronics work run supervised only, during staffed lab hours, full stop — there’s no tutor on duty at midnight to check your file or your wiring. Outside staffed hours, the studio is for everything else: low-risk studio art work like painting and sculpting, hand-tool construction, bench assembly and soldering off mains power, and computer-based work.