Week 7 Tutorial: Studio Brief 2 crit

The first session back from the break — work combining everything up to the bridging week meets an audience

12 April 2027

Before the session#

Bring Studio Brief 2, running, and the one decision you’re least sure about. Same shape as Studio Brief 1’s crit, with more techniques on the table.

In the session#

1. Demo Studio Brief 2 live, in under two minutes — same shape as Studio Brief 1’s crit, with more techniques on the table. The brief asks you to close the loop — signal from the physical world, through a microcontroller, into a program, back out to a physical effect — so the demo needs to show that whole loop live. Showing only the sensor feeding into a sketch, without the effect coming back out the other side, is the SB1-era habit to drop here.
2. Name which techniques from weeks 1–6 it combines and the decision you’re least sure about. By week 7 you’ve accumulated far more techniques than you had for Studio Brief 1, so the harder discipline is naming the two or three that are actually load-bearing rather than listing everything you touched — the brief marks how the techniques connect, not how many appear.
3. Take feedback aimed at that named decision. Because the bridging week’s serial comms is usually what makes or breaks this brief, the decision you’re least sure about is often exactly there — a baud rate, a framing choice, a debounce — and that’s the feedback worth prioritising over anything about the sketch’s visuals.
4. Mention if your studio pair helped you across a gap in your own background — it’s useful context for the feedback, not a confession. Week 7 is precisely the week the pairing structure set up in week 1 has the art-proficient half leaning on their programming-proficient pair for the state-machine material, so saying so is expected, not an admission of a shortcut.

Afterwards#

Crit engagement is part of Studio Brief 2’s mark — see the assessment page for the criteria.