Door audit

The first piece of graded work — a written survey of ten real doors, judged on whether a stranger could tell what each one does before touching it

Due: 15 March 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Find ten doors. For each one, say what it wants you to do, what you actually did the first time, and whether those were the same thing.

A door audit is not a complaint file. Anyone can list ten doors that are annoying; the studio is a semester on why, and “why” needs categories that survive contact with the next building. Use whatever vocabulary you’ve picked up from the hardware clinic and lectures — push plate versus pull handle, signifier versus affordance, the difference between a door that’s wrong and one that’s merely unfamiliar — and apply it the same way across all ten, so a reader can compare door three against door seven and trust that the standard didn’t move.

Doors that work are part of the assignment too. A survey that finds nothing but failure has usually stopped looking, or picked its ten doors to make a point rather than to test one.

What you submit#

A written audit, one entry per door: a photo or sketch, the location, and your judgement against the criterion you’re applying. Ten to fifteen hundred words total is enough if the categories are doing real work; padding a thin argument with more doors doesn’t help.

Bring the doors you’re least sure about to the week 4 studio crit before you submit — that’s what the session is for.