Field guide to doors
The capstone — your own illustrated typology of doors, built from the semester's audit, redesign and prototype, and readable by someone who took none of this course
Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 30%
The brief#
Turn your semester’s doors into a field guide: a typology someone else could use to look at a door they’ve never seen and know what to check.
This is not a portfolio of your other three assessments. A field guide has its own job: take everything the audit, the redesign and the prototype taught you about how doors succeed and fail, and compress it into categories that generalise past the specific doors you happened to study. The door you redesigned belongs in the typology like any other example, not bolted on at the end as “and here’s what I built.”
The test for whether it’s working: hand it to someone who has never taken Doorology, point them at a door on the other side of campus, and see whether the guide tells them what to look for. If it only makes sense next to the doors you personally photographed, it’s still a diary, not a field guide.
What you submit#
An illustrated document — the categories, worked through with examples drawn from your semester’s doors, including the redesigned one. Length is whatever the typology needs; padding it to look thorough is easy to spot and doesn’t help. There is no separate mechanism for demonstrating process here — the Field Guide is judged as a finished artefact in its own right.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- stands alone, with no assumed memory of your earlier submissions
- the categories in the typology are used consistently across every door it covers
- includes the door you redesigned and prototyped, placed inside the typology rather than set apart as a special case
How it is marked
Judged as a whole, the way a stranger would read it — does the typology hold together as one way of seeing doors, rather than three assignments stapled together, and could someone who has never taken Doorology use it to look at an unfamiliar door and know what to check.