Week 3: Hardware and what it tells you

Affordances, signifiers and the vocabulary for judging a door before you ever touch it

8 March 2027

A flat plate tells you to push. A handle tells you to pull, or turn, or lift — which one depends on its shape, and a badly shaped handle can tell you the wrong thing as confidently as a well shaped one tells you the right thing. This is the vocabulary the “Norman door” made famous: a door’s affordance is what it actually lets you do; its signifier is what it tells you to do; the two agreeing is the exception worth noticing, not the rule.

Hardware is where this becomes concrete rather than philosophical. A closer’s spring force and a hinge’s swing direction decide what’s physically possible; a plate, a handle, a sign, and their placement decide what a stranger will try first. The audit asks you to judge ten doors against a stated criterion — this lecture is where that criterion comes from.

Outline#

• affordance versus signifier, and why doors are the clearest example of the gap between them
• mapping and feedback: what a door tells you mid-action, not just before it
• the hardware vocabulary the clinic will put in your hands afterwards
• what “judged against a stated criterion” means for the door audit