The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, honest use of AI on observation-based work, and handling hardware safely.

Policies and support#

Late work and extensions#

The door audit, redesign proposal and prototype are each due at the studio session that marks them — the audit crit, the redesign crit, or the public crit. The field guide is the one exception: it’s due at the end of the teaching period, eleven days after the closing crit, so your typology can absorb what that last session’s wider survey of doors turns up. Work submitted after the relevant deadline loses 5% of the assessment’s weight per day late, to a maximum of five days, after which it is marked as submitted with that penalty applied regardless of quality.

Extensions are granted for the usual reasons (illness, misadventure) and are asked for before the due date wherever possible, not after. Ask Petra directly rather than waiting for the studio session to raise it.

Using AI on this course’s work#

Doorology’s assessments are built on things you did with your own hands and eyes: doors you actually walked up to, hardware you actually adjusted, prototypes someone else actually tested. AI tools are fine for drafting prose, checking your writing, or looking up a general concept from a lecture — the same way they’d be fine for any writing task. They cannot audit a door, adjust a closer, or test a prototype on a stranger for you. If a door audit entry, a redesign specification, or a crit defence describes an observation you didn’t make or a test you didn’t run, that’s a fabrication problem regardless of how it was produced, not a tooling problem — say what you actually did, plainly, and cite an AI tool the same way you’d cite any other source that shaped your prose.

Handling hardware safely#

The hardware clinic (week 3) and making clinic (week 9) put real door hardware — hinges, closers, latches, panic bars — in your hands, some of it under spring tension. Callum demonstrates each part’s safe handling before anyone touches it; follow his lead specifically for closers, whose adjustment screws release stored force if turned the wrong way. If you’re prototyping with tools of your own (a blade, a drill, anything with a blade or a motor), use them only in the making clinic or with a tutor present, not unsupervised in your own time.

Getting help#

For anything about the course as a whole, email Petra. For a specific hardware or access question, ask Callum during a studio or clinic session first — most of these questions are faster answered with the door in front of you than over email.