Week 1 Studio: First door
The first studio — the door you walk through to get here, looked at properly for the first time
22 February 2027
Before the session#
Bring the door you just walked through. Not a photo from the internet, not a door you remember fondly — the one you used today, still fresh enough that you can describe what you did with your hands without having to think about it.
In the session#
Petra opens with the semester’s shape: twelve weeks, four assessments, one object. Then the room works through everyone’s front door together, one at a time, asking the same three questions of each: what does it want you to do, what did you actually do, and were those the same thing. The point isn’t to find fault this early — it’s to notice how rarely anyone has looked this closely at a door before.
Studio time closes with a short list-making exercise: everyone leaves with three candidate doors for their audit, chosen for how different they are from each other, not how annoying they are.
Afterwards#
No mark this week. What leaves is a shortlist and a shared vocabulary the rest of the semester builds on.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you can state the three questions the room asks of every door — what it wants you to do, what you actually did, and whether those were the same
- you have photographed or sketched the door you used to enter the building this session was held in
- you can name, out loud, one thing that door tells you to do before you touch it
Teaching team
- Petra Voss — convenor