Week 2 Studio: Reading affordances

A studio on affordances and signifiers — why some doors explain themselves and most don't

1 March 2027

Before the session#

Walk one corridor you don’t normally use and note every door in it. You don’t need to judge them yet — just collect them.

In the session#

The studio works in pairs, swapping shortlists and testing whether a description of a door someone else wrote is enough to predict what it will do. It usually isn’t, and the gap between “here’s a door” and “here’s how to use it” is this week’s actual subject. We build the vocabulary the audit will need: affordance, signifier, mapping, feedback, and where a door’s hardware lies about which of these it’s offering.

Afterwards#

Nothing submitted. What leaves is a bigger, more deliberately varied shortlist, ready to be narrowed into the ten the audit needs.