Week 4 Lab: The Back-of-House Zine

A creative lab — make a short zine auditing a real venue's front-of-house polish against its back-of-house neglect

15 March 2027

Groups of three. Pick a real, visitable venue — a cafe, a library, a student union space, anything with a public front and a less-public back — and produce a short zine (four to eight pages, any medium: paper, PDF, whatever your group can actually fold) auditing where its polish runs out.

Before the lab#

Read week 4’s lecture. Visit your chosen venue, or draw on a recent visit, before the lab — you need real observations, not invented ones.

In the lab#

Compare notes as a group and pick the three strongest examples of a last-mile failure point that a customer notices but nobody budgeted to fix — the survey week 4’s lecture cites is your model for what counts as “hidden”: something that drives customers away silently, without a complaint ever being filed. Storyboard the zine’s pages together before anyone starts drawing or laying out text.

Submitting#

The finished zine, as a group, plus a one-paragraph note on which of your three examples you think the venue’s own management doesn’t know about. Due Friday 19 March, 5pm.

Groups of three for this one — enough hands to actually make a zine in the time available, few enough that everyone did something.