Gallery Walk

Your work goes up on a wall at ten past the hour, and you are not allowed to stand next to it.

That is the entire mechanism. An artefact you can explain is not the same artefact as one that has to survive a stranger reading it at speed with you out of the room, and the second is the only one you ever actually submit.

Before you arrive#

Print or pin one artefact, in draft, fitted to one named target from Dossier §2. Draft is the correct state — a finished piece attracts compliments and a draft attracts information. Bring three copies of nothing; the sheet beside your work is where everything is written.

The three walls#

The room is organised by surface rather than by stream, in the three columns the lecture deck uses:

• Technical Practice starts at the repository wall: front page and README, read by someone deciding in ninety seconds whether to clone it.
• Creative and Communications Practice starts at the portfolio wall: sequencing and case-study structure, read by someone who will stop at a specific slide and can tell you which one.
• Commercial and Public Practice starts at the brief wall: a one-page capability brief, read by someone who has thirty of them.

How the laps run#

Four laps, and the order is not negotiable.

1. Silent lap. You read, you write on the sheet, you do not speak. Your critique names a decision, not a finish: “the second paragraph claims scale with no number” rather than “nice layout”.
2. Second lap, your own wall. You read your own sheet in silence. You may not reply to it and you may not explain.
3. Response lap. You write, on your own sheet, which critiques you accept and which you reject, each with a reason. Rejecting one with a reason is a perfectly good answer and is scored the same.
4. Cross-stream lap. The last twenty minutes, and the point of the week: each stream walks the other two walls.

Why the cross-stream lap is the point#

Your stream’s conventions feel like quality until you watch another field break them without penalty. Engineers discover a README’s plainness is a house style. Designers discover the sequencing instinct they thought was universal is a sector norm. The commercial room discovers its one-pager reads as evasive to everyone else. What you take away is not another field’s conventions — it is the knowledge that yours are conventions, which is the only way to vary them on purpose.

Critique is written, always. It becomes your evidence for Assessment 3, and a compliment given aloud leaves no receipt for anybody.

Leaving with#

Dossier §7: the target-fitted artefact in draft, plus the first entries in your Varnish Note — every presentational decision you made, and what each one reveals or conceals. Thin and thick both get recorded. The Note is a quarter of Assessment 2 and it is the entry markers read first.

Then the teaching break, then week 7. Build during the break. Do not polish.