First Instrument

A working mark-making instrument, built to one deliberate constraint and handed to someone who has never seen it before

Due: 29 March 2027 · Weight: 35%

The brief#

Build one small instrument for making a mark, hold it to exactly one constraint, and make it survive a stranger’s hands with nobody there to explain it.

This is the first five weeks’ work — reading gesture as more than a position, choosing one constraint and holding it, adding a state that moves on its own — brought together into something that has to work without its author in the room. The room in studio 6 is the actual marking condition: a build that only ever worked while you were narrating it out loud doesn’t meet the brief, whatever it looks like in a screen recording.

What makes a strong response isn’t a longer feature list. It’s a constraint that costs something real when it’s on, and reads clearly as a difference when it’s off — the toggle from studio 4 is the easiest way to prove that in the room.

What you submit#

A link to the deployed build and the source repository. If the constraint or the gesture signal isn’t obvious within the first few seconds of use, add one sentence of context to the repository’s README — not more, since an instrument that needs paragraphs of explanation hasn’t yet earned the crit format this course runs on.

The weighted criteria above split evenly between whether the constraint says something (response to the brief) and whether the build itself holds together under a stranger’s hands (craft).