The Button Autopsy

Analyse one real button before you're allowed to design one.

Due: 19 March 2027 · Weight: 20%

The course’s first four weeks gave you the vocabulary this assessment asks you to use on a button you didn’t build. Before Week 5 asks you to construct anything, this assessment asks you to take one apart.

The brief#

Choose one real button. Take it apart in writing before you’re allowed to build one.

Pick one button — physical or digital, yours or someone else’s, but one specific object, not a category of button. Dissect it:

• what action it appears to promise
• what physical, visual, or conventional signifiers make it read as pressable
• what earlier button convention it inherits
• what actually happens after the press
• whether the apparent importance of the button matches the consequence

Each point draws on a specific week: the promise from Week 4, What the Button Promises; the signifiers from Week 3, The Grammar of Pressable; the inherited convention from Week 1, The Button Before the Screen, and Week 2, Translating the Push; and the match, or mismatch, between apparent and actual weight from all four at once.

What you submit#

A concise, annotated document — labelled notes against a photo or screenshot of the button, not a generic essay about buttons in general. Every claim should point at the specific object in front of you, not at buttons as a category.

End with one defensible claim: state plainly whether this button works, fails, or misrepresents itself, and say why, in terms of the dissection above.

Marking#

Weighted, against how accurately you’ve dissected the five points against the actual object, and how well the final claim follows from that dissection rather than from a general opinion about interface design.