Week 3: The Grammar of Pressable
The four words this week runs on — affordance, signifier, convention, invention — and the two ways a shape can lie about which one it has.
8 March 2027
This lecture sets out the vocabulary the session applies. The full argument, including the two failure cases and the diagnosis it asks for, is at The Grammar of Pressable.
Outline#
- affordance, signifier, convention, and invention, defined against a doorknob and a drop shadow rather than in the abstract
- two failures: something that looks pressable and isn’t, and something pressable that doesn’t look it
- what the diagnosis asks: find one real ambiguous element and name which convention it broke
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor