Sessions
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each session, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
Every week keeps the same object — a button — and asks a different question about it. The sessions below run in order; each one ends in something logged, built, or diagnosed.
The Button Before the Screen
Before a button was a rectangle on glass, it was a switch a stranger could find in the dark — a doorbell, an elevator call button, a pedestrian crossing button, a panic button.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Translating the Push
What a physical button gives you for free — resistance, travel, a click, a physical return to its resting position — and what a digital button has to fake or simply do without.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
The Grammar of Pressable
How a shape earns the right to be pressed — affordance, signifier, convention, and invention — read off real interface elements that get it wrong in both directions.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
What the Button Promises
Every button is a promise about what will happen next, somewhere between trivial and irreversible — and some buttons lie about which end of that scale they're on.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Feedback and the Length of a Second
The interval between a press and its visible result, and how long a button can stay silent before that gap reads as failure.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
The Button That Wants You Back
One repeatable digital button, and why a small randomized reward makes people press it again more than a reliable one does.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
The Button That Doesn't Work
Buttons that visibly acknowledge a press while changing nothing at all — real crossing buttons, elevator door-close buttons, and one you'll build yourself.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
The Button You Stop Seeing
What happens to a button pressed so often it stops being looked at, and what that means for designing it.
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
One Button, Many Hands
Returning to the Week 7 crossing button to find the exact point where its push mechanism stops working for a hand unlike the one that built it.
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
The Button With a Guard Rail
Adding exactly one proportionate obstacle to one of the five buttons from Week 4's reversible-to-irreversible table.
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
The Button That's Lying to You
One real button whose wording, weight, or friction steers a choice, and what's lost when that leverage is removed.
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
The Perfect Button
Returning to the semester's central question with the strongest button built this course, one buttonless comparison, and a final defence.
Week 12 · 10 May 2027