Week 1 Session: 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.
22 February 2027
A doorbell does not open a door. A doorbell closes a circuit in a box on the porch, which is wired to a chime or a buzzer somewhere else in the building, which produces a sound that a person eventually hears and acts on. Nobody presses a doorbell to make a sound. They press it to summon a person who is not currently in the room.
That gap — between the small thing you do with your hand and the much larger thing that happens somewhere you can’t see — is the button’s whole job. A button is a device that translates a small human action into a remote consequence. Everything else about a button, including every button that comes up for the rest of this course, is a variation on that one fact.
Four buttons, before pixels#
- The doorbell. Your press does not ring the bell. It closes a circuit; the ringing is downstream of that.
- The elevator call button. Your press does not move the car. It registers a request with a controller that is already deciding where every car in the shaft should go next.
- The pedestrian crossing button. Your press does not change the light. In most installations it registers a request that a signal controller may or may not act on sooner than it would have anyway.
- The panic button. Your press does not stop the danger. It sends a signal to a person or a system whose job is to respond to that signal.
In every case, the button is not the thing that solves the problem. It is the thing that tells something else a problem exists.
The log#
Pick three physical buttons you actually pressed today — not hypothetical ones, the ones your hand touched. For each, write down:
- what the button is called, or what you’d call it if it has no name
- where it physically is
- what happens immediately at the button (a click, a light, nothing)
- what happens remotely, as a direct result of your press, that would not have happened otherwise
If you can’t find out what happens remotely for one of your three, say so — don’t invent it. Not knowing what a button does on the other end is itself worth logging.
Submit the three entries before next session. Session 2 opens with one of yours, picked at random.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have logged three physical buttons you pressed today, naming what each one is called, where it is, and the remote action it stands in for
- each entry says what actually happens on the other end of the press, not just what the button looks like
- you can state, without mentioning a screen, what a button is a device for
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor