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FLR·B·001

The Norman Door

broke: affordance documented

A door whose handle says pull while its hinge says push. You pull, it resists, you push, you feel briefly stupid — and that misplaced feeling is the entire lesson of this room. Don Norman's founding argument: when a person fails at a door, the fault is not the person, it is a missing or lying affordance. A flat plate can only be pushed; a graspable bar begs to be pulled; a door that needs a sign saying PUSH has already failed as a door.

The Norman door is the basement's patron exhibit because it scales. Every interface that requires a tooltip to explain which way it opens — the icon that doesn't look tappable, the card that is secretly a button, the swipe nobody discovers — is the same door wearing different hardware.

the handle: “pull me” but… hinge side physics: “push me”
FIG B·001 — hardware and physics giving opposite instructions.
The lessonAffordances are the interface's honest signage: the shape of the thing should announce its use. When users fail predictably, redesign the handle, not the user.
The recordNorman, The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988; retitled The Design of Everyday Things) — the concept's citable birth, plus the Gibson (1979) origin of "affordance" and Norman's own later clarification of the term's drift.
StairwellAffordance — including the Gibson→Norman drift, documented there.
Upstairs kinFloor 2's every component carries "the trade it was built to make" — the anti-Norman-door discipline.

Why documented: Norman 1988, and Gibson 1979 behind it.