The Affordance
Audit

A companion to the School Library Review Tool. The Review Tool tells you where your library stands. This is what you run inside Re-imagine — repeatedly, at the scale of one corner, before anyone has to approve anything.

Five sheets, worked in order. Every element has a Notes panel telling you what goes in it and what a good answer looks like. If you’d rather see it finished first, load a worked example — one secondary, one primary, both completed end to end.

Nothing is sent anywhere. Everything you type stays in your own browser. Autosave keeps your work on this device; Save to file gives you a copy you can keep, re-open later, or send on.

Outer loop Review → Re-imagine → Renew  ·  Inner loop, this tool Notice → Name → Imagine → Prototype → Learn

School / Library
Drawn by
Date
Loop no.
01

Notice

What is actually happening in the room?

Evidence before opinion. Watch for twenty minutes a day for a week and record only what happened — not what you think it means, and not what anyone says they want. People can’t accurately tell you how they’d behave in a room that doesn’t exist yet.

Notes — how to fill in the observation log
  1. This sheet adds the one evidence source the Review Tool doesn’t collect. Circulation, bookings and surveys are transactional or self-reported. The survey tells you students can’t find a place to work in a group; observation tells you why. Bring the survey findings into the field above, then go and watch.
  2. One row = one thing you saw, in one place, at one time. If you can’t name where and when, it isn’t an observation yet.
  3. Describe behaviour, not motive. The moment you write because or they don’t like, you’ve stopped observing and started diagnosing. Diagnosis is Sheet 02’s job. DO — “Three students sitting on the floor in the gap between the 800s bays.” DON’T — “Students avoid the tables because they’re uncomfortable.”
  4. Record absences as well as events. A surface nobody touched all week is one of the strongest signals you will get.
  5. Sample across the day. Aim for at least three different times — before school, a class period, and a break. A library observed only at lunch is a different building.
  6. Ten to fifteen rows is enough. Beyond that you start repeating yourself; below about eight you’re working from impressions.
  7. Watch where students go when they’re free to choose. Unstructured choice is the most honest data in the room.
What your existing data already told you

If you’ve run the School Library Review Tool, summarise what the circulation figures, booking patterns and staff and student surveys showed. This is your baseline — and the thing observation is going to explain.

WhereWhenWhat you saw
02

Name

Which behaviours does the room withhold?

Score five behaviours against three levels. Most libraries score well on possible and badly on the other two — which is a far more useful diagnosis than “we need new furniture.” The plan redraws as you go.

Notes — how to score, and what the three levels mean
  1. Possible asks whether the behaviour can physically happen at all. Almost everything is technically possible, so expect high scores here. A low score means a hard barrier: no surface, no space, an actual rule against it.
  2. Probable asks whether it happens on its own, without you organising it. This is the score that matters most. If a behaviour only occurs when an adult sets it up, it isn’t an affordance of the space — it’s a program you’re carrying.
  3. Preferred asks what the room signals. Walk in as a Year 9 student who has never been told the rules. What does the furniture, signage, sightline and noise level tell you this place is for? That’s your preferred score.
  4. Score the room as it is on an ordinary Tuesday — not on the best day you can remember, and not as it will be after the refurbishment.
  5. Low scores are the point. A tool that returns all fours has told you nothing. If everything looks strong, you’re scoring the intention rather than the room. A useful audit usually has one strong behaviour and three or four gaps.
  6. Score it with someone else, separately, then compare. Where you disagree is where the interesting conversation is — and where you should go and look again.
  7. A behaviour scoring 4 or under is flagged as a gap and drawn in red on the plan. That doesn’t mean it’s failing; it means the space permits it and does nothing to encourage it.
Scale0 not at all  ·  1 barely  ·  2 partly  ·  3 mostly  ·  4 clearly yes
Fig. 1 — Affordance plan00/60
Strong Partial Gap

This is a diagram of your library’s pedagogy, not its floor plan — the zones don’t correspond to where things physically sit. Denser hatching means the space more strongly affords that behaviour. A dashed red outline marks a behaviour that is permitted and practically absent.

The continuum

Where are you, and where are you going?

The audit tells you where you are. The five-stage continuum from the School Library Review Tool tells you where you’re going. The distance between them is the work.

Where the library is now
Where the school is working towards

Notes — how to place yourself on the continuum
  1. It is not a quality ranking. Where a school should sit depends on its learning philosophy, not on being furthest right. A primary school with a strong literature focus that sits deliberately at stage two is doing better than one that drifted to stage four because someone bought devices.
  2. Place yourself by evidence, not aspiration. Use the circulation, booking and survey data from the Review Tool, plus your scores above. If your affordance total is low, you are further left than the furniture suggests.
  3. Read the target off the school, not the library. The right target is the one that matches the school’s teaching and learning vision. If nobody has written that down, the Review Tool’s brainstorm questions are the place to start.
  4. A prototype addresses the next column only. Two or more columns is a Renew-scale project with a budget and a project plan. Ambition belongs in the target; action belongs one step to its left.
  5. The stages assume device access was the differentiator — hence Digital hub as a distinct stage. That question is now largely settled, and judgement rather than access is what separates the last two columns. Place yourself accordingly.
The space of conflict — one sentence

Name the gap between the behaviour you want and the behaviour your room encourages.

Notes — how to write the conflict sentence
  1. Use the sentence shape. “Our library makes X probable and Y merely possible, because Z.” X is usually your highest-scoring behaviour; Y is usually your lowest.
  2. Four things must not appear: furniture, budget, blame, or a solution. If a solution has crept in, you’ve named an answer instead of a problem and you’ve skipped Sheet 03. DO — “Our library makes solitary consumption probable and collaborative interrogation merely possible. Year 9 read the room as a place where you are watched and expected to be quiet.” DON’T — “We need flexible furniture and a collaboration zone because the tables are old.”
  3. Test it on a colleague who wasn’t there. If they can restate the problem without seeing your scores, the sentence works.
  4. One sentence, not three. Length usually means you’re describing several conflicts. Pick the one you’d act on first and run the loop again for the others.
How might we…?

Convert the conflict into a design question. A conflict statement is a diagnosis; a How might we is an invitation to answer it.

Keep it broad enough that several answers are possible and narrow enough that not everything is. “How might we improve the library?” is too broad; “How might we buy beanbags?” has the answer already inside it.

03

Imagine

What would change the behaviour?

Generate spatial and programmatic moves together, always in pairs.

A spatial move without an activator is decoration. A program without a spatial home is just a booking. If you can only fill one side of a pair, you haven’t finished the idea.

Notes — what counts as a spatial move, an activator, and a finished pair
  1. A spatial move changes what the room offers. Five things are usually available to you, and four of them are free: angle (turn something), sightline (what can be seen from where), surface (something to write on, display on, or leave work on), enclosure (walls, backs, corners, thresholds), and rule (what is permitted here). Purchasing is the sixth and the last resort.
  2. An activator is what you or students will actually do that uses the change — a routine, a lesson structure, a ritual, or a change in your own presence. It must be specific enough to appear in a timetable. “A fortnightly Source Court at lunch: four students defend one source’s credibility to their peers.” “Encourage more collaboration.” — that’s an aspiration, not an activator.
  3. The pairing test: cover one half of the pair. Would the other half still change behaviour on its own? If yes, the visible half is doing all the work and the pair is under-specified. Rewrite it.
  4. Tag each pair to the affordance it addresses using the dropdown. Pairs that don’t map to a gap from Sheet 02 are good ideas solving a problem you didn’t diagnose — park them.
  5. Aim for three or four pairs, then choose one. Generating more than you’ll build is the point; it makes the choice a decision rather than a default.
  6. The cheapest pair is often the strongest. Moving the desk out of the sightline costs nothing, and its activator is a change in your own practice rather than a new program.
  7. Six zone types are your vocabulary of solutions: Active Collaborative · Small Group Collaborative · Interactive · Individual Study · Chill out · Quiet Reading. The five behaviours you scored on Sheet 02 are the diagnosis; these six are what you build in response. One behaviour may need more than one zone type, and one zone may serve more than one behaviour.
  8. Answer the How might we, not the whole continuum. Each pair should be a plausible answer to the design question you wrote on Sheet 02, and should move you one column — not five.
04

Prototype

What will you build this month?

Prototype at the speed of tape. Reversible, cheap, fast and publicly provisional — a trial invites feedback where a renovation invites complaints. Pick one pair from Sheet 03 and specify it here.

Notes — what makes something a prototype rather than a project
  1. Reversible by Friday. If undoing it would take longer than a day or require anyone’s approval, it’s a project. Projects need business cases; prototypes need tape.
  2. If it needs a purchase order, it isn’t a prototype yet. Borrow, repurpose, tape out, or use what’s already in the room. Budget follows evidence — and evidence follows prototypes, not proposals.
  3. Precise enough to tape out tomorrow. “The east wall between the 800s and 900s, under the second window” is specific. “The back corner” isn’t.
  4. Fixed end date, chosen now. Four weeks is usually right — long enough for novelty to wear off, short enough that ending it isn’t a defeat. Open-ended trials quietly become permanent and stop being tested.
  5. The sign is not decoration — it’s the mechanism. One sentence saying this is a trial and asking what people think is what converts a change into an invitation. Without it, students read the change as a new rule and behave accordingly. “This corner is a four-week trial. Tell us what it’s good for — or what it’s ruined.”
  6. Tell your executive it’s running; don’t ask them to approve it. Four weeks of masking tape sits below the threshold of policy and well above the threshold of visibility.
The prototype

What physically changes. Name the objects and where they move to.

Where exactly

A location precise enough that someone else could mark it out without asking you.

Runs until

A date, not “a while”.

What it costs

List it honestly, including your own hours. If there’s a dollar figure, the prototype is probably too big.

What the sign says

One sentence, in the room, in plain language. Say it’s a trial and ask for a reaction.

05

Learn

How will you know, and when will you decide?

Instrument it before you run it. Decide in advance what would count as working — and what would count as failing. Being willing to end a prototype publicly is what buys you credibility for the next four.

Notes — choosing measures that can actually tell you something
  1. Count behaviour, not opinion. Satisfaction surveys reward novelty and tell you almost nothing about affordance. What people do in the room is the evidence.
  2. Door counts measure traffic. Dwell time measures welcome. Prefer measures of staying, returning, and self-organising over measures of passing through.
  3. Take a baseline before you move anything. Without it, every result is arguable. Sheet 01 is usually your baseline — go back and pull the numbers from it.
  4. Choose at least one measure that could come out against you. If none of your measures could produce a bad result, you’re building a case rather than running a test. “Stop if borrowing from the relocated 800s drops by more than 20%.”
  5. Add one question asked of students. “What is this corner for?” tells you whether the room is signalling what you intended — which is the preferred level from Sheet 02, measured directly.
  6. Write the stop condition before you start, and mean it. A prototype you were never willing to end wasn’t a prototype. Reporting a failure honestly is what earns you permission to run the next one.
  7. Put the decision date in your calendar now. On that date you scale it, kill it, or run the loop again — and you say which, out loud, to the people who noticed.
What you’ll measure

Two to four countable things, plus one question you’ll ask students.

It’s working if…

A threshold, in numbers where you can, measured against your baseline.

You’ll stop it if…

The condition under which you’ll end it and say so publicly.

Decision date

When you scale it, kill it, or run the loop again — and report either way.

What this contributes to the change case

Where this evidence goes next. The inner loop ends by feeding Renew — the business case, the project plan, the budget request that does need approval.

You don’t need permission to run a prototype. You need permission to spend the money — and this is how you earn the right to ask.

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