Principles for the Studio (+10)
A decade ago, in 2015, these principles for the studio emerged from a need to establish what we meant by "studio" for an online Masters in an increasingly digital and distributed world — a sacred space that could exist anywhere, defined not by walls but by shared values and practices. They were written for RMIT's Master of Design Futures programme, an attempt to articulate minimum viable behaviours while pointing toward a larger canon of practice.
Ten years on, these principles have lived through countless projects, iterations, and transformations. They've been tested in forensic walls covered in affinity diagrams, in the delicate negotiations of collaborative making, in the tension between digital systems and physical craft. They've evolved from text to triangular compositions to typographic fragments, each iteration revealing something about how principles themselves must breathe and adapt.
This revision reflects what a decade of practice teaches: that extraction exhausts while abundance sustains, that perfection suffocates while breath gives life, that discourse can divide while dialogue connects. The original principles leant heavily on a certain energy — relentless engagement, promiscuous sharing, fierce defence. What emerges now is something softer but no less rigorous: an acknowledgment that the studio thrives not through conquest but through cultivation.
The new voices woven through — painters on finding life in the work, science fiction writers on new suns, physicists on winning together — speak to a practice that has learned to value emergence over control, systems over silos, the improvisational over the predetermined. Where once the principles quoted mostly from design's established canon, now free jazz musicians, non-dual philosophers, and poets working in the gaps between disciplines feel more essential.
These shifts mirror broader transformations in how we understand creative practice: from seeing design as problem-solving to understanding it as pattern-finding, from individual genius to collective intelligence, from making things to making things possible. The studio remains sacred, but its rituals have evolved — less about exhausting our environment and more about letting the environment move through us, less about defending our positions and more about holding multiple futures simultaneously.
The principle that remains most unchanged — "Improvise Together" — perhaps held the key all along. Your unexamined rules are still the ones that limit you most. Ten years of examining, of breathing, of starting without knowing what will happen, has led here: to principles that trust in plenitude, that resist perfection in favour of life, that multiply rather than narrow the possible.
Happy 10th birthday, MDF. Here's to the next decade of unknowing.
"You'll vastly overestimate what you can achieve in a year and vastly underestimate what you can achieve in a decade."
— My grandmother, to my mother (who told it to me)