# Principles for the Studio — 2025 Refinement ## Introduction A decade ago, in 2015, these principles for the studio emerged from a need to establish what we meant by "studio" 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 the 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 masculine 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 contemporary artists who work 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) --- ## 1. Engage The Abundance Read everything you can get your hands on. Listen to it all. Use all your senses. Go deeper. Go wide. > "Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." — Mary Oliver --- ## 2. Fear Less Try new things, you have nothing to lose : Resist perfection, it'll never breathe like your fearless imaginative response. > "You start, and you don't know what's going to happen. You have to find the life in it." — Ann Thomson --- ## 3. Share Generously Share your thinking — it makes the tacit explicit and builds the studio dialogue. > "Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you." — Austin Kleon --- ## 4. Make Often Use your craft to expand the conversation. Craft your skills at making the abstract concrete. > "Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making." — Maria Popova --- ## 5. Make Better Critically engage with the work, make it better. Give this gift regularly. Expect it in return. Fiercely defend your work, and the dialogue around it. > "In dialogue, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins." — David Bohm --- ## 6. Be Demanding > "…pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students" — Sister Corita Kent & John Cage Expect more from your peers, and the converse will help you grow. --- ## 7. Be Kind Cultivate a generosity toward failure, and you're already learning. (remember to breathe) > "There's nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns." — Octavia Butler --- ## 8. Improvise Together > "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams" — principles of the Agile Manifesto Your unexamined rules (and roles) are what limit you most. --- ## 9. Multiply the Futures Work on holding multiple visions of the future in your mind at the same time. > "The possible has been tried and failed. Now it's time to try the impossible." — Sun Ra --- # Footnotes 1. ## Engage the Abundance “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it,” from Red Bird (2008) — Mary Oliver Mary Oliver’s line from the poem Sometimes distils a three-step practice of awareness, wonder, and expression. Each part is inseparable from the others. To pay attention is an act of care — a resistance to distraction, an orientation towards the richness of the world. To be astonished is to let that attention undo you, to allow what is observed to move and transform perception. And to tell about it is the creative obligation: to make, to show, to share what has been seen. In the studio, this becomes a rhythm of inquiry: observe, respond, communicate. The abundance is not out there waiting to be consumed; it is revealed through sustained attention. Oliver’s practice teaches that astonishment is a kind of knowledge — a recognition that everything, when seen clearly, exceeds its description. Creative work, then, is not invention but translation — the telling that keeps astonishment alive. → [Read the poem “Sometimes”](#) online ⸻ 2. ## Fear Less “You start, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to find the life in it.” from interview with Ann Thomson, Art Collector Magazine (2013) Ann Thomson’s observation describes creation as encounter rather than execution. Her painting process is improvisational, built on movement, intuition, and trust in what the work reveals as it unfolds. For studio practice, this is a lesson in courage and responsiveness: to fear less is to begin without a map. “Finding the life” in a work means listening to its energy, allowing gesture, accident, and material to guide direction. The fear of imperfection is replaced by attention to vitality — to what feels alive rather than correct. This approach mirrors improvisation in jazz or prototyping in design: the act of making is discovery, not demonstration. Every creative act, however small, carries risk; Thomson reminds us that risk is also where art breathes. Fearlessness here is humility — the willingness to learn from what appears, even when it resists control. → More on [Ann Thomson’s process](#) ⸻ 3. ## Share Generously “Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you,” from Show Your Work! (2014) — Austin Kleon Austin Kleon’s phrase reframes sharing as an act of connection rather than exposure. In the networked studio, generosity of process replaces secrecy as the engine of creativity. To share early is to invite collaboration, feedback, and resonance. The risk of vulnerability is balanced by the richness of exchange: others who see your traces recognise something of their own practice there. Kleon’s ethic fits a culture of open iteration — sketches, prototypes, and thoughts made visible form the ecology through which creative communities thrive. Generosity is not self-promotion; it’s contribution. To “share what you love” means to foreground curiosity and sincerity, rather than polish. What circulates through this sharing are not finished products but ideas in motion. The studio becomes a commons: collective intelligence grows as individuals show their work in progress. → Read excerpts and notes from [Show Your Work!](#) ⸻ 4. ## Make Often “Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making.” from Figuring (2019) — Maria Popova Maria Popova points toward the oblique path of discovery — understanding that arrives through craft, through doing. In studio work, the “sidewise gleam” is the reflection caught when we circle a question instead of confronting it head-on. The act of making becomes epistemological: we learn through form, not about it. Popova’s notion of “figuring” joins the intellectual and the material — the process of shaping meaning by hand. Making often, then, isn’t repetition for its own sake but continual re-encounter with uncertainty. The object or artifact becomes a trace of thought, a mirror of evolving perception. To craft is to think sideways — to allow intuition and experimentation to reveal what direct analysis cannot. In the studio, this principle fosters momentum: each attempt refines both skill and sensitivity, building a rhythm of learning grounded in practice. → Read Popova’s original passage on [The Marginalian](#) ⸻ 5. ## Make Better “In dialogue, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins,” from On Dialogue (1996) — David Bohm David Bohm captures his vision of collective inquiry. Dialogue, for Bohm, is not argument but exploration — a suspension of judgement that allows thought to unfold communally. In creative studios, critique often risks becoming debate; Bohm’s insight reframes it as a shared process of seeing more clearly together. The “win” is understanding — when one participant articulates something new, it lifts the whole field. Practising dialogue means cultivating listening as a creative act: holding multiple perspectives without collapsing them into agreement. It turns feedback into co-creation, where making better is both personal and collective. The studio thus becomes a living system of thought — ideas circulating, refining, deepening. This principle also resists hierarchy: knowledge emerges through relation, not authority. In a culture obsessed with individual achievement, Bohm offers another metric — coherence, not conquest. → [Read more on Bohm Dialogue](#) ⸻ 6. ## Be Demanding “Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.” from Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit (1985) — Sister Corita Kent & John Cage This is not an exhortation to extraction, but to engagement. To pull everything out is to meet learning as collaboration — to awaken the potential that exists between people. Demandingness here is generosity’s twin: it acknowledges that growth requires friction, that curiosity is a form of respect. In a studio, this manifests as rigorous conversation, probing critique, shared striving. To expect more from one another is to recognise what’s latent in the group. Kent and Cage, both educators as well as artists, understood that creativity flourishes under pressure when that pressure is mutual and kind. Being demanding is not dominance; it is commitment to possibility. Every exchange becomes a site of activation — an invitation to exceed one’s own boundaries in company with others. → Explore [Learning by Heart](#) online ⸻ 7. ## Be Kind “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns,” from Parable of the Sower (1993) — Octavia E. Butler Octavia Butler’s line appears in Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993). It reframes originality as renewal. Butler’s speculative worlds teach that change is both inevitable and necessary — that kindness, adaptability, and imagination sustain life. Within creative practice, “new suns” represent the countless small reconfigurations through which old materials gain new meaning. Being kind to failure, as your principle suggests, is part of this regenerative cycle: mistakes are compost for new suns. Butler’s aphorism dismantles the anxiety of novelty by affirming that invention arises from recombination. Kindness, then, is epistemic as well as ethical — it allows learning to occur by keeping the field open. In a studio, kindness establishes the psychological safety required for experimentation, where uncertainty is treated not as weakness but as fuel for growth. → [Read Butler’s quote](#) in context ⸻ 8. ## Improvise Together “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams.” from Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001) Though applied mostly in software develpoment, The Agile Manifesto maps directly onto collaborative creative work. Self-organisation relies on trust, transparency, and adaptability — conditions under which improvisation thrives. In a studio, improvisation is not chaos but responsiveness: structure emerges through interaction rather than instruction. When roles loosen, possibilities multiply. The manifesto’s insight is that creativity accelerates when authority circulates, when people closest to the work shape its form. This principle challenges the myth of the singular author and foregrounds collective intelligence. Improvising together is the practice of shared rhythm — listening, adjusting, building coherence in motion. The product — a design, performance, or idea — becomes the residue of that process. The studio thus mirrors a living system: adaptive, self-correcting, alive to change. → [Read the Agile Manifesto](#) ⸻ 9. ## Multiply the Futures “The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.” from interview with Sun Ra, The Paris Review, 1988 The phrase encapsulates Sun Ra’s radical imagination — a refusal to be bound by existing narratives of what can be done. For creative practice, this is both challenge and liberation: the impossible is the edge of the known, the invitation to transcend inherited limits. To “multiply the futures” means cultivating plural imagination, recognising that there is never just one way forward. In a studio, this might look like prototyping parallel ideas, holding contradictory possibilities in play, or designing artefacts from speculative worlds. Sun Ra’s work reminds us that the future is not discovered but composed. Every creative act is a small act of world-building, a rehearsal for different realities. Trying the impossible is not naïve — it’s necessary, especially in times when the merely possible has ceased to inspire. → [Explore Sun Ra’s philosophy](#) on The Paris Review ⸻