One of the biggest challenges in writing Studio Properties was trying to define studio without, well … defining it.

Studio is made up from a whole set of tacit, cultural, and emergent bits and pieces that make it difficult to be explicit about. You cannot define or measure studio in certain ways, such as specifying how it should be formed with any confidence of outcome.

At the same time, this very un-definability is often argued to be a key thing that makes studio what it is. Studio is not something created by following a set of explicit instructions; it is something that emerges from setting up initial conditions and then responding to situations along a set of guides, norms, cultures, and so on.

So how do you balance saying something about something that cannot be defined?

What we settled on was avoiding this question completely and basing the work on what others said about studio!

OK, we didn’t completely avoid it. But having the Guiding Principle of using existing scholarship and research was an important part of the work.

First, this gave us a condition to work to, allowing us to make progress without it being right or correct from the start. Instead, allowing judgement to be part of the definition of the knowledge itself.

Second, it highlighted how much knowledge is already out there and that we’re not always aware of. We ended up citing 700+ articles, books, and other pieces of writing. The references section is nearly 10% of the book!

For me, this last point was a real reminder that others have come before us and said a lot of useful stuff that should not just be ignored. (of course, there is also a lot of stuff that needs to be read with updates…).

Of course, it also means that this book is not a final thing either – Studio Properties is also the start of a studio in itself. It is not a definition and that means that it is also incomplete.

Personally, that’s one the things I’m most looking forward to as an author: the fact that the work is unfinished and that other work might build on it, transform it, or even replace it.

Or it might just be an early Pitch for Studio Properties 2 …