Most studios I have worked in describe themselves as agencies, or labs, or — once, painfully — as collectives. None of those felt right. The metaphor that has stuck, ten years in, is the kitchen.
A kitchen is a place where a small number of people, each good at one or two things, prepare food for a slightly larger number of people, who eat it. There is a head chef. There is a sous chef. There is a person who, despite the title, is mostly responsible for keeping the room from descending into chaos at 7:45pm on a Friday. The work is daily, physical, and entirely unsentimental.
Design studios, when they're working, look almost exactly like that.
How we hire
We hire one person every eighteen months, on average. Sometimes two, in unusual years. Almost never zero — we've found that going more than two years without hiring, even when we don't strictly need to, makes the studio quieter than it should be.
We do not hire for portfolios. We hire for taste, which is a thing portfolios sometimes hide and sometimes reveal. The interview is two parts: a long lunch, and a small piece of work the candidate does at our studio, on a tight brief, over a single afternoon. The lunch tells us if we want to share a kitchen with the person. The afternoon tells us how they think when nobody is watching.
The best people are almost never trying to impress you. They are trying to figure out the actual problem.
How we work
The studio opens at nine. Most people arrive between nine-fifteen and ten. The first hour is quiet — coffee, drawing, reading — and we have learned, the hard way, never to schedule meetings before eleven. Mornings are for the kind of thinking that does not survive a Slack notification.
The middle of the day is for talking. Reviews, walks, small lunches, the half-hour spent staring at a printed page on the studio table while three of us decide whether the spacing is right. This is the part of the day that looks, to outside observers, the least like work. It is, almost always, where the actual decisions get made.
The end of the day, four to six, is when the best work happens. The building is half-empty. The day's noise has settled. Someone — usually whoever is least senior — has the room to themselves and a problem they have been quietly chewing on since lunch. Two hours of that is worth a full day of meetings.
- We do not work weekends. Not as a policy — we just don't.
- We don't have an office Slack channel for design feedback. Design feedback is given in person, or it isn't given.
- We share lunch on Fridays. Whoever cooks decides what's for lunch. There is no menu.
The argument
None of this is a productivity system. We have, more than once, looked at the calendar and noticed that the studio simply did not produce anything significant for two weeks. We worry about it for an afternoon. Then a thing ships, and the two weeks turn out to have been the thing, just before it became visible.
A kitchen, working well, looks slow from the outside and then, suddenly, looks like dinner. We have stopped trying to make it look any other way.