kinetic optimism studio
kinetic optimism studio

notes

 

These are notes from an ongoing inquiry into how people and technology relate to each other — and into what design can do when that relationship is still being formed.

They are not finished positions.
They are thinking made visible, offered in the spirit in which the rest of this site is offered: as an open invitation to the conversation.

We are in a period when the relationship between people and technology is still being shaped — by AI, by connected systems, by platforms that are becoming participants in daily life before anyone has asked what kind of participants they should be.

The year of keeping it together

 
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Missing our Studio

what we are learning when we are missing our Studio.

A studio is not a room.
It is a shared way of seeing — a commitment to asking certain questions persistently, even when the answers take a long time to arrive. Even when the collaboration is remote, or partial, or interrupted.

During the year we were without a physical studio, we discovered something that now seems obvious: the work continued, because the vision was shared. The studio was in the questions we kept returning to, the problems we could not leave alone.
What is technology capable of in this situation that it is not currently doing?
What does this connected system understand about the people it is with?
What would it mean for it to notice?
You can ask these questions over zoom and anywhere. You can make progress on them in twenty minutes of unscripted conversation between two people who see the same thing.
The studio, wherever it is, is the place where that conversation happens consistently enough to become practice.

Working as a Studio without a studio is a techno-social experiment. Studio is not defined by where we are, but why we are.
Design Studio is a place where you investigate new ideas and put things together to make new stuff.
Studio helps to apply and evolve your vision through projects and design investigations. Studio is a place to develop ideas that let you see the world in new ways.

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A place that inspires collaborations, messy human energy encouraging discovery, tinkering with ideas, objects, and materials. It’s more than a physical space.

Studio invites curiosity about things that don’t make obvious sense, leaving space for creative associations.

Sometimes in a studio, you don’t know what you are looking for until you find it, learning by trying new things.

Year of remote collaboration helped us realize that vision we share continues to inform our studio practice.

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Studio is not defined by where we are, but the why we are. And the how we see the world and the purpose of our work.

The energy of studio is in a shared vision, values, and goals that foster inspired collaboration.

We continue learning new things and seek new ways: how to put this world back together to be more resilient.

  • Learning how to create intentional change, how design can make room for more possibilities.

  • Learning that the most advanced design tool you have is your imagination.

  • Learning how to inspire new expectations, inspire new relations with each other and how to have better relationship with the world around us.

  • Learning to inhabit virtual collaboration places with shared imagination, humanity, and meaning.

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Working as a Studio without a studio is a techno-social experiment.

We are leaning into openings of unscripted human energy, shared moments of flow, learning by doing, discovery, and above all, keeping it together.

And in these moments, our studio feels unexpectedly, tangibly, present.

 
wojtek szumowski