Studio D Radiodurans is «a research, design and strategy consultancy». A sentence that could describe thousands and thousands of design studios around the world. Studio D, however, is unique and incredibly and constantly fascinating. Studio D is a design studio that doesn’t feel real. They seem to come out straight from William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, his series of books set in the contemporary universe, in what Gibson himself defines «the 2010 zeitgeist». I have evidences.
Evidence 1: The studio name comes from Deinococcus Radiodurans, and rarely I have heard a design studio name that sounds less cool. If anything, design studios want to sound as cool as possible. But the fact that they decided to call it like this anyway is a clear declaration of intents: they don’t really care, it’s not the point. The point is that you can just shorten it to a very enigmatic Studio D and that when people ask you can tell the story of Deinococcus Radiodurans, an extremophilic bacteria discovered in 1965 that «can survive acid, drought and has extraordinary tolerance to radiation».
Evidence 2: The founder of Studio D is Jan Chipchase. He was — prepare for very long job title — Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog and worked for a long time for Nokia, researching how people used cell phones. Jan is probably the least outspoken designer in the world. He gave few talks years ago but has since basically disappeared. Jan publishes sporadical reports with delightful findings and critical insights and then submerges again. Studio D website doesn’t have a list of clients, a list of cases, a list of designers and researchers. In a rare interview given to Bloomberg, Chipchase says that it’s easier this way, both for clients that prefer «keeping relationships discreet» and for the work they do.
They often self-describe as a «pop-up studio» that focuses on field-research. Their approach is to go as close to the users as possible, to understand them deeply and truly. This is a common part of the design process: understanding people, and their needs, allows designers to build effective, innovative and successful product. However, few studios operate the way Studio D does, trying to blend in to the point of living near the people they are trying to understand, the way an anthropologist would do. The default mode for Studio D seems to be the incognito mode.
Evidence 3: in 2012, Chipchase and assistants (Studio D didn’t formally exist at the time) ran a pretty crazy experiment to probe and understand the ever growing and incredibly complex China’s manufacturing industry. The objective of the project was to «manufacture of a large physical object, where no-one know’s what they are making, until the moment of completion». The process involved more than three hundred people, employed both via traditional means and via crowdsourcing websites and touched dozen of services, factories and shops spread all over China. In the end, a hundred regular and custom made red door-mats (an extremely common door-mat style in China) were manufactured and, after six months, assembled together for the first time in a gigantic flag of the People’s Republic of China. The results of the experiment are detailed in a 37 pages booklet entitled Ghost Factory on sale on Studio D website.
Evidence 4: in 2014 and in 2015 Studio D reported to have a grand total of 0 permanent employees. It is unclear if they hired permanent employees for 2016 but it’s interesting to notice how they approach field research and design: by assembling a different team every time, picking the right people for every project. You know… the way you would do in a heist movie.
Evidence 5, somewhat related to Evidence 4: Studio D has as a side business — SDR Traveller — that designs and produces a variety of travel bags and equipment. One of the bags they produce is the 1M Hauly Heist (!!!) a duffle bag that can fit exactly one million dollars in banknotes and is designed to minimize «the risk of radio frequency tracking».
So… a design studio named after the scientific name of a bacteria that can survive in basically any condition, that works almost entirely in stealth mode, assembles on the fly and produces — as a side business — incredibly expansive duffle bags sized to carry 1 million dollars in cash and cover cell signals. Can it get more Gibson than this? I don’t think so. And, to be honest, if it wasn’t for the constant and beautiful stream of pictures that Studio D outputs on Instagram, I would actually have some trouble believing that they are not strange design fiction experiment from Gibson himself, trying to poke at our imagination with stories of a design studio that shouldn’t be.
Instead, we have this, an ongoing effort in running a design studio at the fringe of reality. And I couldn’t be more interested in following along.
(The photo at the top is from Studio D’s Transformations: The Impact Of Aging On Society report, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)
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