The contemporary design studio operates within shifting conditions that challenge its historical foundations. No longer simply a workshop of form-making or visual communication, the studio is increasingly drawn into complex entanglements—technological, ecological, social—that demand critical reflection and adaptive practice. It becomes a site of situated inquiry: a space where infrastructures are made visible, where hybridities are rehearsed, and where futures are tentatively composed.

The studio’s position, both literal and conceptual, is shaped by inherited material legacies and emergent ethico-political demands. Its walls contain more than desks and tools—they contain histories of labour, systems of reproduction, and contested protocols of authorship. To understand its role today, we must read the studio not merely as a space of production, but as a post-industrial apparatus—one capable of reimagining publishing as a sustainable, collective, and critically engaged practice.

Materialist Inheritance and Modernist Shadows

The specter of modernism continues to haunt the studio, its ethos of clarity, standardisation, and universality lingering in the typographic systems, grid structures, and modular thinking that pervade much of contemporary design. Yet this inheritance is ambivalent. The modernist project, with its utopian aspirations, also carried with it the logics of industrialisation and optimisation—an “economical page” born of efficiency, not ecology. The studio today must reckon with this materialist legacy: not by rejecting it wholesale, but by re-reading it critically, tactically inhabiting its forms to expose their ideological substrata.

This parasitic strategy—a mode of “critical mimicry”—allows the studio to operate within existing infrastructures while subtly reconfiguring them. The ISO standard, the A4 page, the offset press, the PDF export—these are not neutral tools, but historically situated technologies. As Craig Dworkin (2013) reminds us, “No medium is ever empty.” In re-appropriating these forms, the studio transforms them from carriers of bureaucratic clarity into vessels of aesthetic resistance and epistemological play.

The Dissolution of Matter and the Hybrid Future

Simultaneously, we find ourselves in a time when matter itself is dissolving—flattened into screens, reduced to vectors, consumed through interfaces. The rise of post-digital publishing has created a terrain where the printed page coexists with the scrollable screen, where presence and absence blur, and where materiality becomes spectral. Alessandro Ludovico (2012) characterises this moment as a mutation rather than a rupture: publishing has not disappeared, but dispersed.

In this context, the physical studio must resist becoming obsolete. Its continued relevance depends on its ability to act as a node—a place where hybrid modes of production, distribution, and imagination can converge. It is not a nostalgic return to print, nor a wholesale embrace of the virtual, but a careful negotiation between the two. The studio becomes an incubator for what might be called situated hybridity—a way of working that honours material conditions while experimenting with immaterial extensions.

Sustainable Practice and the Studio as Infrastructure

To be a sustainable design studio today is not merely to print on recycled paper or reduce emissions. It is to rethink what counts as value, labour, time, and visibility. Publishing, in this expanded field, becomes an infrastructural act—a means of maintaining, supporting, and distributing ideas, communities, and forms of care. This is where the studio transforms from a production unit into a cultural infrastructure: one that is small-scale, relational, and durational.

Such a model finds resonance with Ivan Illich’s (1973) concept of convivial tools: technologies and systems that enhance autonomy and mutual aid, rather than dependency and extractivism. The studio, then, is not only a place of output but a practice of maintenance—of protocols, spaces, and human relationships. Publishing becomes less about launching objects into the world and more about holding space for collective sense-making.

Toward a Desirable Immateriality

The future of publishing is not immaterial in the sense of weightlessness, but in the sense of immanence—a quality that emerges through encounters, affects, and shared imaginaries. In this future, the studio may no longer distinguish between book and event, between layout and logistics. It operates across formats and durations, working with print-on-demand as easily as with community workshops, version-controlled documents, or performative gatherings. These practices are not supplemental but central to its role as a publishing organism—a living system of circulation, friction, and care.

In this light, the studio positions itself not at the end of design history but at the beginning of something else: a post-capitalist, post-disciplinary ecology of making and sharing. It becomes a site of potential, where publishing is reclaimed from the engines of scale and returned to the textures of intimacy, locality, and desire.

Disappearing Matter, Platform Logics, and the End of Tools

Designers increasingly work through screens, interfaces, and cloud services—engaging in what can be described as immaterial operations. Files are stored in remote servers, tools are updated or deprecated without notice, and production chains are fragmented across continents. In this context, the idea of the studio as a place of hands-on, material engagement is under threat.

This disconnection is not merely technical—it is existential. Tools, once extensions of the hand and the body, are now automated, virtualised, and leased. As Bernard Stiegler (2010) argued, the loss of technical individuation leads to a loss of memory and agency. And as David Graeber (2018) observed, much of what passes for “work” today is increasingly managerial, administrative, or abstracted—detached from meaningful creation or direct social value. Design studios risk becoming sites of bullshit work, absorbed into the logic of platforms that prioritise speed, visibility, and scale over situated, ethical practice.

Obsolescence, Burnout, and the Erosion of Relations

The acceleration of obsolescence—of tools, knowledge, even aesthetics—creates a culture of permanent update. Designers are compelled to continuously learn new software, respond to new trends, and adapt to new logics, often at the expense of depth, slowness, or care. The studio, if uncritically absorbed into this cycle, becomes complicit in the erosion of relational work: collaboration becomes transactional, communities become audiences, and knowledge becomes data.

This is not just a technical issue, but a social one. Graeber’s (2011) analysis of debt reminds us that human relations, when mediated by extractive systems, become distorted and hierarchical. In the same vein, the relationships that sustain design—between peers, between disciplines, between publics—are fraying under the weight of deadlines, deliverables, and digital fatigue. The physical studio, if it is to survive meaningfully, must become a space for rebuilding these relations—slowly, collectively, and materially.

The Studio as Infrastructure of Care

What then does a sustainable, future-oriented design studio look like? It is not defined by productivity metrics or brand coherence, but by its capacity to hold space—for experimentation, for maintenance, for collective thinking. It becomes less a factory than an infrastructure: an ecology of tools, bodies, and thoughts held together by care rather than capital.

In this model, publishing is no longer the final output of a linear process. It becomes the method itself: a way of documenting, sharing, and rehearsing alternatives. It is through publishing that the studio articulates its position, critiques its conditions, and proposes other possible worlds. As Johanna Drucker (2004) suggests, design is not simply a carrier of content, but a performative act that structures how knowledge is encountered. And as Silvio Lorusso (2023) adds, the template, the format, the interface—these are the front lines of ideological and aesthetic struggle.

Toward a Post-Platform Publishing Ecology

To sustain itself in the context of hybrid publishing futures, the studio must operate at the intersection of the infrastructural and the poetic. It must engage with both the material limits of paper, ink, and tools, and the expanded field of digital workflows, collective platforms, and speculative imaginaries. This does not mean abandoning the physical, but rather rethinking its role: not as obsolete, but as resilient—as a site where memory, matter, and meaning can be recomposed.

In doing so, the studio can begin to withdraw from extractive platform economies and reorient itself towards convivial infrastructures. This is where Ivan Illich’s (1973) concept of tools for conviviality becomes relevant again: tools and practices that are accessible, shareable and orientated towards autonomy and mutual support. The studio, seen through this lens, is not just a place of work – it is a node in a wider network of material and immaterial relationships, a space of publication-as-communion, a project of the possible.

Has the Studio Always Been a Network?

Yet one must ask: has the studio not always been a space of relations—material and immaterial, practical and symbolic?The statement that “the studio is not just a workplace” risks sounding like a contemporary rediscovery of something that, in many ways, was always already true. From Renaissance botteghe to Bauhaus ateliers, from artist collectives to underground printshops, the studio has historically functioned as a site of apprenticeship, exchange, speculation, and infrastructural entanglement. It was never purely functional, never entirely autonomous, and rarely apolitical.

What we now describe as publishing-as-commoning, or as designing infrastructures of care, may in fact echo older, slower rhythms of practice—ones based not on acceleration or visibility, but on continuity, interdependence, and tacit knowledge. Before the current obsession with innovation, studios were places where tools were passed down, ideas were rehearsed collectively, and publishing was inseparable from pedagogical and political commitments.

However, what has changed is the intensity of abstraction, the extent of disconnection from material reality, and the dominance of platform logics that flatten, extract, and monetize every trace of studio activity. The risk today is that the studio becomes aestheticized as a zone of resistance while it is being quietly absorbed into the very infrastructures it claims to critique.

As Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009) warns, the neoliberal economy of signs has rendered creative work precarious, self-exploitative, and affectively draining. Under these conditions, the re-imagining of the studio as a node of possibility must guard against becoming a comforting myth. It must instead be grounded in infrastructural realism: in an honest accounting of what tools are available, what relations are sustainable, and what forms of publishing are truly emancipatory—not just formally experimental, but socially and ecologically committed.

The Future Studio Must Be Invented

Therefore, the question is not whether the studio was always a relational node, but whether it can remain one under the conditions of late platform capitalism. Can it sustain its autonomy amidst outsourcing, automation, and the demand for constant content? Can it host collective life when the very rhythms of attention and time are fractured by notification systems and algorithmic feeds?

To affirm the studio’s potential is not to indulge in nostalgia, but to recognize its radical openness. The studio, in this view, is not a fixed structure but a negotiable space—one that must be continually re-assembled around care, resistance, and imagination. It is less a room with walls than a temporary constellation: a place where publishing becomes a way to compose worlds rather than merely reproduce them.

In this sense, to design the studio is to design not only tools or formats, but conditions of possibility. And to publish—critically, slowly, materially—is to resist the dissolution of thought into data, of community into audience, of labour into metrics. This is the quiet, daily work of the future studio. It must be invented again and again.

Reprogramming the Studio: AI, Technical Systems, and the Politics of Publication

The contemporary studio does not operate in isolation from planetary-scale computation. Increasingly, it is embedded in a mesh of algorithmic processes, remote infrastructures, and automated workflows that exceed human perception. The rise of artificial intelligence, parametric design, machine vision, and synthetic image-making has profoundly altered the coordinates of design practice—and, by extension, of what it means to publish.

To publish is no longer only to make something public in the traditional sense (a text, a book, a poster), but to operationalise it: to introduce a form, image, or protocol into a networked field where it can be copied, indexed, recombined, and acted upon. The studio, in this expanded field, becomes less an authorial site and more an interface—a zone of mediation between human agency and machine processes, between speculation and execution.

In The Terraforming, Benjamin H. Bratton (2020) proposes that design must reorient itself from surface aesthetics to systems thinking, from representation to infrastructural intervention. In this model, the studio is not merely a place of expression but a site of synthetic reasoning—a platform for negotiating the implications of computation at scale. AI, in this context, is not just a tool, but a kind of epistemological shift: a new actor in the studio’s ecology, capable of generating, filtering, and even deciding what becomes visible or knowable.

Yet with this shift comes a series of ethical and political challenges. What are the implications of delegating the act of publication to non-human agents? How do we ensure that the studio does not become merely a curator of outputs generated elsewhere—by datasets, algorithms, or corporate platforms? And how can publishing remain a space of criticality, subjectivity, and dissent in a context increasingly shaped by predictive models and computational bias?

AI and the Automation of Publicness

If publishing was once a gesture of intentional exposure—of making something known, shared, or debatable—it now risks being automated into a series of algorithmic optimisations. Recommendation engines, engagement metrics, and generative systems have begun to reshape not only what is published, but why and how it is published. Visibility itself has become infrastructural: curated by platforms, managed by code, and modulated by monetisation.

The danger is not the presence of AI per se, but the loss of intentionality and locality in publishing practices. The studio that embraces AI without critique risks accelerating the logic of content farming, rather than inventing new grammars of collective meaning. As Bratton reminds us, the future must be designed, not merely predicted—and this requires studios capable of situating their practices within broader geopolitical, technological, and ecological systems.

To engage AI critically is therefore not to reject it, but to embed it within a wider epistemology of design. A future-oriented studio might work with machine learning models—but to destabilise rather than reinforce their assumptions, to test their boundaries, to use them as lenses for rethinking authorship, agency, and representation. In such a configuration, publishing becomes an act of meta-design: designing the conditions under which meaning, knowledge, and relation are produced.

Between Automation and Agency: Studios Experimenting with AI in Editorial Practice

In navigating the complex entanglement between computation and culture, several design studios and collectives have begun to experiment—critically and creatively—with the possibilities and risks that artificial intelligence brings to publishing. These practices are not unified by aesthetic style or technological determinism; rather, they share a common concern with how tools shape thought, how infrastructure affects language, and how editorial practice can remain meaningful within algorithmic systems.

Speculative Glossaries and Semiotic Experiments

Studio like Commonplace Studio (Amsterdam) https://www.commonplace.nl have incorporated AI-generated text in the creation of speculative glossaries—hybrid textual forms that blur the boundaries between lexicon, poetry, and critical theory. Using models similar to GPT, they prompt the generation of new terminologies for emergent phenomena (e.g., climate anxiety, post-human kinship, planetary labor), which are then edited, situated, or deliberately deformed by human collaborators.

These experiments foreground a double gesture: delegating the initial generative act to machine language while reclaiming authorship through curation, interruption, and reframing. The glossary becomes a publishing act not of final authority but of open speculation—an editorial invitation to collective redefinition.

Generative Design Systems and Ecological Grounding

The Barcelona-based holon studio https://holon.cat/en/ explores generative design by linking machine learning tools with datasets derived from local ecologies—such as microclimate patterns, soil compositions, and urban biodiversity indexes. In one project, machine-generated graphic systems responded to the fluctuations of environmental sensors installed in public gardens, producing dynamic zine-like publications that registered, printed, and shared real-time environmental conditions.

Rather than treating AI as a detached intelligence, this model treats it as a relational interface—an interpreter of ecological signals. The resulting publications are more than visual objects: they are infrastructures of situated witnessing, where the algorithmic and the atmospheric converge in editorial form.

Archival Automation and Community Memory

The Berlin-based collective Kapsel https://kapsel.space works with autonomous archiving tools to maintain and distribute zines, pamphlets, and minor publications produced in local activist networks. They employ simple AI classifiers to help tag, organise, and retrieve material across time—especially useful for oral history projects or ephemeral protest media that resist traditional cataloguing.

Here, automation is used not to erase labour but to extend it: liberating time for deeper community engagement while ensuring that the archive remains usable and alive. Publishing, in this model, is both a technical and political act of memory maintenance.

Critical Resistance to Automation

Not all studios embrace AI uncritically. The collective Banner Repeater (London) https://www.bannerrepeater.org, located on a train station platform, frames its publishing work as a resistance to computational standardisation. Through slow publishing, risograph processes, and performative reading groups, they build editorial contexts that are intentionally opaque to algorithmic parsing—fragments, marginalia, and subcultural references that frustrate indexing and refuse scale.

Their refusal is itself a kind of infrastructural publishing: not anti-technological, but counter-technological. It is a choice to design opacity, ambiguity, and care into systems that otherwise demand legibility and optimisation.

These examples suggest that AI is not inherently emancipatory or oppressive—it becomes what the studio makes of it. The design studio, as a relational and situated entity, has the capacity to reframe these tools not as substitutes for thought, but as provocations for deeper editorial engagement. It is in the interpretation—the gesture of framing, curating, rerouting—that publishing retains its critical force.

What remains to be imagined is how such practices could scale, not in quantity, but in planetary coherence—across temporalities, climates, and worldviews. This leads us to the next section: a speculative proposal for the terraforming studio.

The Terraforming Studio: Toward a Planetary Architecture of Publishing

If, as Benjamin H. Bratton (2020) suggests, design must rise to the scale of the planetary—not merely to visualise but to institute new systems—then the studio must no longer be imagined solely as a workshop of forms. It becomes instead a terraforming unit: a site of thought, code, and material articulation entangled with the infrastructures it seeks to modify. The publishing studio, in this vision, is not an atelier or a brand; it is a semiotic reactor, a performative space of planetary maintenance and modulation.

Publishing as Architecture, Code, and Ethics

In the terraformative paradigm, to publish is no longer only to express or communicate, but to construct worlds. This construction is not metaphorical—it is infrastructural, ontological, and ethical. Publishing shapes epistemic architectures: it codes what becomes legible, what is remembered, what is archived, and what is omitted. The terraformative studio recognises that to design a format, a layout, or a platform is to take a position on truth, on time, on relation.

This studio does not distinguish between architecture and metadata, between page and protocol. It treats design as a form of systemic ethics—an ongoing negotiation of scales, sovereignties, and temporalities. In doing so, it repoliticises publishing: not as an act of output, but as a commitment to the conditions of legibility and life.

Terraforming as Collective Editorial Infrastructure

The terraformative studio is not a solitary space of authorship, but a shared, plural, distributed infrastructure. It brings together designers, coders, ecologists, poets, theorists, and machines—not in service of consensus, but to cultivate divergence and interdependence. Its publications may take the form of books, yes—but also scripts, sensors, oral protocols, performative gatherings, distributed networks, satellite maps, or soil registers.

It publishes not to fill shelves but to compose rhythms: of maintenance, of attention, of cosmotechnical reciprocity. In this sense, the terraformative studio echoes Yuk Hui’s (2016) call for a multiplicity of “cosmotechnics”—technological worldviews grounded in specific ecologies, cultures, and metaphysics.

A Studio Without Walls, A Publishing Without Ends

What does such a studio look like? Perhaps it has no fixed address. Perhaps it emerges wherever protocols of care intersect with tools of expression. Perhaps it is temporarily installed in a server, a farm, a workshop, or a kitchen. Perhaps it publishes without paper—through shared repositories, rituals of telling, or streams of encoded witness.

The terraformative studio is not utopian; it is planetary in the full sense of the term: situated, entangled, flawed, and constantly in negotiation. It is less concerned with speed than with resonance—how forms resonate across scales, across species, across times.

This is not a future to be forecasted, but to be co-designed. The studio, in this light, is not a victim of automation or a passive receptor of tools—it is a compositional force. It reclaims design and publishing from the regime of immediacy and reinvests them with duration, reflection, and accountability.

Conclusion: Toward a Politics of Editorial Imagination

This essay has traced a path from material constraints to planetary imaginaries, from the inherited structures of the modernist studio to the speculative architectures of a “terraforming” practice. Along the way, it has interrogated the logics of automation, the allure of artificial intelligence, and the affective residue of obsolete tools and accelerated workflows. Yet rather than offering a solution or model to be replicated, it insists on something less conclusive and more urgent: a politics of editorial imagination.

To publish today is to act within and against systems—technical, economic, epistemological—that shape what is visible, sayable, and shareable. As anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us, “we are stuck with the trouble” of living in damaged landscapes, ecological or otherwise. But it is precisely from within this trouble that practices of care, repair, and speculation emerge—not as optimistic blueprints, but as situated experiments in survival and sense-making.

Design, in this view, is not a neutral language but a “world-making activity”, as Arturo Escobar (2018) puts it. It is a practice that can reproduce dominant infrastructures or recompose them from below—through minor gestures, collective rhythms, and publishing acts that imagine otherwise. The studio becomes a testing ground for such gestures: a place to question not only how we publish, but why and for whom.

This requires a mode of practice that is not only critical of external systems, but also autocritical—able to interrogate its own complicities, repetitions, and desires. It is a call, following Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013), to inhabit the “undercommons” of institutional life: to use the tools at hand not to sustain the present, but to sabotage and recompose it.

To do so is not to retreat into nostalgia or abandon technology, but to situate tools within ethics, ecologies, and collective imagination. Publishing becomes less about producing content than about creating conditions of encounter—between bodies and systems, memories and futures. As philosopher Édouard Glissant (1997) writes, “we demand the right to opacity”—to resist the total transparency imposed by platforms, to preserve the unknowable, the relational, the emergent.

In this context, the “terraforming studio” is not a utopian destination, but a method of attending to the world otherwise. It proposes that every act of publication is also an act of design: a configuration of power, attention, and possibility. It suggests that the future of publishing depends not only on new formats or tools, but on our capacity to reimagine what it means to share, to relate, and to endure together.

In the face of abstraction, we return to situatedness. In the face of automation, we return to relation. In the face of collapse, we design—and publish—not for certainty, but for the not-yet.

References

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MIT Press link

Bratton, B. H. (2020). The Terraforming. Strelka Press.
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