You don’t need to be Google to engage in a little industrial psychology. I note the tone of Berg London’s update postings (“weeknotes”), which create a near-palpable YOU ARE HERE feel. The mystique they are trying to imbue runs as follows: These theoreticians (in Berg’s case, of media) are doing important, interesting work. Unlike lackadaisical freelancers and procrastinators, they get things done every week – and they’re only too happy to tell us about it.
The nucleus around which all this atmosphere crystallizes is the word studio – so important it merits its own page. In this day and age, who really wants to be a “developer” working in an “office”? (Or, God help us, a “plex” or a “campus”?) At the very least, wouldn’t you prefer to be a designer, or, if more advanced, a creative technologist or director, or, at the pinnacle, a principal, all working tickety-boo in a studio?
This kind of mythmaking, while agreeable and humanizing, is also self-aggrandizing. And it works: Berg keeps hiring, and their shit don’t stink. It’s a model that works well enough that another theoretician, this time of urban computing, adopted it wholesale, “studio” and all.