Welcome, new subscribers from Twitter!

I’m sending this out earlier than I’d planned because one of the projects I was hoping to share with you just got delayed until November — and that’s too long to make all of you wait.

So here’s Part 1: a short profile I wrote for Businessweek of Studio D Radiodurans, a design consultancy that operates like Mission: Impossible. No staff, no offices, no visible clientele. They also sell $1000 duffel bags designed for smuggling a million bucks in small bills past bribe-seeking border agents. See, it’s right there in the headline!

Studio D’s founder, Jan Chipchase, has been dubbed “the Indiana Jones of design researchers.” But after working on this story, I’d say he’s more like T.E. Lawrence: British, soft-spoken, poetically inclined, physically courageous, and inexplicably willing to follow his curiosity into places few others would.

And like Lawrence — whose allegiance may have been to England on paper but may have been more practically aligned with his Bedouin partners on the ground — Chipchase walks a fascinating line between serving the interests of his clients, those of the people in “developing markets” he’s sent to research, and those of his own ego.

From his website:

Sounds familiar.

But what sets professional curiosity-ers like Chipchase (or Alan Kay, or Ian Bogost, or…) apart is that they seek interesting questions more than interesting answers. (He kept trying to interview me the whole time I was interviewing him.) I don’t think they actually want to “close” a subject in the way that most of us ultimately do: “OK, got it, check. Moving on.” Their interest is fractal: it could zoom in or out forever.

The reason they get paid the big bucks, though, is that they can make meaningful observations from whatever arbitrary level of zoomed-in detail they (or their client) may choose to inhabit.

Here’s a quote from Chipchase’s former boss on what makes the guy unique, that didn't make it into my profile. And it has nothing to do with acting like Indiana Jones:

Keep seeing,
J