Across the room, a prodigious young culture curator, whose Brain Pickings blog has managed to attract fans as disparate as Pee-wee Herman and professors from M.I.T., was posting about “must-read books on the art and science of happiness.” Two Web developers from a company called Fictive Kin joked about Russian spammers. A ZZ Top song was playing. The office puppy was napping. A clipboard was going around for lunch orders.
As a group, the writers, Web designers, illustrators and social media figures who share the Studiomates collective in Dumbo have around a half-million followers on Twitter and many more on their blogs, Foursquare accounts and Facebook pages.
Yet it’s the offline interaction — the group lunches, the whiteboard brainstorming sessions, the Friday beer parties — that puts Studiomates at the forefront of an innovative new model for doing business.
It turns out that 140 characters in a Twitter post cannot compete with 26 characters in a Brooklyn loft.
Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks.
The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”
“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”
Studiomates is an especially information-oriented bunch, and an influential one, too. In addition to her swissmiss blog and Twitter following of 200,000, Ms. Eisenberg is the founder of Creative Mornings, a popular monthly speaking series that has young designers in four cities talking.
Jason Santa Maria, 32, a graphic designer and the kind of free-thinking creative who makes magazines for people who make Web sites, has more than 175,000 Twitter followers.
The trio of graphic designers from Workshop, all based at Studiomates, creates much of the printed material for the TED Conferences and the New York Philharmonic.
Maria Popova (@Brainpicker to her 60,000 Twitter followers) delivers a steady stream of wonders and high-minded divertissement, like deep-space photography and Lego art, and recently began blogging for The Atlantic. Her impact score on Twitalyzer, an independent research group that tracks Twitter influence, puts her in the 99.9th percentile; she ranks higher than Anderson Cooper, Sarah Palin and Justin Timberlake.
Even the two Studiomates dogs, Pinky and the sleepy Mr. Toast, are on Twitter (albeit with fewer followers than Ashton Kutcher).
“The move to co-working is a move from a culture of me to a culture of we,” said Rachel Botsman, the author of “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.” “People are looking to express their individualism but want to do it in a more social way. They’ve experienced how to do that virtually on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. Now they’re looking for that face-to-face interaction.” The number of co-working spaces like Studiomates has roughly doubled worldwide over the last year, said Joel Dullroy, an editor at?Deskmag, an online co-working magazine. In North America, the number increased to 342, representing a growth of 16 percent between October 2010 and February 2011, Mr. Dullroy said.
New York City alone has dozens of co-working spaces, from Pizza Island, the all-female collective of cartoonists in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to New Work City, an exposed-brick den of freelancers in Little Italy, open to anyone who can obey the simple house rules outlined by Tony Bacigalupo, a founder of the space: 1. Show up, 2. Bring some work to do, 3. Don’t be a jerk.
Not surprisingly, the earliest adopters of co-working came out of Silicon Valley. In 2005, Brad Neuberg was a freelance software programmer in San Francisco when he created the first co-working space in the city’s Mission District.
The San Francisco Co-Working Space, which has since closed, had a group-friendly atmosphere (clustered desks, hangout areas, lots and lots of coffee) common today at co-working places like Independents Hall in Philadelphia and Dogpatch, which provides desk space to aspiring entrepreneurs in Cambridge, Mass.; New York, and San Francisco.
“The giggle factor was high in the beginning because people always assumed you either worked for yourself or you worked in an office,” Mr. Neuberg said.
Today, even those who dabble in co-working have options. A “jelly” is the term for a free meet-up that brings freelancers together at a cafe or other public site on days when a housecat’s company is simply not enough. Web sites like Deskwanted, Loosecubes and Desktime connect independent workers with shared spaces by the day, week or month for a fee.
At lunch at Studiomates one day last month, most of the members gathered over takeout cartons at a communal table with a group of smart-looking visitors from m_ss_ng p_eces, a creative agency in Brooklyn. The guests were invited as part of a speaking series that has included founders of media and design companies like Kickstarter, Pinterest and Svpply.
It was hard to get a word in. The group’s conversation moved from negative comments posted on YouTube to “miracle berries” that turn the taste of sour foods to sweet to why Ms. Popova was walking around barefoot (she was raising awareness for Toms’ One Day Without Shoes campaign, she said). Nobody was checking e-mail.
“This is the first time I’ve had community at work,” said Ms. Popova, who also has a full-time job as Insight Patternist at TBWA Worldwide. She splits her time between Studiomates and TBWA’s Madison Avenue office since the advertising agency “sees the value of my being in an environment where I can keep a finger on the pulse of creative culture and tech,” she said.
Much of the content for her blog and Twitter feed comes from the casual conversations at Studiomates. “The day-to-day distraction level may be slightly higher,” Ms. Popova said. “But in terms of the influx of the building blocks of productivity — ideas, story tips, the interesting people who come in — an environment like this is priceless.”
If the emphasis is on ideas at Studiomates, the focus at General Assembly, a co-working space in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, is money. The 20,000-square foot “campus,” which opened three months ago and is already booked to its 100-seat capacity, has presentation rooms sponsored by Skype, sleek communal worktables and a list of free agent members including Chris Maguire, a founder of Etsy; Amanda Hesser, the former New York Times food writer and a founder of the Food52 cookbook project; and Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook and coordinator of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
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