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How the CPS is built

Studio case note · June 2026

Every studio has a production process. Ours is a system that runs itself and improves itself while it runs.

We call it the CPS, the Conversational Production System. It's the apparatus inside Good Design where I work with Claude to organize three things: mind, meaning, and material. Mind is the thinking, the ideas and concepts carried in language. Meaning is the feel, the character and tone and aesthetic. Material is the literal output, a 4K video file, a thumbnail, an article, a deployed page. Most production processes treat these as separate stages handed between people. The CPS treats them as one cascade and keeps them coherent from idea to file.

The system behaves more like an ecosystem than a pipeline. It has parts that do their own work with their own inputs and outputs — what Herbert Simon called a near-decomposable system, one whose components run largely on their own internal business and interact only at the seams (Simon, 1969). A task queue orders what happens next. Orchestration services watch for work that's ready, fire it, and notify me when a step needs my hands. Canon, our source of truth in Notion, holds every locked decision so nothing gets re-litigated. None of this is ceremony around the creative work. It's the mechanism that lets one person carry many projects without the work going generic — the system supplies the requisite variety a solo operator can't hold alone, in Ashby's sense that a regulator needs as much variety as the situation it manages (Ashby, 1956).

The part that matters most is that the CPS examines itself. As it produces, it looks for problems to fix now, problems to head off later, and openings to run cheaper or better. When a session learns something worth keeping, it writes that learning back into the structure, and the next session starts smarter. The system uses its own surpluses to grow itself. A system that watches and revises itself this way is what Stafford Beer designed for in the viable firm (Beer, 1972), and what second-order cybernetics describes as a system that includes its own observing in the loop — Heinz von Foerster's account of systems that observe themselves (von Foerster, 2003).

That recursion is the whole design. A production process that only produces gets stale. One that produces and refines how it produces gets better every week it runs.