Studio 2: Set your rules, shape your question
This studio is part of a book in active development and has not yet been through the author’s review. Content may change as the review advances.
What you can defend when you leave. Set how you and your tools will work while the stakes are still small, verify your first AI assistance, and close by declaring the question your evidence will answer.
The milestone ahead
Your committed problem now needs two things at once: guardrails, and an exact sentence. The rules are not a preface to the question; they govern how it is written — which parts AI may draft, which decisions stay yours, what gets verified, what gets recorded, and what your name signs. So this studio interleaves its two purposes. You open the ledger and map the work, test a claim your starting belief already makes, and put your name on the record. Then, under those rules, you classify the question, draft its wording with every change accounted for, and close with the field card, the boundary pair, and the stranger test. Every later studio traces its evidence, design, analysis, and claim back to a declared question, and to the rules under which that declaration was made.
This studio closes with Milestone 2: Your rules and your question, a short chapter of its own after the lessons. What it asks you to produce. Your working agreement (an ownership statement, your working rules, your opened AI Research Ledger, your delegation map, and the red-flag screen of your chosen problem) and your question, formally declared: objective, units, outcomes and conditions, kind and reach, and a provisional claim boundary.
Milestone 3 holds the declared question up against what is already known, and it will usually send back a sharper version. The milestone chapter keeps the working details: the practice steps, the versioned record, and how the artifact is assessed.
The lessons in this studio
Read them in order, working each lesson’s It is your turn as you go. Each one builds a piece of Milestone 2; beside each lesson is the piece it hands you.
- Lesson 2 — AI Is Your Arm, Not Your Brain: your opened AI Research Ledger and one verified factual hinge from your own problem, including the retrospective Studio 1 receipt as row one.
- Lesson 3 — You as a Research Director: your delegation map for the whole project and for the declaration ahead: candidate wording may travel, while the lead question, kind, reach, and boundary stay yours.
- Lesson 4 — Specify, Delegate, Interrogate, Inspect, Verify, Document, Defend: one complete SDIIVDD run on a checkable claim your starting belief makes, with the check’s outcome on record — including “nothing changed” when the check agreed.
- Lesson 5 — Research Responsibility and Intellectual Ownership: your ownership statement, never-delegate list, and first AI-use disclosure, with the research question named as the first sentence your name signs.
- Lesson 6 — Choose Your Question’s Kind and Reach: your lead question chosen from the candidates, placed by kind and reach, with double-barrels split and a comparison world recorded when causal.
- Lesson 7 — Declare Your Research Question: your chosen formal wording with every change accounted for, the field card, the boundary pair with its uncertainty-and-limitations line, and the stranger-test result, dated as version zero.
When the last lesson closes, the milestone chapter is next. Nothing you write in a lesson is busywork: every piece above is on the milestone’s checklist.