project versus process: biodesign versus architecture

While in Chicago, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. At the bookstore I picked up "101 Things I Learned in Architecture School". It's filled with one or two sentence lessons like, "We move through negative spaces and dwell in positive spaces" and "Our experience of an architectural space is strongly influenced by how we arrive in it", followed by a few elaborating sentences and a simple illustration on the facing page. One of my favorites so far is "Improved design process, not a perfectly realized building, is the most valuable thing you gain from one design studio and take with you to the next." I think it's analogous to SynBERC in that the researchers comprise something more like a group of interrelated design studios and less like a team all building one specific thing. Also I really like the idea of organizing research into many studios. "Studio" connotes something with a discreet output and timeframe, and counterbalances the lofty and endless goal of "catalyzing biology as an engineering discipline." In a nutshell, studios break our grand challenge into bite-sized pieces.

I can't find a good definition for "design studio". Something like a study (in the sense of a drawing, sketch or painting done in preparation for a finished piece).

FOLLOW-UP:
I asked architect, professor, and brother-in-law Eric Bunge of nArchitects how he defined a studio. Though context dependent, it often means an instructional class. Except for the first few semesters, design studios typically focus on a single problem, increasing in complexity from year to year. An advanced design studio might involve professionals from other disciplines, such as engineers.

I think where I get hung up on the analogy between biology project and design studio is that, while both are a finite period of process development addressing a specific problem, the architectural design studio is by nature decoupled from hammers, trucks and getting your hands dirty. Biology process development cannot (at this point in time) be extracted from the actual "building" phase of assembling proteins, genes and markers. And in a way, I think that's part of the intellectual agenda of synbio.

I wonder how useful it is for bioengineers to sit in a room and sketch out a hypothetical cell with properties that address a specific problem. I've never really seen that happen before. Would that design process help to elucidate specific pathways and general strategies for producing biological problems? What if it happened over several weeks, as does in an architecture project? Does a successful biology project deserve any more or less of a design studio than a building? Does a $10M bioE research project deserve twice as much of a design studio as a $5M building?