ON a rainy Tuesday last month, in an all-white office space in Brooklyn, a blogger known as swissmiss traded productivity tips with some visiting creative strategists. “Our own mini-TED,” she said, half-joking, referring to the high-profile tech conference.

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.