Lust

LUST is a multidisciplinary graphic design practice established in 1996 by Thomas Castro, Jeroen Barendse and Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen and based in The Hague, Netherlands. LUST works in a broad spectrum of media including traditional printwork and book design, abstract cartography and data-visualisations, new media and interactive installations, and architectural graphics. LUST considers design as a process: each design evolving from a concept as a result of extensive research. In the course of its existence, LUST has developed a design methodology which has been described as process-based or generative-systems based design. This entails the developing of an analytical process which leads eventually to an end-product that designs itself. Moreover, LUST is deeply interested in exploring new pathways for design at the cutting edge where new media and information technologies, architechture and urban systems and graphic design overlap. http://www.lust.nl

Excerpt from the book "Area 2", Phaidon, London, 2008

by Jan Middendorp

There is no other studio in the Netherlands where conceptual thinking about graphic design and cutting-edge digital technology are as obviously interdependent and interwoven as LUST. 'Generation Random' is a term its members like to use to describe themselves and a select group of like-minded designers. Although it indicates an essential aspect of their mentality and practice, the term seems somewhat reductive. Surely, in almost every piece conceived by LUST there is a component that is randomly generated. But the overall conception of each work - from visiting cards to interactive animations the size of a building - is guided by a stringent internal logic, and is the outcome of a thinking process that is at once extremely flexible and extremely systematic.

Thomas Castro and Jeroen Barendse met when studying at an art college in Utrecht, and decided to jointly enter the Arnhem Academy, where Karel Martens was an influential teacher. Although a skilled typographer, Martens is by no means dogmatic when it comes to typographic design, and Castro and Barendse felt very much at home with Martens' idiosyncratic mixture of earnest, commitment and anti-hierarchic thinking. LUST was originally the title of their graduation project, which combined several elements that would be recurrent in their later practice: cultural philosphy, speculation about interfaces, mapping, experimental type. Having established themselves as a studio in The Hague in 1996, they were soon joined by interactive designer Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen.

LUST quickly became a high-profile design studio, doing work for local government agencies, architects, art and music venues and publishers. But despite their obvious adaptability, LUST never stopped approaching the design practice as an ever-changing, all-embracing personal project. Each job is seen as an incentive to research and question the strategies and workings of design itself. Most importantly, whatever the end product - exhibition interface, system, performance or object - the work is primarily about process.

Among other things, this implies that boundaries between categories often get blurred. An exhibition becomes a game. A poster becomes a visual essay on high and low resolution. The studio's website becomes a peephole into its inner workings. A book of essays is made into an interface and a piece of conceptual art by indexing every single word. And how about aesthetics, you ask? Well, in LUST's case, if the underlying ideas and structures are well conceived, then Eric Gill's maxim applies almost by default: 'beauty will take care of itself.'

Follow LUST on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lustnl