Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen is one of the founders of LUST studio. LUST is a multidisciplinary graphic design practice established in 1996 by Jeroen Barendse, Thomas Castro, and Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen, 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. Moreover, LUST is deeply interested in exploring new pathways for design at the cutting edge where new media and information technologies, architecture and urban systems and graphic design overlap.
This interview was made on October the 3rd in LUST studio in The Hague.

Institute of Network Cultures: Can you talk about your design methodology and how do you relate it to book design projects?

Dimitri: To better answer your question, first I have to tell you about our studio. LUST was founded in ’96 by my two colleagues Thomas Castro and Jeroen Barendse. In ’99 I joined them and we decided to merge our two studios. Thomas and Jeroen come from a graphic design background – they both studied in Arnhem under Karel Martens. I, on the other hand, come from an interactive design background – Delft university & Design Academy, Eindhoven. We worked well together from the beginning. We were all fascinated with new forms of communication: the ways in which art, design, new media, information technologies, architecture and science overlap and how this interdisciplinary approach can be used anywhere from graphic design to creating urban systems.

Over the course of the years we developed a design methodology which was later called “process based design” or “generative design”, and is founded upon the development of an analytical process which eventually leads to a final-product that designs itself. Using this kind of methodology means that you know from the beginning that there is no difference whether the end result will be a book or a magazine, an urban area or the whole city, because the process is what defines it.

INC: Have you ever made an e-book? In which ways do you think traditional publishing and digital publishing can coexist and intertwine?

D: I think that the e-book – which is actually a very incomplete word – was invented to build a bridge between something we are so use to, analog technologies and paper, and the digital world that we are trying to replace that with. For me the e-book is no more than a half product, it’s like the CD: one of the many steps that had to be taken in the transformation from analogue music to digital music. This is the same in the case of books and e-books.

Infact, I think that text in the digital age is never alone in any medium, since it has so many layers. We are all very skilled in using all these layers by just browsing the web, why not use them to read a book? So, did we make e-books? Yes, we did, but not in PDF format. We made, let’s call them, interactive books or magazines, which were all experiments to help figure out how content and context could relate to each other.

In this video: We.Mooove.com, 2012
We.Mooove.com is one of the last projects developed by LUST for Audi Urban Future Initiative. It combines an online magazine with a new kind of research engine. Every article on Mooove.com is linked to We.Mooove.com, which takes a “fingerprint” of the article (based on words, names, locations and organizations) and compares it to thematically related Web sites and social-media channles to produce a list of related articles and other media.

INC: Many LUST projects deal with rethinking material objects with a digital approach. Can you relate this concept to the book? Since it has always been a material object, is it possible to conceive the book in a different way and how?

D: First, I have to explain some things about LUSTlab because it’s the place where we do a lot of research on these issues. We founded LUSTlab in 2010. At that time it was already becoming clear that the economic crisis was would happen and that times would have changed. We were used to doing projects in the cultural field, since that was where you could experiment the most, go a few steps further, see the potential of your ideas, even if it didn’t work out 100 percent. However, at that time, we had already realized that the cultural field was completely collapsing. Therefore, for us it was still a very important issue, and we decided to start a laboratory where we could keep doing these kinds of projects.

Hence, with a huge amount of experimenting, not even necessarily having a clear goal, we started LUSTlab whose aim was to cross the lines of design, science and technology to find new forms of communication. Within LUSTlab we have also done some interesting projects to investigate how reading was changing, not necessarily how the book will be in the future, but more about how we absorb information.

McLuhan already said in the ’60’s that basically it is the medium that changes us, rather than the information that’s in the medium. Of course for us, as we are human beings, the content is the most important thing, but actually it is the carrier of that content that defines our society. We have always tried to find the bridge between information and the carrier of information, so now we are just doing the same with the digital world. For example looking at a digitalized text, we can create algorithms to figure out what this text is about. Some of these concepts come from the theories of Wolfgang Iser on how the meaning of texts changes depending on the context. LUSTlab tried to use these theories with digital text: for example, in order to analyze a text and figure out what it means, we can find algorithms to trace the meaning of it in terms of semantic orientation and location.

Another interesting way to analyze a text is to have links to the context: who is the writer, where did he study, what is his background etc., and any other kind of meta information. We create something like a fingerprint, so that the computer can use its semantic orientation to find other information, for example, what is the emotional value of each word, or where are the people who are talking about any given subject. Again, for me, a stream of tweets is also like a book…

In this video: PolyArc, LUST
Dimitri talks about the PolyArc media installation made by LUST for the 22nd International Poster and Graphic Design Festival of Chaumont in the Chapelle des Jésuites, as an in-situ piece intended to build bridges between the Festival’s past and future. Extending the notion of archiving to the future and to hypothetical pasts. Prior to the exhibition, they compiled a visual and textual database. Visitors at La Chapelle could interact with this ‘polyarc’ to make their own digital or print publication, before adding their own contributions to it.

INC:Let’s talk about something that has always been seen as the main issue in graphic design and editorial design, the relationship between text and images. What happens to the image in the digital media?

D: Images and texts are only different in form, but actually they are quite close. Images were the first form people used to try to easily pass information on to other people. Later, somehow, those images became symbols, and then symbols became characters and, combined with one another, they became sentences.

With an image, with one glance you can find multiple layers of information, this of course has a different meaning, but there actually is not so much of a difference between text and image. However, now we are starting to realize that using the characters we have created, the ones from the latin alphabet, our communication is limited. This is finally being proved through the internet. Therefore, in the making of a book, being limited is a choice, it’s something that we appreciate and it’s also the value of the book, that’s why I think analogue books are not going to disappear.

In this video: Posterwall 2.0, LUST
Dimitri talks about the Posterwall 2.0 project developed in 2008 for the Graphic Design Museum in Breda, both online and as a part of the museum’s permanent installation ‘100 Years of Graphic Design in the Netherlands’.
In the museum 600 unique posters are automatically generated daily using content gathered from various internet sources. Online, one new poster is generated every five minutes. New posters are automatically generated when physical events occur in the space: for example, when visitors enter the space, when visitors view the touchtables, and when visitors approach the wall itself.
Live-versions of the posterwall have been shown at the 2010-2011 Triennial of Design at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, at the Wide White Space exhibition in Wattis, San Francisco and Public Design Expo in Seoul. This 2.0 version of the Posterwall offered new possibilities, like Tweets, QR-codes, and social sharing.
The latest version of Posterwall is currently up at the Walker Art in Minneapolis and travels in Januari 2012 to the Cooper Hewitt in New York before travelling all over the States.

INC: New media sometimes make us feel a little bit overwhelmed by a huge amount information, especially because we are no longer only dealing with textual information: it seems that it’s becoming more difficult to concentrate on things. That’s probably because we still try to have the experience that we have with text and to absorb all the information in it, like we were used to doing since we were born, and like the generations before us were used to. Now we feel like something’s wrong and that it’s up to us, we have to change. Do you think that technology is becoming faster than us?

D: First, I think there’s always been a gap between generations and we have to find ways to close this gap. On the other hand we can also go beyond technology itself, because it’s just a tool.
Frequently, what I see with tablets and all this hype about ePublishing is that it’s only about tablets, but actually I think the main issue is absorbing information that has been digitalized. I wish that publishers and other people involved in publishing, for example content creators, would start to think about how they want to deliver their information.

We got so used to paper, which was of course a fantastic invention! Moreover, with the press we could spread it out in a relatively cheap way and to millions of people…but this is going to come to an end. So how do you want this information reach the reader, now that we are living in a world in which these two things, the digital and the material, are integrated? Everyone now is walking around with digital machines in their pockets, so they definitely cannot be considered two worlds anymore.

In this video: Res Sapiens Lamp 001/1, LUST
The Res Sapiens project merges the digital world with the physical. It connects them seamlessly, treating both entities equally. It asks questions not only to us, but also to itself. Res Sapiens refers to thinking physical objects, from products to architecture, that surpass their visual representation and display their meaning, role and status in society. The continuous stream of (public) digital data and information form the energy on which the Res Sapiens can live. It builds the oil fields of the future, where an ever growing digital heritage increases our understanding and knowledge and, most importantly, creates a stronger collective consciousness.

INC: What do you think about open source culture?

D: I think that there is place for both open source and not. When Tim Berners-Lee created the www protocol in ’91, it was a side project he did under the flag of science, so the internet as we know it today, was invented to be free.
Open software is a very important tool for sharing knowledge. The same is for open data because the transparency of information becomes a part of the whole privacy issue. I think every company should be completely transparent about what they know and track about people and what they do with this information. Once companies will start doing that, it will be in their benefit too. Let’s take the example of a health insurance company: when their data shows which part of the city is healthier to live in, why shouldn’t this become public information?

INC: Let’s talk about professions and their boundaries. Do you define yourself as a designer? What do you think about concepts like different professions, fields of knowledge? How do you interact with all the other professionals you work with?

D: With education you can see the first new forms of professions. We all are teaching in several academies: Jeroen in the Interactive Design department in Arnhem, Thomas in the Graphic Design department. Myself I’m teaching at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

Unfortunately, in the past few years there has been a lack of innovation within education. In practice you can see the emergence of a huge number of new professions. Different disciplines are merging and professions are building on top of each other. I don’t know what we’re going to call it yet, but it will be the result of a mixture of art, design, technology etc.
I wish that this could go a bit faster in education, to prevent us from preparing students for professions that will no longer exist in 5 years.

It is interesting to see the rapid changing methodologies in elementary school, because they have no choice: kids that start school at 4-5 years old can handle an iPad perfectly but they have a hard time using a pen. So, there are developments going on and of course there is also a down side of technology, it is often still quite expensive and lacks tangible qualities.
With regard to new generations: they will not be limited by what other people have told them. There will be enough inventive and creative people to go beyond the existing professions and profiles of today. So, am I a designer, am I an artist, am I a scientist? It doesn’t really matter. Understanding things is most essential, multidisciplinary skills will help you to always keep expanding the horizon.