Interview mit Thomas Castro

Hi Thomas. It’s nice to have you here. So how did you start your job after you graduated from university?

In the first year of university I met my companion and colleague from LUST, Jeroen; we met in Utrecht. The third year after transferring to Arnhem we decided to do a project together, like a magazine, and we were looking for different names for it. One of the names we came up with was LUST. Actually the idea of LUST was born in our third year. And the magazine never came to fruition, but the collaboration with Jeroen remained. After graduation, the place I did my internship hired me for one year; I wanted to get some experience. Jeroen also wanted to work as a freelancer for a few people. And after doing a year of this, we decided that it was time to start LUST.

What did your studio look like back then?

In 1996, one year after graduation, Jeroen and I started the studio. We didn’t start off with grand plans and we didn’t have a big space, big computers, an identity or a website. We did have a website after two years after starting LUST, but not when we graduated: you can actually still see it online in our archive. After that we basically said: we are two guys, let’s just try to do good work and be noticed. We were patient and started small. Our first studio was maybe nine square meters, one big table that we shared and one computer. We didn’t have a high living standard. We were really picky with the projects we chose; if a project was for family, friends or somebody who wasn’t really critical about their work, we said no to them. At that time, we would have rather eaten more bread with cheese then to do a project that we didn’t like. And I think this attitude helped us to be critical about the people you work for.
I think we were one of the first Dutch studios that had a website, so when the internet was growing, we bought the lust.nl domain. Really early, that is why we are able to have this domain. Jeroen always came in early. And I would come in it at around five, so we switched places, he went home and I kept on working on the projects we did. In 1999, Dimitri came and joined us, our third partner.

What does LUST mean?

It’s a four-letter word,that sounds good. Like fuck. ­And in different languages it means almost the same thing, and it also has an ambiguity in different languages. So, on the one hand, it refers to lust, sexual lust, and on the other hand it also refers to passion – not the sexual one but the passion for a thing. We really like this ambiguity. Playing with contexts, words, associations and randomness ­– this is how we grew in the studio. I think the name really fits to how we started, too.

How big is LUST now?

We had been doing a lot of interactive work, already at the beginning when Dimitri joined LUST, like websites and CD-ROM. He had a company, and we were constantly asking him to help us with projects. And when his company stopped, we asked him to become a part of our studio. That was the first time we actually grew. And then a few years later we had our first intern. So then we were four. And after that we hired our first person so we were five. And now LUSTlab is about nine people, up to ten, depending on how many are freelancing. LUST is six, we are a pretty big group now. We can’t be hands-on for everything anymore. It changed more to a modular studio, in which different teams work on different projects together.

What hierarchy do you have in the studio?

At any given moment there are 20 to 30 projects going on. At different stages of evolution; some are in early stages, some are in middle stages and some are at the end. So everyone at LUST and LUSTlab are working on five projects per person, in different stations of completion. Each team has one head who oversee every-thing, a head designer. And then there is also a coder; depending on whether we need any more help, there are one or two interns or other coders and designers on that team.

LUST seems to handle different media. How do you decide, which media you use for a project? Do you decide by content or media?

We are in a really good position right now. In our projects, people just come to us and say: we have this question. We try to help answer this question. We are involved in shaping the project from the beginning. For example: we can define research questions, content and media. But a good answer to your question is actually: we don’t think media is the most important aspect of a project. In a lot of our work, we don’t really consider the media until we know what we want to do with it.

And what does a design process look like at LUST?

I think it isn’t really that much different than for others. Basically, you get a brief from a client and then you read the brief and you say: Hey, do you really want a website? I mean, if I read what you want, maybe you want something else.  You try to reframe the question somehow so that it’s sharper, and then usually you can get the client on board and then the project itself becomes different. The first few meetings are generally brainstorming sessions. We love brainstorming together. The way we try to brainstorm is that we just have big pieces of paper in front of us. We don’t try to brainstorm in the way that we just share images we find on the internet. I think that’s the worst thing you can do, because basically that’s just like a snake eating its tail. A good way to say it is: when we start, we don’t actually design, but we try to find the project’s vocabulary. We are looking for words that can describe the project.

Words can be anything: images, text, process, method and algorithms. And once we have enough «words», we can build sentences. And all we have to do at that time is to talk about it! At a certain moment we see things that we sketched at the beginning, and we implement them in our projects. We like to call it more of a process-
based, bottom-up approach.

I wanted to ask you about the methodology at LUST; we read about that. Process-based design or generative design: that still exists for you?

Our methodology is: we try to work from the bottom up and break down the research questions and then try to find research questions that don’t necessarily have to do with design. It is when you don’t know what to do that you do your best! And then you analyze what happens and after analyzing it, you learn and you try again. This method of going backwards and forwards, of trying and analyzing, is heuristic. You just keep taking small steps forward; you will get there eventually. Why tackle the big question first? If you tackle all the small pieces first, then you can build this vocabulary of what you want to try to do. After that, you have this set of things put together and your project will grow naturally out of this.

How do you work at LUST? Do you have help from freelancers or interns?

When we have freelancers or external people, it’s usually in a collaboration. It’s not that we just try to hire production help. So usually if we do try to hire somebody to help us on something it’s usually not a programmer or designer. Usually it’s an artist, musician, historian or architect. I think we love to be inspired by the things around us and we naturally love that as creative people. I think that is a healthy attitude for a graphic designer these days. You have to be a designer plus something. My interest in statistics plus design led to the work that LUST makes: analytical, kind of rational, a lot of data visualization and mapping. This method is how we should shape our practice. Maybe somebody is a writer, so he’s a designer plus a writer. That makes for richer practice than if you are just a designer.

Why did you start LUSTlab?

We realized that our projects were getting so big and so complex that we decided in 2007-2008 to start LUSTlab. We never wanted to become a big company. Instead of having LUST grow – having a coding department or interactive department – our idea was to try to have a separate lab to do the experimental things. LUSTlab actually started off with three people plus Dimtri. With LUSTlab, we have been working a lot with the Kinect in the past few years: testing things out with drones and mobility. A lot of times what we do is: there is an interesting technology and try to see what’s available and what can be done with it. And then we try to think of a project that we can put it into or that turns into a project in and of itself. If we have the chance, for example, to do an autonomous work, then there’s a project that asks for a specific technology and LUSTlab will develop that. It can go both ways. It is an interesting kind of dynamic because the designers of LUST are more the philosophical ones; they’re thinking about the greater idea, typography and distribution. The LUSTlab designers and coders think more about what it is to be human, about technology and all these questions that we at LUST don’t have time for or can’t get deep enough into. So if you look at the way we work, it’s kind of a venn diagram for the two things put together.

In the 90s, LUST was one of the pioneers of information design. From this point of view, how do you reflect on technical improvements in view of analog work and your work made by LUST?

Only in the 90s? Just kidding. For example, there is a book we made about two years ago for Valis Publishers called «I read where I am». Its basically about reading in the digital age, how that has changed, and the way we produce books. While we were doing the book, we did a lot of tests and experiments to analyze the words that we used. The books content was 86 short essays, written by famous thinkers, designers and image makers. We wanted to analyze, to use different linguistic algorithms to see how these essays were made, to see if there is a change in reading and its effects. All these experiments were based on code; we wrote programs to do this. We hosted everything on the web. We said: «We can publish the book for sure, we have to do that, but why don’t we also have a version of the book on the internet?». The URL is ireadwhereiam.com – and if you go to the website, you will see the full text of the book. What we did, is to change the context. The project was, for example, that we asked all the writers if we can open source their texts. The whole content of the book, including the design. It is under a creative commons license now.  And what you can do as an online reader is that you can click on any word and add a comment. You basically can change the way the text is. It should invite other people to re-author the text. So we talked to the publisher and made the book, but it was also nice to show the method we used to design the book and offer that as an online medium as well. This is a good example of how we think about things: it isn’t necessarily in the medium that we use, but we try to find the answer to the question of what the medium offers. I think that’s the best way to think about how we do it. And again, I think we can easily shift from analog to digital; that scale is so gradual and fluid, it’s nice to surf between them. You shouldn’t limit yourself.

We from Stilvorlagen #9 want to design an E-book for this year’s documentation. How do you think traditional publishing and digital publishing can coexist and work together?

I think you have to analyze what it is that you want to do with an E-book. I mean, when all it is to offer it electronically, right? Then why not publish a PDF? I mean, it’s more platform-independent than an E-book. Or put your text on a website. That can be read by almost eveything. Whereas for an E-book there are special formats. One is the mobi format, one is the e-Pub format. There’s no value in a digital page because it’s basically text. Right? I would rather see text in a container database and if you want to read your text on your mobile phone then you can get your text that way by entering it through a web browser or an app.

What do you think a graphic designer has to know today to survive tomorrow?

I think you need to have good methods. That’s really the key. It’s not about style. My students are going kill me for saying this, but it’s not even about learning good typography. Because I can imagine that there is a moment in the timeline of computers that a computer can set better typography than we can. Just optically, for example. This is going to be a big debate, of course. But what I’m trying to say is, for experts, they can always do better. Then why try to compete with that? Well, I think then the question comes down to: how can you control that? Or how can you use that to your best advantage? Then the skills that you need to do that would be your method. That’s what’s important. To learn these specific kinds of methods that will teach you going forward. Or actually not teach you, but carry you forward. Styles will come and go, you know? We see this in fashion, we see this in music. Everything is in a cycle. You wait long enough and something that’s really stupid and cheesy and square becomes hip again, right? To me it’s more about the conditions in which design rises instead of the end result.Those are the skills that I think the modern designer needs to have.

Since when have you been teaching at the university of graphic design in Arnhem?

I’ve been teaching since 2001. Actually, it was nice that Arnhem, the place where I also studied, asked us to teach. I’ve been head of the department for three years. The transition process lasted about two years. The old head of the department retired and he asked if I was interested in doing it in his place after he retired. That was one of those things I had to think about: would that change my practice? I’ve always taught one day a week. All of us teach one day a week. But now that I’m also head, that’s also one extra day a week, so now I’m in Arnhem for two days and at the studio for three. So that changes the dynamic of your practice a little bit. But until now, I have loved it. It’s nice to try to disrupt old models of how to teach design. I think we built a really strong team of good thinkers, young artists and designers. They have the same ambitions in graphic design and communication. And we have the backing of our director. She gives us a lot of freedom to do a lot of things, a lot of experimental things. And we really want to change the way design is being taught. I think it’s time!

What do you learn from your students?

I never really liked teaching in the first years; I tried that a long time ago, and I really hated it. Some students are so young that you even have to explain to them how to make a sketch. But now that I’m head, I want to see what they are doing and I want to influence them. And what I like about that is that it helps me, it challenges me to change my methodologies ‒ also in teaching. So I try something and then I see how they react to it. I am not one of those teachers with a very set plan. I am always improvizing along the way. That is the biggest thing about teaching. In order to teach, you have to have it in your mind as well, you have to define that what you want to teach. That struggle refines your way of thinking and it refines your approach. The next time you give that course you can change it again and make it sharper. Some of these projects I have been giving are part of a process that has lasted from sometimes seven to ten years. Every version of this course gets it more defined and better and more concrete. That is interesting. And it is very nice to see how this evolves.

When you look back on your career, what advice would you want to give young designers?

(Sounds like a question to an 80 year old…)

The best advice I can give is: don’t think about the superficial things about our profession. Accept the fact, and know the fact, and be open to the fact that our profession is changing. Of course, the thinking and the skills are the same – the basic skill set. But it also expands. If you don’t accept this, and you guys still think waiting at the studio and waiting for that phone call, making your posters and making your books is what graphic design is, then I think it’s going to be difficult for you to make it into this brave new world of graphic design. So the best thing that I can offer you is: be open to these changes and try to redefine those things for yourself, your peers and your generation. Technology is something that can change, but global politics changes, economics change. All these things affect what we are as designers. And your specialty within that range will take you forward.