25:Eng: Interview 6 — Nigh Magazine

You then founded NODE in 2003, what kind of design studio did you want to be at that time?

My Norwegian colleague and then fellow student, Anders Hofgaard, and I founded the studio unofficially during our studies at the Rietveld. The idea was that we would leave for Berlin after graduation. We imagined that we would have a lot of freedom in a city in transition, which then turned out to be true. Amsterdam seemed too cramped for us at the time. Twelve years after the reunification of Germany, a proper design scene had not yet really emerged in Berlin, which we found attractive. Our goal was to collaborate with interesting clients on exciting projects and we felt that we could be author-designers. At that time, we alone had eyes for the world of art and culture. We were probably still under the influence of the Rietveld, where it was not popular to work for commercial clients.

You have had studios in Berlin and Oslo since the early days. What are the reasons and advantages of having bases in those two cities? Also, how many members do you have now, and what kind of system do you run on?

Lars Ø Ramberg
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mono.kultur
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Sissel Tolaas
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Sissel Tolaas in her Berlin laboratory / Fotodimatti, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Desaturated from original

Anders had some good contacts from the beginning and already had a couple of clients in Oslo. That helped us tremendously—an important jump start. During the first seven years, we worked a lot from Berlin for clients in Oslo, and also partly for Scandinavian clients located in Berlin. Back then, many Scandinavian artists and gallery owners moved to Berlin, such as the artist Lars Ramberg, for example. At the same time, however, we also developed good contacts in Berlin. We worked for example with mono.kultur magazine and the Norwegian artist Sissel Tolaas. I would say that working in two cities made our work significantly more diverse, traveling was exciting — and at the same time, it was of course a good business model for us as young designers. Cultural funding was much better in Norway than in Berlin.