NODE is a design studio founded in 2003 by Anders Hofgaard and Serge Rompza with offices in Berlin and Oslo. The studio works collaboratively for a diverse range of clients focusing on print, identity, exhibition, and interactive design. In addition to studio projects, NODE lectures and conducts workshops for art and design academies in Europe and the United States.
The distinct feature of NODE lies in its relational approach to graphic design. Its portfolio could be described as a unique series of field notes reflecting efforts to create a synthesis recorded through experimental tests. The activities of NODE studio are best characterized as a form of design authoring, informed by a documentary attention to the needs of its clients. In 2011, the studio redesigned the visual identity of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and has produced a wide range of designs for the institution, including Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, published by MIT Press.
In 2015, NODE collaborated with Oslo-based digital invention studio Bengler to design and engineer a redefined web presence for the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), employing new tools that work as condensers of ideas, works, identities, research, history, people, data and geographies. For this project, Bengler developed Sanity, a content curation tool to make maintaining complex, connected datasets enjoyable, while also facilitating the reuse of material in multiple forms to reach different users. Modeling internal data and embracing external information, oma.eu functions as an omnivorous sensor, tracing OMA’s work from inception to post-occupancy.
Even Westvang and Simen Svale Skogsrud are principals of Bengler. Central to their practice is the continuous exploration of the communicative and expressive affordances of technology. Westvang and Skogsrud have collaborated for twenty years on television, museum audio-visuals, mobile games, social media and installation artworks. Westvang specializes in concept development, user interface design and data visualization. Skogsrud specializes in product design, software architecture and broad spectrum tinkering. Skogsrud is the original creator of Grbl, the industry standard motion control system for maker-grade 3D printers, milling machines, and laser cutters.
Bengler advocates for making more public data available through projects such as Westvang’s series of experimental data visualizations, which have been featured in The Guardian, Fast Company, and Norwegian national media. A series of publishing commissions turned their interests towards exploring the future of publishing and the challenges of facilitating fluid collaboration while manipulating complex data structures. Recent projects include Sanity, created for OMA’s website and Vega, an open-source publishing system for open-access science, to move scientific publishing beyond email-ping-pong and static PDFs by providing publishers and authors with richer, yet tailored modes of collaboration, review and presentation. Bengler is currently working on an open-ended exploration to describe and organize the collections of the Norwegian National Museum using machine learning and automated classification to build new interfaces for end-user navigation.