The studio
A studio built for long timescales.
Ostrand is a design studio working with museums, archives, concert halls and public collections: institutions whose job is to hold something on behalf of other people, usually for longer than anyone currently employed there will be around to see.
How we work
That timescale changes how we work. An identity for a company can afford to be of its moment; an identity for a collection cannot, because it will be applied by people we will never meet, to objects that have not been acquired yet. So we design systems rather than artefacts: a set of rules with enough structure to stay recognisable and enough room to absorb whatever arrives next. If the institution's own staff cannot extend it without us in five years, it has not worked.
The practice
We are eight people in Rotterdam. We take on six or seven projects a year, which is fewer than we could, and we stay on after launch to see the system used. Most of our work arrives through people we have worked with before moving to a new institution and taking our number with them.
What we do
Six things, and we would rather do fewer of them well than list twenty. Most projects use three or four together.