Chrome Web Lab

Client: Google & The London Science Museum

Partners: Universal Design Studio, MAP, B-Reel, Karsten Schmidt, Fraser Randall

Web Lab is a groundbreaking, year-long exhibition, featuring a series of interactive Chrome Experiments that bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life.

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SoundAffects NYC

Client: Parsons The New School for Design

Partners: Mono

A 10-day audio experiment in the form of an interactive wall which listened to its ambient environment through noise, temperature, color, weather, wireless networks, and the proximity of humans nearby.

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The Blu Dot “Real Good Experiment”

Client: Blu Dot

Partners: Mono, Supermarché

Blu Dot wanted to find the answer to a simple question: "What is good design?" What resulted was a provocative marketing stunt that involved GPS-tracking the company's iconic "Real Good" chairs as they were taken from New York City Streets and back to people's homes.

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The Love Song Machine

Client: Tellart

For Valentine’s Day, Tellart created a brightly colored octave of mechanically-played bells connected to an online song-composition interface. Thousands of people went online, composed their own love songs, and watched live as they were played in our Providence office.

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The YouTube Symphony Orchestra

Client: Google

To augment their already-excellent and monumental YouTube Symphony Orchestra project, Google came to Tellart in search of an online musical instrument that could be enjoyable for non-musicians, but complex enough to engage more advanced users.

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Iditarod {a.k.a. the Dog Lamp}

Client: Sagmeister Inc.

Once every seven years, Stefan Sagmeister takes a legendary sabbatical to the Sagmeister Experimental Outcamp (Bali, Indonesia), during which he explores personal design projects. They came to us to make their dog lamp ambulatory.

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St. Louis Metro: Linear Accelerator

Client: Metro Transit St. Louis

Partners: Mid Ocean Studio

Tellart partnered with Mid Ocean Studio to create a large-scale interactive lighting sculpture for a station in the St. Louis Metro. The steel double helix holds thousands of custom wirelessly-controlled light nodes that track the movements of passengers and trains in the station.

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Augmented Reality Experiments

Client: Various

Working with augmented and mixed-reality experiences is another way that we explore the boundaries between the natural, material and virtual worlds. Ideal projects for Tellart exist as hybrids where the physical and the virtual are inseparable.

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Arcade Game Remixes

Client: Maker Faire & Others

Our mixed-reality retro game hacks started with the classic Pong, where players rolled around a New York City gallery as human paddles. Full-body frogger, and our most recent "life-sized" game, a musical instrument based on the popular Monome, have followed.

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Games for Health

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Prototyping Platform and Zero-Power Adapter

Client: Nokia

Nokia’s designers needed a platform for exploring new smartphone concepts that would allow them to design, build, test, tweak and iterate environment-aware smartphones quickly–even in the field while performing user testing.

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Reflections of OCD

Client: Jazz Pharmaceuticals

Partners: RJO Group

This trade show installation used a high resolution display coupled with synchronous lighting & video control to provide physicians with some insight into the experience of patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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Connected Health

Client: Humana

For several years, we have worked with Humana to understand the challenges of health management – including patient compliance with health interventions, caregiver and provider challenges, and understanding health benefits.

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Experience & Information Mapping

Client: Various

When we started out in 1999, digital layers on objects and architecture were becoming more and more common. In order to design and build objects and spaces that involved these invisible and intangible software layers, we first mastered visual map making.

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Tellart Sketchtools

Client: Various

Tellart's culture and work represent a symbiotic relationship between research, teaching, and working with clients. Since 1999 we have been producing our own tools–called Sketchtools–that allow designers and engineers to work closely together in tight cycles of iteration.

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Tellart Workshops, Lectures, Teaching

Client: Various

As industry experts in design for emerging technologies, we are frequently called on to lead workshops, teach courses, and deliver lectures at venues worldwide.

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Our Idea

People don’t interact with computers or devices, they interact with each other and the world around them; a world in which the borders between natural, material and virtual have blurred.

Tellart builds where these borders blur.

As we come to understand that the network isn’t in computers but inside everything we touch, we learn that “form” isn’t what we see, it’s what we use. Every day there’s a new surface to interact with. But, underneath these surfaces lie familiar human needs, desires, habits and hopes.

Emerging technologies aren’t built with the same tools or the same talents we know from the past. We are Tellart: we’re inventors and explorers. We believe the best way to explore an idea is to make it real. We don’t just dream and sketch, we prototype and manufacture. We are in the business of making things real.

Our Company

For twelve years, Tellart has been building interactive objects and environments that connect to the web.

Twelve years of marketing stunts, building control systems, museum exhibitions, games for health, consumer electronics, and medical simulations. Technologies emerge, and we’ve set out to give them culturally and economically relevant form.

In a small factory in New England, we’ve been housing the brains, hands, and hearts of industrial designers, electrical engineers, graphic designers and software architects. We’ve built our own tools and we use them every day.

We are proud of our clients and partners and the work we’ve done together. Sometimes our work starts with workshops to reveal needs and goals, or to identify potential strategies and tactics. Sometimes we create long-term agreements over years to build out innovative lines of business. But we always share the same goals as our partners: to actually make things that change the way the world thinks and acts.

Tellart starts where you start: with a hunch, an idea, a stray piece of technology, a carefully articulated demand, a broad sense that something is possible if addressed with courage, care, attention, and commitment.

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Capabilities

We’re designers – by temperament, by training, by experience. We think of design as a sensibility, a practice, a process. We think the best design is a response to constraints: we identify them, we understand them, we find inspiration in them.

We’re teachers and thought leaders. We run courses and workshops, speak at conferences, contribute to open source communities and lead research projects internationally – experiences that allow us to experiment, explore, study and shape the future of our discipline.

Design is an integral part of our lives. We believe that if design serves human needs, communicates clearly, functions cleanly, and makes sense of both material and virtual worlds, then it is beautiful.

Reach Us

It's always great to hear from new people– please get in touch if you have an inquiry or would like to discuss a new project. Call any of our offices or send us an email at contact@tellart.com.

For occasional updates on Tellart projects, news and events, sign up for our email list below:

Note: We will never sell your information or spam you.

This Week: Domus Magazine, Webby’s, and WSJ

May 3rd, 2013

Last month, Tellart and the Chrome Web Lab were the subject of an excellent, in-depth profile by Rory Hyde in Dan Hill’s Supernormal column for Domus magazine.  If you missed “Under the Bonnet of the Internet” while the print edition was on newsstands, not to worry: as of this week, the article is available freely [...]

Behind the Scenes: Prototyping Web Lab

March 1st, 2013

Announcing the first of many sneak peeks at the creation process that led to the Chrome Web Lab.  In this set of videos, we take you behind the scenes to show you some of the prototypes and motion sketches that were instrumental in the creation of two of Web Lab’s most popular experiments: the Universal Orchestra and the Sketchbots.

Brian & Jasper Explain Technology Behind Web Lab

August 16th, 2012

Alongside Google, Tellart’s Brian Hinch and Jasper Speicher sat down to give some behind-the-scenes information on the technology and strategy behind each Web Lab experiment.  Check out each of the short videos after the jump.

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