Tellart

09/08/2024

Immersive design and strategic storytelling for a better future.

Combining future foresight, design craft and emerging technologies to help courageous clients steer a desirable future for themselves, their audiences and the world around.

Video featuring our new brand refresh!

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29/07/2024

We are delighted to announce Tellart is designing the guest experience for the Philippine Pavilion at Expo 2025, Osaka in Japan. In collaboration with the Filipino architect Juan Carlo Calma, the theme is "Nature, Culture & Community, Woven Together for a Better Future.”

With multisensory spaces, design craft and emerging technology, the experiences will be an immersive invitation to discover the wonders of the Philippines.

Learn more here:

Towards a future woven together. At Tellart, we are delighted to announce our role as the guest experience designer for the Philippines Pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka in Japan. The pavilion building has been designed by the Filipino architect Carlo Calma Consultancy and the central concept is how .....

19/07/2024

Delighted to see we have been featured in the latest Vogue Singapore magazine! 🍱✨

Our Dinner in 2050 installation design concept is centred around reducing the climate impact of food using local, seasonal and lower impact ingredients. This speculative experience is designed to spark conversation and help us imagine the future of food.

How does it work? 'Visitors gather around a dining table crafted from sustainable palm wood and speak their favourite dish (from crispy falafels to fresh sashimi) into the microphone. The AI-powered plate analyses the main ingredients of each dish, then replaces the main carbon footprint contributor with a sustainable alternative, whipping up a vision of the food’s future self that is strikingly hyper-realistic—and delicious.'

Discover more here: https://vogue.sg/tellart-future-of-food-artificial-intelligence/

28/03/2023

🇳🇱Tellart goes to Osaka 🇯🇵

We are delighted to announce we have been selected to design the Dutch Pavilion at World Expo 2025 Osaka as part of the consortium ‘A New Dawn’ consisting of architecture firm RAU Architects (.architects), engineering consultancy firm DGMR () and Osaka-based construction company .

We look forward to sharing the design with you on June 5th when it will be presented in the Netherlands and Japan. For now, we’re reveling in the creative partnerships and journey ahead. We’d be delighted to have you follow along.

Thank you to our clients The Ministry of Foreign Affairs () and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) (.nl)

image: © Osaka Expo 2025

04/03/2023

Now, more than ever, there’s an urgency to communicate the importance of cultural memory and its relationship to human resilience.

Buried deep in a mountainside on Svalbard, the Arctic World Archive stores digital data, and the Global Seed Vault represents the world’s largest crop seed repository. Tellart and global architecture studio Snøhetta were invited to create a concept for The Arc, a new visitor center that is to be built on the remote Arctic Ocean island of Svalbard.

As the public cannot visit these vaults, Arctic Memory AS asked us to design a visitor experience that showcases the content of the vaults and conveys the vital importance of preserving world memory.

🌏 Memory of the World - Here visitors explore the content of the Arctic World Archive and learn about the importance of digitally preserving our cultural legacy for future generations. The collection currently includes art collections, Vatican manuscripts and video clips of legendary football player Pelé.

🌳 Future Food Security - Here visitors discover the inner workings of the Global Seed Vault and gene banks, and learn why crop preservation and diversity are key to ensuring that our expanding global population can continue to feed itself. The centerpiece of the experience, which we call The Signal Tree, will be a species of living tree that would have grown indigenously on the island some 50 million years ago. We have learned from experts in marine biology and plant genetics that if we do not stop global warming, the permafrost of Svalbard will continue to thaw and a forest much like this could return to the now barren snowy landscape in a matter of hundreds of years.

The Arc explains the mission of these two archives and the urgency of preserving our diverse cultural heritage and natural ecosystem in order for human civilization to continue to thrive.

It’s WIP - watch this space.

Project team:

Tellart was responsible for
Collaborator - architecture:
Images: Snøhetta and .mp

23/02/2023

We are working on an expansive experience about circular manufacturing and it’s been helpful to
sketch with the mixed reality tech available to us, to create new ways to understand - and experience - the potential of manufacturing. It’s now incredibly urgent to understand how these new technologies can work to limit environmental impact now and in the future.

Our projects predominantly focus on creating new and transformative experiences, using design craft and emerging tech, to bring people closer to nature - finding ways to design for all living things, in harmony with our planet's ecosystem.

As humans we urgently need to know more about our world to make more intelligent decisions with it - just to go on existing.

16/01/2023

Tellart is at the start of The Ocean Race in Alicante, Spain, where we’ve created the Race Village immersive experience , presented by 11th Hour Racing in collaboration with Tellart and The Ocean Race, transports guests onboard an racing offshore and takes them below the surface to learn how we are inseparable from the ocean. From blank page to a concept and script, hand painted and animated 3D worlds, musical and narration score composition, performance of all instruments, recordings and production of the spatial audio experience. A game world that does what Tellart always does: use design craft and emerging tech to give people new and transformative ways to engage with, understand, enjoy, and protect nature.

25/12/2022

Season's Greetings from all of us at Tellart.

Looking forward to continuing to explore hopeful futures with you all in the New Year. 🌱

Love these Tellart portraits taken on film by .

10/10/2022

, Tellart's Project Leader for our work with and at race HQ in Alicante, Spain. Thanks for the generous paella spread (and millions of tapas later that evening) for our Tellart delegation! We flew home from a milestone day of presenting and workshops for the project. Almost 100 days till race start...!

2nd photo taken through sunglasses of the North Sea from the plane. -

30/09/2022

Studio dogs and renovation status update. ✨

Coming together beautifully and we’re all delighted the heating is on.

13/09/2022

Don’t miss the maturing Salt Water Garden at ’s Floriade pavilion, closing Oct 9. The garden presents a vision of what ‘Greening our Cities’ means in a region where greening in the traditional sense is unsustainable.

Guests experience how elements of the garden work together to form a closed-loop biosaline agriculture system which cycles seawater, salt brine, and waste to produce edible crops, fish, and drinking water. It’s a system that forms an elegant machine at the confluence of natural processes and human ingenuity that enables Emiratis to thrive in a challenging landscape.

Photographs by , who was with us for most of Tellart’s design journey for this pavilion. Incredibly special to see the garden flourishing through the eyes of his family. Thank you Lukas.

Credits:
Lead Guest Experience Design -
Architecture and landscape architecture - .ap
Immersive Experience -
Photography - Mohamed Somji
Glass Sculptures -
Brand Guidelines - .ae
Wayfinding -
Lead Engineer -
Construction -
Fabrication - .amsterdam
AV Hardware -
Vinyl stickering -

16/08/2022

Delighted to see our work longlisted for best Exhibition Design for the 2022

Thank you for recognising the UAE Host Pavilion at , created in collaboration with . Congratulations to everyone involved on this very special project.

Images by

23/06/2022

“Talking about scent is like dancing about architecture.” (Quoting our producer ).

Here’s a glimpse of the studio today, we’re working with scent as a design element for an upcoming project. Utilising all the senses is a startling and vivid way to tell stories within experiences - when it’s appropriate.

17/06/2022

Sabrina, Bjorn and Maia adrift — Summer Half-Day Fridays on the water at Tellart.

And… Sean and Fer on the Foredeck enjoying 30 degree day in and out of the Nieuew Meer on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

07/06/2022

We worked with to create these luminous glass sculptures of microalgae. This is the powerful, unseen hero of the sea that forms the essential foundation of the marine food chain, directly and indirectly supporting almost all life in the sea, and our own.

The halophytic plants and the people in the who are researching, protecting, and finding new ways to work with them for the benefit of humanity and nature, can be explored through our exhibition design for the UAE’s pavilion .

Tellart is committed to creating new forms of experience in order to open perspectives and help contribute to a sense of optimism and agency about the role we can play on our planet.

06/06/2022

Tellart’s design for ’s Saltwater Garden at embodies the ethos of working intelligently with nature and is layered with traditional wisdom and modern scientific knowledge.

Guests experience how elements of the garden work together to form a closed-loop biosaline agriculture system which cycles seawater, salt brine, and waste to produce edible crops, fish, and drinking water.

It’s a system that forms an elegant machine at the confluence of natural processes and human ingenuity that enables Emiratis to thrive in a challenging landscape.

These ideas are helping build futures. Our studio’s work at the intersection of nature, culture, and technology, especially in regards to how the ocean sustains us, is at the forefront of our minds this month.

06/06/2022

Deployment day at Tellart — boarded with team for Newport, RI to launch our newest nature/climate project with our friends at

27/05/2022

What can a desert nation add to the debate about sustainability and cities? How can design communicate this evocatively and effectively?

Tellart’s strategy director spoke with about how a key Emirati insight - that to green our cities, we also have to think about greening our seas - shaped our design for at .

Listen to the podcast now, the link is in our Stories and discover the thinking behind our closed loop salt water garden and exhibition that immerses you in a seagrass meadow at the 07:00 mark.

Thank you to and the wonderful Angela Migally from for joining us in this conversation.

18/05/2022

Occlusion Grotesque, 2021: a typeface that will keep growing
Bjørn Karmann

Tellart’s Design Director has created an experimental typeface carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it deforms the letters and outputs new design variations that are captured annually. The project explores what it means to design with nature and on nature's terms.

Chapter two, Deep Occlusion, explores the typeface as a dataset for an AI to learn how a tree grows and designs shapes over time.

The project challenges how we are terraforming and controlling nature to our own desires, which has become problematic to an almost un-reversible state. Here the roles have been flipped, as nature is given agency to lead the process, and the designer is invited to let go of control and have nature take over.

03/05/2022

Join us and give your studio a spring clean for tech that’s going unused and donate these to , a local foundation supporting displaced Ukrainians in the Netherlands. 🇺🇦

We’re pleased to be able to donate 8 MacBook Pro computers that were previously loved at Tellart. An old tablet can make a world of difference to a child distance learning, and a second-hand laptop can keep families connected or give a young designer the equipment they need to keep working.  

Please visit their website for more information and how to donate. 

(Thank you for the absolutely gorgeous Ukrainian strawberry pie!) 

15/04/2022

We are pleased to announce the opening of our newest project, ‘Salt Water Cities’, our exhibition design for the UAE Pavilion at .

“Salt Water Cities: Where land meets sea” is a sculptural enclosed garden and educational exhibition space that invites visitors on an multisensory journey along the Emirates’ coastline.

We consider this urgent, yet optimistic work. The salt-loving plants thriving at the ecotone between a notoriously arid desert and the world’s hottest sea, hold answers that may help address some of humanity’s biggest challenges. Because of its extreme environment, knowing that much of the world could look like this in the future, the UAE is a lab for the future. Our exhibition design celebrates their innovative approaches to sustainability and the lessons this unique ecosystem has for us and our global aspirations for .

Thank you to our clients, collaborators and colleagues for their vision and helping bring this to life.

Credits:
Lead Guest Experience Design -
Architect - .ap
Immersive Experience -
Photography - Mohamed Somji
Glass Sculptures -
Brand Guidelines - .ae
Wayfinding -
Lead Engineer -
Construction -
Fabrication - .amsterdam
AV Hardware -
Vinyl stickering -

23/03/2022

We are delighted to see both the Polish Pavilion and UAE Pavilion taking top honours at the awards this year (think of it as the ‘Olympics of experiential design’).

Congratulations and thank you to our clients for the briefs to make compelling, immersive experiences at such a large scale. A heartfelt thank you to our colleagues and collaborators. (Side note, many innovative methods were used to work collaboratively and globally throughout the pandemic, but that’s another story!).

Thank you

BEST LARGE PAVILION - Winner:
Honorable Mention:

BEST EXTERIOR DESIGN - Winner:

Explore our work on both Pavilions in our highlights.

02/03/2022

“Talking about scent is like dancing about architecture.” (Quoting our producer ).

Here’s a glimpse of the studio today, we’re working with scent as a design element for an upcoming project. Utilising all the senses is a startling and vivid way to tell stories within experiences - when it’s appropriate.

18/02/2022

“I do believe design is an act of discovery.”

Tellart Founder speaks to on the importance of immersion in both life and design.
Link in our Stories.

15/02/2022

The Pavilion guest journey is designed to create a welcoming guest experience that tells an immersive, multi-sensory story of the UAE. Each moment is designed to leverage the spatial properties of the Calatrava building and allow the architecture to shine.

Together with , we designed a guest journey that is structured around six experiences that build a simple and consistent narrative arc.

The first of these is the Oasis, sheltered under the wings of the building, and was developed in response to the wish from our clients for our guests to avoid long queues, to be in space that was for gathering, rest and enjoyment. Guests spend up to 23 minutes in the Oasis before entering the building.

Here, surrounded by nature, soundscapes and seating, they are greeted with a fresh, multi-sensory introduction to Emirati values and traditions.

The key elements are:

The Falaj: a water feature inspired by an ancient irrigation system that was designed to transport water from the mountains to villages and fields.

Environmental panels: An introduction to local plants and their central role of nature in shaping UAE culture.

Majlis: A comfortable seating area that expresses the central importance of hospitality in UAE culture, and inspired by the traditional majlis, an open forum for exchanging news and resolving important issues within the community.

Biographs: Steel structures with viewing windows on all four sides. They invite guests to explore Emirati culture through the personal memories of Emiratis and long-term residents over the fifty years since the country’s founding.

Explore more in our Stories over the coming days.

Photography by

The guest experience of the United Arab Emirates’ Host Pavilion at - ‘The Land of Dreamers Who Do’ - was created by the most senior leadership of the UAE, and .

04/02/2022

Shooting on location in the KSA with our friends . Sweeping backdrops and that warm desert light made for some magical shoot days.

28/01/2022

Proud of our friends and colleagues in the industry , and a big congrats to them taking out the ‘Design Studio of the Year ‘Award at the  Awards in 2021. 

We’ve had some great conversations over the years, including for our series. They’re all up on our website, ranging from Anab and Jon’s take on ethical and moral considerations when creating future scenarios for the public, to the relationship between science and design. And for the parents/caregivers out there we also asked, how does your role as parents impact how you approach futures as a design practice? It’s a gift to get this kind of personal insight on craft and process, and musings on the provocations and solutions. As always, it’s a work in progress.

For the full interview and many, many others, visit   on our website. Through conversations led by Tellart, this project explores and documents transformations in design between the Dotcom Crash and the rise of  . Through reflections on key projects from this period and interviews with a community of today’s top design practitioners, Design Nonfiction explores the   practice. It emphasises the timeless need to make the invisible visible and the immaterial tangible, in order to sketch and build with  .

22/01/2022

Let our multi-sensory guest experience design with take you on a journey through the UAE’s rich history, culture and vision for the future at .

Welcome to ’s ‘Land of Dreamers Who Do’. 

🔊Sound on for some exquisite by , .audio

Watch the full film and explore the project in full on tellart.com

10/01/2022

Hello everyone, wishing you a wonderful New Year from all of us at Tellart. Starting the year by musing on, reiterating to ourselves, how design is not just a job — it is our way of viewing and acting in the world.

We are by nature always probing, exploring, discovering. Every act of design brings us closer to the world and to ourselves.

We know that change comes fast and the challenges facing our world will require deep creativity and collaboration. We continue to create at the frontiers of technology, turning complexity into transformative and empowering experiences — striving always to make our planet and our human experience better through design.

Immensely grateful to all our team members and collaborators, past and present.

Looking forward to sharing our journey with you in 2022. 💫

17/11/2021

Ongoing exploring differing sensitivity levels in depth cameras and filtering algorithms. How to make use of noise and ghost images?