The Art of Telling

In this Future Spaces session, Matt Cottam — founder and principal designer of Tellart — traces 26 years of strapping a studio to whatever emerging material was coming next: from the web in the mid-90s, to physical computing, to the AI bloom we're living through now. Along the way he makes a case for why design has to stay embodied — why "seeing first discovers" while "prompting first narrows," and why our job is to make the immaterial pokeable.

Tellart is the Amsterdam-based studio behind immersive, technology-driven experiences for Google (Chrome Web Lab), Samsung, the V&A, the UAE Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai (with Santiago Calatrava), the Philippines and Netherlands Pavilions at Expo 2025 Osaka, and Snøhetta's Arc at Svalbard. Matt is core faculty at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, a RISD and Umeå graduate, and was kind enough to do this talk at the wrong end of an Amsterdam evening.

A line worth saving from this one: "Magical technologies on familiar contexts, or familiar technologies on magical contexts — but you shouldn't put magic on magic."