Tellart
Success Through Visualization
Using visual communication, contemporary design techniques, and good old fashioned story telling, Providence-based Tellart specializes in producing interfaces that align information with human experience to create interactive and user-friendly ways of sharing information. By using diagramming and other visualization techniques to enhance collaboration, the Tellart team has found a unique niche producing innovative—and often unexpected—solutions for a variety of challenging problems.
"Our team's goal has been always been to create new opportunities for design and embrace all elements of the user experience – the materials, the gestures, the narrative, and interactivity between humans and computers," says Tellart president Matt Cottam, who co-founded Tellart with this vision in mind in 1999.
For example, says Cottam, the team has mapped surgical procedures, disaster recovery processes, product-use models, and other tough to map things like software system architecture. "Having a visual model of a project promotes conversation between the project's stakeholders and helps everyone better see and understand how the project develops."
Using this unique approach, the Tellart team has created specialized software applications that facilitate communication and collaboration over long distances; audio, visual, and animation that depict hard to envisionvisual activities like a chemical reaction; real time data streams that drive live maps, charts and diagrams; and web-based narratives for interactive documentaries and promotional materials. Tellart also specializes in computer design and building physical computer interfaces that react to touch, heat, motion, light, and sound.
The diversity of Tellart's services is reflected in their clientele list, which includes organizations like the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Coastal Resources Center at the University of Rhode Island, Item New Product Development, Novartis Oncology – Education Division, the World Trade Center Recovery Project with filmmaker Kelly Riley, Philips and Jordan Contractors, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the US Army Corps of Engineers.
At the heart of Tellart's mission is a fierce commitment to collaboration, a value reflected in their problem solving approach and in the scope of talent the studio employs. With industrial and graphic designers, and film, animation and video artists to electrical and mechanical engineers and computer scientists on hand, the Tellart team is able to tackle every problem from many different angles. Tellart is also continually exploring the future of their discipline by actively participating in national and international academic and professional conferences, such as the Doors of Perception Conference in Delhi, India and the upcoming National Disaster Medical Services Conference in Reno, Nevada.
Being located in Rhode Island also contributes to Tellart's ability to collaboratively create products, services, and technologies. "Given that our business is very much about understanding human factors and making the end-user the focus of every project; having access to a diverse population in such a geographically compact state is a huge asset for us in our user research and testing."
As for the future, the company has grown significantly in the last five years, with Tellart teammates stationed as far away as California. And as Cottam sees it, the need to continually improve how humans interact with computers and information in general will only increase. "As society moves deeper into this information age, we won't be visiting big plastic desktops for vital information. It will be available whenever and wherever we want to use it. Tellart hopes to be there to make that information comprehensible, easily accessible and more valuable."
For more information about Tellart, please visit www.tellart.com.