Would you let machines take care of you? Let AI dictate your dining experience, or chat with a generative AI companion on our changing relationship with artificial intelligence itself? While these scenarios may sound slightly unsettling in theory, they are precisely the kind of intriguing registers that Tellart—a spatial experience design studio, production house and strategic partner rolled into one—explores through its multidisciplinary work. For 25 years, Tellart, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has combined foresight, interactive design craft, emerging technology and the power of ‘strategic’ and ‘multisensory’ storytelling, to communicate fresh ways of seeing, engaging as well as inspiring urgent conversations on the challenges we face today, particularly of climate awareness.

“Tellart means the art of telling,” the studio states on its website. “All of our work is in service of inspiring positive change by reaching people in new ways… We are able to define why an experience should exist in the world, what it must communicate and how it will take form.”

For most of us, sensory-driven, creatively charged interactions are often more successful in captivating and building more potent emotional connections. Instead of adding to the constant flood of information, immersive storytelling is able to bypass cognitive overload and fatigue through tactile engagement, creating experiences that stick. Picture an AI-powered dining experience that challenges how you think about food systems and sustainability, or a generative art installation that transcribes nature’s hidden rhythms into sound and light. Such newfangled experiences, then, become proactively educational, in a world facing climate change, social inequality and rapid technological shifts.

A truly experiential design is defined by how the senses are touched and activated to tell the story in an embodied way.

“At Tellart, we take a ‘story first’ approach to design,” explain the studio’s strategy director, Maia Garau and creative business developer, Tristan Hupe-Guimarães, when asked about what truly makes an experiential design. “The experiential, multisensory and interactive aspects of our practice are in service of the storytelling goals of an experience. A truly experiential design is defined by how the senses are touched and activated to tell the story in an embodied way. This way, the memory of the experience is multisensory, embedded in your body and emotional core, not just in your mind."

A key project by the practice has been the Dinner in 2050, created for The House of Sustainability at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai in 2023. The AI-assisted visual game made ‘climate action real on a plate’, reimagining familiar dishes with curious interventions—such as swapping lamb for grasshoppers, broccoli for algae or beef for lab-grown meat—to highlight how our eating habits can impact water, energy use, biodiversity and food security at large. In an intimate, playful setting, guests congregated around a table made of sustainable palm wood to speak their favourite meal into a microphone. Tellart’s custom AI model then identified the top ingredients, analysed their carbon footprint and suggested sustainable alternatives using data from the UN.

The result was a data-driven unpacking into how we might eat in a climate-resilient future. “We developed interfaces that connected directly with people, even bridging gaps in language and culinary heritage to ensure the experience was both meaningful and impactful,” Garau and Hupe-Guimarães tell STIR.

“As designers and storytellers, we work at the intersection of culture, nature and technology,” they continue. “We care deeply about creating work that brings people together by building understanding and common ground. Our design philosophy is life-centric—not just in service of humans, but of all living things. Our goal is to create empathy between people, nature and even machines.”

Equally ambitious is Tellart's work on the Netherlands Pavilion at the ongoing World Expo 2025 in Osaka, which celebrates the Dutch spirit of innovation and collective problem-solving. Collaborating with architects, engineers and storytellers, the immersive experience explores the Dutch nation’s deep and evolving relationship with water. As visitors step into the pavilion (built to be completely circular and sustainably sourced: all its materials shall become available again, making the pavilion a depot and a material bank), they will encounter a mural introducing the Dutch ‘common ground’ mindset, and receive an orb—a personal storytelling device that unlocks narratives about how the Dutch have lived with, adapted to and harnessed water as a renewable, clean source of energy.

Inside the striking spherical structure of the pavilion design, visitors experience A New Dawn, a 360° full-dome AI film co-created by Tellart and Return to Earth Studio. The cinematic journey combines human creativity with generative AI, where, towards the end, guests will be invited to create generative artwork at its Pledge Station, “by stepping into a shared space, a literal common ground,” according to Tellart.

Our design philosophy is life-centric—not just in service of humans, but of all living things. Our goal is to create empathy between people, nature and even machines.

In the SAM AI Experience at Amsterdam’s Nxt Museum (2024), Tellart took a fresh look at our relationship with AI for entertainment, work, nature, creativity and community. SAM was designed as an interactive, generative AI companion that prompted participants to share personal stories via chatbot on their mobile phones, where they were asked to describe a concert experience or the idea of being in nature; SAM then wove the answers into unique, musical video narratives, including a wedding under an oak tree and a walk through autumn forests. Combining ChatGPT for scriptwriting, Stable Diffusion for visuals and TouchDesigner for immersive show control, the character SAM managed to blur the lines between human and machine creativity in real-time. The outcome? A deeply personal, multisensory journey that encouraged visitors to rethink their relationship with AI—not as a tool, but as a partner.

Even in projects such as the UAE Pavilion at Floriade 2022, Tellart’s storytelling meshed with environmental stewardship, responding to the international horticultural exhibition’s theme, Growing Green Cities. There, the studio crafted an experience around the desert’s halophytic plants—salt-loving species that thrive in the arid landscape of UAE. Through immersive installations, live plants and evocative sculptures, visitors encountered stories about these plants’ hidden superpowers and their potential to transform how we understand ‘greening’ and sustainability, in some of the world’s most challenging climates.

When asked about Tellart’s collaboration with architects, and how much the ‘experience’ they design is dictated by the space available. Garau and Hupe-Guimarães comment, “Many of [our] projects are at architectural scale. We often say that we turn stories into worlds you can step into. Even before a building is conceived, there is a story—a relationship to the community and the spatial context. Our studio often collaborates with architects, landscape designers, developers and urban planners to explore and develop the concept from the blank page, so that every aspect of the experience, from the building’s exterior to its layout and communication touchpoints, tells a seamless and holistic story.” This philosophy can be witnessed in their work on the UAE Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, where they even reversed the intended flow of the falcon-shaped building to create a narrative of ‘lifting up’ into the future.

But why does this kind of immersive, interactive spatial design matter so much right now? Reflecting on this, Garau and Hupe-Guimarães observe, “The urgency of communicating well—and our potential to do so—have never been greater than they are now… The present moment is different to anything that came before. As humans, we urgently need to know more about our world to make more intelligent decisions with it—just to go on existing. Some of what matters most may be too small, too big, too distant, too hidden, too far in the past or future for people to perceive and understand. Words and pictures are not enough. Experience design is uniquely capable of telling the stories that matter most in a multisensory way that touches hearts and minds and helps people change their behaviour towards a better future."

Tellart’s dedication to the art of telling—rooted in empathy, curiosity and innovation—proves that design, when tapped into its full sensory, technological and narrative potential, can do more than just beautify or serve a function. It can challenge, inform, inspire and reshape how we see and interact with our world, and most of all, how we decide to care for it.