Instructors
Matt Cottam and Maia Garau
Matt at Tellart dot com
Maia at Dynamicdiagrams dot com
Matt Cottam
CEO, Tellart * Part-time Faculty, RISD ID and Umeå Institute of Design.
Matt Cottam graduated in 1999 from the Industrial Design department at the Rhode Island School of Design. In his ten years since graduating, he has been teaching courses at RISD on topics including product and service design, physical computing, design for emergency medicine, and design for human habitation in extreme environments (besides his work as a designer and teacher, Matt is a Paramedic for the US Department of Health and Human Service’s National Disaster Medical Team, as well as the National Ski Patrol). Since 2004 he has been an adjunct faculty member at the Design Institute Umeå in Sweden, where he teaches Experience Prototyping. Matt is also a visiting Instructor at The Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing (China), and the Oslo School of Architecture (Norway).
In 2000, Matt co-founded Tellart, a product and service design firm specializing in the development and prototyping of web, mobile and embedded systems.Tellart’s projects range from museums to medical simulators, from ambient game interfaces to mobile phones. Tellart’s clients include international manufacturers and service providers such as Nokia, Humana, Novartis, Otis Elevator, the Wright Brothers Museum, and Stanford University. Matt serves as Tellart’s CEO to build strategies and tactics for design and works closely with clients to discover opportunities for innovation.
Maia Garau
Senior User Experience Consultant, Dynamic Diagrams * Adjunct Faculty, RISD ID
Maia Garau teaches at RISD and is a senior user experience consultant with Dynamic Diagrams, where she translates research into visual explanations that bring complex ideas to life. Recent projects focused on information design and service improvements for clients including Hewlett Packard, the Aerospace Corporation and the World Health Organization. Prior to joining Dynamic Diagrams she was sponsored by British Telecom to conduct doctoral research on improving avatar-mediated communication. She went on to manage a European Union research project on social presence in virtual environments, and then focused on design strategy for Radar’s mobile picture-sharing service. Maia has a BA in comparative literature from Brown University, an MSc in virtual environments from the Bartlett School of Architecture, and a PhD in computer science from University College London.
