Ted Acworth's Artaic: The Left & Right Brain's Head-on Collision
T hese are the words of a scientist on a mission. In this case, the scientist is Dr. Ted Acworth. His mission is UFO hunting. And for engineer and entrepreneur Acworth, it was only one of many missions – equally or more extraordinary – that he has found himself embarking on in his still young 40-year-old life. Among his accomplishments: designing telescopes for NASA, developing a digi- tal system that gives doctors a realistic measurement of arteries with- in the heart, directing a research portfolio at Cambridge-MIT Institute that yielded four venture-backed spinout companies and starring as the resident “unbiased” scientist on the History Channel’s hit series, UFO Hunters. The first episode of the series is where he spoke the words above when the team was presented with the case of a possible UFO sighting off the coast of Washington, two weeks before the much-speculated 1947 Roswell incident.
But it was Acworth’s most recent technological undertaking that brought him to the tumultuous world of design, a place where left-brain- thinking, professional scientists and UFO hunters are seldom seen. Combining an insatiable passion for technology and mechanical solutions with an emotional connection and artistic appreciation for mosaics, Acworth created Artaic, an idea that started to take shape while he was on the road filming episodes of UFO Hunters. Eventually that idea gave way to a tile company that is using science and technology like none of its competitors, and doing something few other furnishing companies can boast: manufacturing from a design center showroom.
I heard it first hand when I spoke with Acworth over the phone from his Boston office. “You hear that?” he asked me. “That’s a robot making mosaics.” I heard the robot, along with every other peripheral noise that comes with having a design center and manufacturing hub in the center of Beantown. Among the sounds were a fire alarm test and lots of atmospheric chatter, but all were dwarfed by that distinctively metallic twang of a robot placing tiles one by one on a surface that was destined to become a piece of art.
Artaic’s history is not a long one — the company was only founded in 2007 — but the idea for it dates back to Acworth’s childhood, when he was living in Europe with his British entrepreneur father, and his artist mother. He began stumbling across historic mosaic works in places like Madrid, Sicily and London and was struck by their technical mastery and artistic appeal. A left-leaning thinker (the analytical, logical, rational side of the brain), Acworth connected with the art’s precision, but would not cultivate the inspiration until much later in his life.
Through Acworth’s educational and professional experience, he has learned and
mastered the science of creating mechanical solutions for many of life’s problems. When it came time for him and his wife to decorate their Beacon Hill home in Boston, Acworth found one he couldn’t solve. His child-bred affection for mosaics kicking in, Acworth wanted to use mosaics for decorating but when he researched his options, he was appalled at how expensive and inaccessible a furnishing it was. Harvesting his experience at MIT, where he managed projects with hopes to identify inventions and spin out new companies, Acworth decided it was time he tried one of his own: he would create a solution to the problem with mosaics.
“I’m trained as a mechanical engineer and designer,” said Acworth. “I use technology to design machines that solve problems for people. The problem I’m trying to solve is that I love mosaics, but right now it’s very expensive, it takes a long time and it’s a complicated process. I recognized that. I built a home a few years ago and wanted a mosaic and realized how prohibitive it is. I said, ‘Darn-it, I can solve that problem and make it more accessible!’ That’s the dream for Artaic — to make the mosaic medium more accessible. Maybe we’re not saving lives by looking at people’s hearts. People might argue art is not as worthy a goal as science and medicine, but I think it is. It improves life.”
Through the use of proprietary robotic technology developed by Acworth, Artaic can create virtually any design a client chooses. The image is translated into a language that the Artaic robot understands, and then the mosaic is created by it through a super-efficient method that allows projects to be completed in mere hours as opposed to weeks or months, and with practically no manpower. The robot does have to be supervised at this point, but Acworth is hoping that within a year, the technology will be a “lights out manufacturing” process with no need for a human babysitter.
“We’re just trying to be a lot faster,” said Acworth. “When you talk to architects and designers about using mosaics they say, ‘Yeah, I love it, but it takes forever,’ and often the project doesn’t allow that. We’re trying to make it more accessible by making it much faster.”
Because Acworth’s specialty is in mechanical engineering, he has paid special attention to hiring the most creative artists around to design patterns for Artaic and represent the artisanal character that the ancient art form is all about.
“We have two customers; one group who’s going to buy the mosaic, but the other group is the artist, because if we don’t get really good artists, we’re not going to get really good art,” said Acworth, who stressed that Artaic’s technology in no way replaces the mosaic artist, but merely creates a tool with which they can more efficiently execute their work. “We still need the artist. This is just a tool for them. It’s meant to be a new technology and the proof in the pudding will be if people adopt it and use it.”
