Mosaic Maker

he first thing you hear is the robot. The rhythmic beat of whirrs punctuated by brief silences reaches down the unmarked concrete halls of the Boston Design Center, letting you know you’re headed in the right direction. As you approach the entrance to Artaic’s offices, you pass by an open side door and the robot is right there — an industrial arm suspended off a steel frame, its tip zipping back and forth between a gridded sheet and rows of colored tiles. It grabs a piece and drops it on the grid, then grabs another and does the same and another and another. Whirr. Pick. Whirr. Drop. Whirr. Pick. Whirr. Drop.
Eventually, Ted Acworth will notice you standing there, mesmerized, and greet you. Acworth is founder and CEO of Artaic, and Artaic makes custom mosaics with a robot.
Acworth started Artaic in 2007 while working at MIT after finishing his PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford. He’d already been involved in one start-up, Brontes Technologies, a 3-D dental imaging company that was acquired by 3M in 2006. “It was a big exit, classic textbook case,” he says. When it came to his next project, he wanted to do something more permanent, a company he could built. “I didn’t have a lot of passion for dental imaging.”
He did have some passion for mosaic, something he fell in love with while traveling in Europe during summers while in college. Mosaic is an ancient art form, dating back to Mesopotamia in 3,000 BCE. As methods for decorating your space goes, it has some significant advantages, the biggest being that it’s durable and looks classy. It has some downsides as well, the biggest being that it’s expensive and labor intensive. Extremely labor intensive.
Historically, all that labor had to be done on the ground, wherever the mosaic was being installed. Today, mosaics are often assembled in factories, mostly in China or India. Workers places the tiles on adhesive backing paper, which is then cut up and shipped to the installation place. There, installers line up the sheets, embed them in the grout and peel the tape away.
“I visited a factory to see how it works,” says Acworth. “I literally clocked two hours to make a square foot.” It’s a terrible job. Many modern mosaics are essentially giant bitmaps, with colored square tiles acting as pixels in a grid. Picture workers painstakingly completing a paint by numbers from hell, pixel by pixel.
Monotonous repetitive tasks are perfect for a robot. By mechanizing mosaic assembly, Artaic can make higher quality, lower cost mosaics than their overseas competitors. Once Acworth had satisfied himself that the size of the market for mosaics was good he hired Artaic co-founder and creative director Paul Reiss and together they set to work.
It makes sense, from a man who got his MBA in management of technology innovation from MIT’s Sloan business school.
“With any tech startup you know there is going to be this initial trench while you are developing the product,” says Acworth. They expected it would take around a year to get the robot online. At the same time, they had to get customers. Acworth decided to break in to the commercial market — large places like office buildings, hotels, and casinos are already used to buying mosaic, while the product’s been priced out of consumers’ interest. Developing those relationships is also a slow, long process. “We tried to time is so that at the moment the robot was ready, there would be customers ready to buy,” he says. “We’d kind of bluff our customers as we were developing the first project, saying ‘oh yeah, of course we can make that.’”
Perhaps they bluffed too well. “We made our first sale before the robot was ready,” says Reiss. “We made our first project by hand.” The resulting scramble meant living through the very work flow they were hoping to replace. It involved “a lot of pizza, beer, and nimble fingers,” says Reiss. “And a lot of student interns,” adds Acwort