Tokyo, 2001.

teamLab is an art collective based in Tokyo. The name is written as one word, with a lower-case “team” followed by a capital L for “Lab”, and the same styling appears in the names of its museums. English Wikipedia describes teamLab as an international art collective formed in 2001 in Tokyo by an interdisciplinary group of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects, who call themselves “ultra-technologists”.

The founding year comes from the collective itself and from the press. The Tokyo magazine Pen, interviewing Toshiyuki Inoko on 29 August 2018, introduced him as teamLab’s founder and chief representative and wrote that seventeen years had passed since teamLab was set up in 2001. Takashi Kudo, teamLab’s communication director, gave the same year in an interview with designboom published on 19 August 2023, saying that since the group founded teamLab in 2001 its aim had been to find new relationships between humans and the world.

Wikipedia gives a longer prehistory. It says the group began in 1998 when Inoko and Shunsuke Aoki were students in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, working with three friends from engineering backgrounds, and that the group was officially incorporated when Inoko graduated in March 2001. The same article says teamLab initially supported itself by building websites and smartphone apps and by designing offices and shops for other companies, before its art reached a wider audience. It says the artist Takashi Murakami invited the collective to show at the Singapore Biennale in 2011 and then at his Kaikai Kiki gallery in Taipei, and that Pace Gallery has represented teamLab since 2014.

The two halves of the name describe how the group presents itself: a team rather than a single named artist, and a lab where art, science and technology meet. Kudo told designboom that technology is a tool for teamLab, in the way paint is for a painter or bronze is for a sculptor, and that the work is always about the concept and the experience.

From Odaiba to Azabudai Hills.

Much of teamLab’s public identity is tied to buildings that carry its name. Pen reported in August 2018 that the collective had staged the exhibition teamLab Dance! Art Exhibition together with Learn and Play! teamLab Future Park at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Tokyo’s Odaiba district in 2014, and the exhibition DMM.PLANETS Art by teamLab in the same area in 2016.

The next step was a museum of its own. Pen reported that MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless opened in Odaiba on 21 June 2018, and Wikipedia says the museum is operated jointly by Mori Building and teamLab. In the interview, Inoko said that, as the word “Borderless” implies, it is a museum without borders. He said that, apart from physical ones, the borders in the world have been drawn by people, and described rooms in which artworks leave the space where they start, move into another room and mix with the works already there. He said he had long wanted to make a space like that.

The museum also carried an idea about the body. Pen described an area called the teamLab Athletics Forest, with trampolines and a bouldering wall, and reported Inoko’s view that physical and spatial awareness matters as much as mathematics and language. He explained a concept he calls an ultra-subjective space: in place of the single fixed viewpoint of Renaissance perspective, he pointed to pre-modern Japanese scroll paintings that combine several viewpoints and moments in one picture.

The Odaiba building did not last. Reuters reported on 20 November 2023, in a story carried by BusinessWorld, that the Borderless museum had closed the previous year ahead of a redevelopment of the site by Mori Building, and was due to reopen in February in Mori’s new Azabudai Hills complex in central Tokyo. Inoko told the agency that being able to create a large space in which to exhibit was what really mattered to the collective. The report said pieces nearing completion included “Flowers and People”, a continuous projection of blooming and scattering petals, and “Bubble Universe”, a mirrored room of glowing bulbs.

Time Out Tokyo reported on 16 January 2024 that teamLab Borderless would reopen on 9 February 2024 in the lower levels of the Azabudai Hills complex. Its preview described a room for the Light Sculpture series, a Megalith Formation room in which “Flowers and People” gives way to a work called “Black Waves”, and the mirrored “Bubble Universe”.

A name in lower case, a museum in the dark.

Digital and interactive studios rarely have a product on a shelf, so the name and the website carry the identity work. Many of the names are made up rather than descriptive: a word with a numeral attached, a film-industry term borrowed and hyphenated, a phrase that hints at a way of working. The same name can also be written several ways over the years. Trade magazines may print it in lower case while the studio’s own site sets it in capitals, and a hyphen or a numeral can become a distinctive part of the mark.

The studio website is usually the main brand surface. It works as a portfolio, with full-screen video and case studies in front and the typography kept plain. Office cities are often written as short codes along the top of the page, and project credits, director rosters and archives are treated as part of the brand, because they show who made what and when.

These identities also change shape as the business changes. Studios open and close offices, split a film arm from an agency, or fold their work into new ventures under the original name. When reading them, look at how the name is set across the website, the credits and the trade press, how the studio lists its cities, and what it keeps from earlier eras in its archive.

Planets, barefoot, as dated facts.

teamLab’s Toyosu museum opened a few weeks after Borderless. Wikipedia says teamLab Planets TOKYO DMM.com opened to the public in Shin-Toyosu on 7 July 2018, and that its name carries that of the online company DMM.com. Kudo told designboom in August 2023 that the collective opened teamLab Planets in 2018.

Where Borderless is built around artworks that move between rooms, Planets is built around the visitor’s body. designboom, after a visit published on 19 August 2023, described the concept as “body-immersive”: visitors take off their shoes, walk upstream through an installation called “Waterfall of Light Particles at the Top of an Incline”, and later wade through knee-high water. Kudo described a dark room with a soft, cushioned floor called “Soft Black Hole”, and said “Infinite Crystal Universe”, a room of LED lights and mirrors, was an attempt to use digital technology to make a sculptural work, which designboom called a three-dimensional version of pointillism.

The same report covered a newer Garden area with two works. In “Floating Flower Garden”, live orchids hang above visitors and rise away as people approach. In “Moss Garden of Resonating Microcosms”, outdoors, egg-shaped ovoids reflect their surroundings by day, fill with coloured light after dark, and change colour and give off sound when pushed by a person or by the wind. Kudo said the garden began with a question about why people are charmed by flowers at all.

Across these venues the collective’s name works as a label for a kind of space more than for a single object. Reuters noted in November 2023 that earlier teamLab projects in Tokyo had combined digital art with a sauna and staged a performance of Puccini’s opera “Turandot” with lasers, and Inoko said the team wanted people to feel that continuity itself can be beautiful.

For a design guide, teamLab shows how a collective can keep its name short, lower-case and anonymous while the museums that carry it — Borderless, Planets — do the visual work. Compare Rhizomatiks, another Tokyo collective joining art and engineering, and Work & Co, a digital product studio in this collection. For this guide we use petal pink, water blue and night indigo with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep teamLab’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.