The Purina Institute, at Nestlé Purina's St. Louis headquarters, exists to do one job well: put Purina's actual science — gastrointestinal health, cognitive aging, nutrition research — in front of the veterinary and scientific community that can act on it — an audience that is expert, skeptical, and short on time. The Institute's original exhibits were designed by Tellart and fabricated by Chicago Scenic Studios. Some years into their run, the Institute engaged Sitara in 2021 to carry the interactive layer forward — managing it, maintaining it, and redesigning exhibits as the science and the hardware moved on. We consider stewarding systems another studio built a direct test of our thesis: exhibits are long-lived infrastructure, whoever built them.
One of those exhibits — the Gut Viewer, communicating gastrointestinal research — had been running on custom hardware since 2018, and custom hardware in a building with no in-house technical staff is a maintenance liability, not a feature. When the units began failing unpredictably, we didn't propose a like-for-like repair; we redid the exhibit entirely, retiring the custom electronics in favor of commodity touchscreens engineered to drop into the existing casework with minimal disruption to the space. Reliability, not novelty, was the design brief the second time around.
When travel restrictions cut off the Institute's ability to host visitors in person, Sitara — as prime — designed, implemented, and executed a full virtual tour of the center, photography included, rebuilding every interactive as a browser-native version embedded directly in the tour. It's the same principle behind our lifecycle work everywhere else — the content outlives the room it was built for.