About
Tertiary Co. designs for the transformation visitors carry out the door.
The practice
Tertiary Co. is an experience architecture practice for museums, themed entertainment, and immersive venues. We clarify the change an experience is meant to make more likely in the people who move through it, design the conditions that invite it, and engineer the systems that keep those conditions alive from the first conversation through handover and beyond. Engagements are principal led. Designers, engineers, producers, and integrators are assembled per project, with contracting structured to fit the engagement. The practice is built to produce, not just advise.
Engagements often begin after blue sky, when creative direction is set but intent still needs to survive build and operation. We are also in the room earlier, when naming the change is still the highest leverage move.
The practice is a safe place to experiment: risks taken together, with intent named before they become expensive.
Tertiary Co. is a United States company, incorporated in California, working worldwide. The principal is based in Wellington. New Zealand engagements are delivered through Tertiary Co. NZ Ltd.
Principal
Tim Pike
Twenty years of hands-on work across themed entertainment, museums, live production, innovation labs, and broadcast. Previously at StudioLAB, The Walt Disney Studios. In those roles, significant contributions to award-winning projects, including leadership credit on a THEA Award–winning program and team work on a VES Award–winning special venue project for Disney and ILM. Author of The Tertiary Effect, forthcoming late 2026.
Cross-disciplinary work is how the practice started. Twenty years across live events, prototyping, and installations built a habit: move between disciplines until the constraint that looked fixed becomes something you can design around. That is the same move Tertiary Co. makes for institutions: name what matters, find what was missing, and build so it still holds. Teams pull Tim in when the ambition is real and the path between intent and delivery still needs to be found, not when the plan was never made.
Delivery draws on trusted specialists across creative, technical, and production disciplines, assembled per project with flexible contracting.
The name
Named for the layer that connects us.
The name comes from Buckminster Fuller's concept of precession. A bee gathers nectar, makes honey, and, incidentally, pollinates an entire ecosystem. That third outcome is the larger systemic connection: the layer that joins a single action to the orders we live in. We design for that layer, what becomes true about visitors after they leave. How the method works
- 20+ years across live event production, themed entertainment, and cultural venues
- Career work spanning 50+ interactive installations and 100+ AV/IT systems
- Prior career: leadership credit on a THEA Award–winning program; team contributor on a VES Award–winning Disney and ILM special venue project
- Author, The Tertiary Effect, forthcoming late 2026
- Patent pending measurement tools