TEDBlog October, 2009 Archive
31 October 2009
Onsite at TEDIndia: Q&A with TEDIndia volunteer Ishan Bhalla
Ishan Bhalla is a volunteer at TEDIndia. TEDIndia volunteers — there are about 30 of them — will be onsite throughout the conference helping with registration, special requests and generally making things run smoothly. We spoke to Bhalla after orientation on Saturday.
How did you find out about volunteering at TEDIndia?
I’d been following the TED.com website for a while, and when I saw on the website that there’s a TEDIndia coming, I knew immediately that I wanted in. I sent email to the manager here, telling him that I would be a volunteer, waiter, sweeper, anything.
What will you be doing onsite?
We haven’t had our assignments yet, but one job I’d like is, if one of the guests want something, arrange it for them. Let’s say they want something delivered to their room. Or requests for information. Just to be helpful.
Watching the volunteers this morning, I was struck by your teamwork. You’re systems thinkers. You talked together about the best way to do a particular job, then sat down and did it. So I have to ask: Is everybody on this team an engineer?
I think yes. It’s a good guess to say 90 to 95 percent are engineers.
Are you? Do you work for Infosys?
I do. I’m an engineering analyst. I work in the department of Infosys that does solutions for engineering; for example, in the auto or aero sector. Our work is basically building applications that would improve the productivity of someone doing, say, an aircraft design, by taking a portion of the design cycle and automating that process. Because some of the processes are very repetitive. What we do is take some of the rules that are in the designer’s head and write them down and build our applications to automate CAD processes, for instance.
What’s your favorite TEDTalk?
My favorite TEDTalk is Ken Robinson. Apart from the content, which is absolutely great, his presentation, the way that he puts in those little funny things in between, I thought it was brilliant. It’s a great talk. I’ve seen it like 6, 7 times.
The other one that I watch often is Yves Béhar, from fuseproject, because I’m very interested in design; that is what I want to take up as my future career. That talk really inspired me specifically, because I saw it at a point where I was trying to figure out my life, what am I going to do in my career going forward. Also the founder of IDEO, David Kelley, his talk on human-centered design. This talk is what pointed me to human-centered design.
Tim Brown‘s recent talk was interesting too, because he talks about using design to solve bigger problems, and that is something very close to my heart. I would like to explore the use of design to solve problems which are socially relevant. I’m not talking about social work specifically but problems that people have, real-life problems, especially in economically backward areas. Because that’s a huge population in India.
I believe that a lot of design is targeted at a western audience. And those products come in to India, but they’re not necessarily designed for India. And I believe there’s a huge potential for that; I also think there’s a huge need for that. As an example, a simple interaction thing: the radio button. You know where the radio button comes from — it’s a metaphor, right? It comes from car radios, where the button can be pressed only one at a time. But people over here are not familiar with that kind of a control. We don’t have those kinds of radios in our cars. If I go and ask somebody what a radio button is, they’ll say it’s an interaction mechanism, but they don’t relate to the source of that metaphor. This is just a very simple example, but let’s say if we are targeting populations in a low-literacy area, who have not had the exposure to things that we have, like technology, we might need to find metaphors from their world to explain new concepts to them. That’s very exciting.
Follow Ishan Bhalla at @lukwhostalking
31 October 2009
Scenes from TEDIndia setup
Onsite at the Infosys campus in Mysore: The TEDIndia war room is live, and staff from around the world are here pulling together details before Tuesday’s events begin. TEDIndia co-hosts Chris Anderson and Lakshmi Pratury are in conference in one corner; employee volunteers from Infosys are sitting at a long table in another corner building badges; TED.com’s media production team is wiring up a mobile production unit for capturing talks as they happen.
Outside, maybe the most spectacular feature is the Simulcast lounge, which crews are building from scratch atop a basketball court. Pictures from the site last week showed a thin metal skeleton; today, it’s built and almost ready for the carpeting to go in. The photo above comes from the facade of this brand-new building. More onsite pics and reports coming soon.
30 October 2009
Q&A with Bjarke Ingels: On architectural alchemy
The TED Blog caught up with Bjarke Ingels several weeks after he gave his TEDTalk at TEDGlobal 2009.
How have the reactions been to your talk?
Well, in the comments on the website, there’s been a lot of meticulous debate about whether or not you can actually see the Great Wall of China from the moon. (Laughs) It’s a saying. The saying doesn’t have the full power if you don’t use the actual language that it normally comes with. It might be an urban myth. But everybody knows what I’m talking about. Sometimes I think communication is more important than the nitpicky details. Since childhood, everybody’s been told that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object that can be seen from the moon.
You’ve said elsewhere that some architects’ work is driven by mysticism, while others’ work remains stubbornly practical. You’re trying to find a way right down the middle.
I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring. Somehow they can’t face the conditions and limitations of the real world, so they come up with an imaginary world, without gravity, where everything is either insanely expensive, or highly irrational, or really unpractical. Our general thesis is that the real world, human life on the planet, is actually super-exciting. If the aspects of normal architecture are not as exciting, it’s because it doesn’t really fit to how life unfolds.
We try to pay attention to how human life is constantly evolving. We use that analysis as the ingredient, the driving force that actually shapes exciting structures — rather than contribute to the traditional accumulation of boring boxes. You don’t have to find it in something incomprehensible. Just because you can understand it, just because you can relate to it doesn’t mean they’re not interesting or sophisticated. We try to turn like all these rational, functional, pragmatic issues into the driving forces of exciting architecture, rather than being its enemy.
Is architecture possible without a sort of single ideology behind its creation?
For me, architecture is the means, not the end. It’s a means of making different life forms possible. Since the planet is populated by billions of people that all live differently — we prioritize things differently; we believe in different gods; we have different standpoints — architecture, and the city, has to be able to accommodate this incredible variety. Therefore, I think architecture is rarely the product of a single ideology. It’s more like it can be shaped by a really big idea. It can accommodate a lot of life forms. Just to put all your eggs in one basket doesn’t work in real life. It’s more a question of being open to new input — allowing your architecture to be tainted, and shaped, by the turmoil of the world.
In your talk, you used the term “alchemy”: you’re not restricting yourself to any single notion of what one structure can contain.
What I like about the term alchemy is that you take traditional ingredients that would separately be just “normal this” and “normal that,” and when you combine them, because of symbiotic relationships, you get much more out of the mix than if you were to leave them separate.
We just had the topping ceremony of a big project in Copenhagen: the Eight House or the Infinity Loop. It’s a hybrid of offices and shops, 150 townhouses — two-story row houses with gardens — and classic apartments, blended together to form a figure-eight-shaped perimeter block, where we explored the fact that offices and shops are deep, while housing is shallow. The difference in depth actually creates space for gardens, and even a small street. As a result, we have this community of row houses along a mountain path that climbs the figure eight, all the way from the ground floor to the penthouse — allowing people to essentially bicycle all the way to the 11th floor.
Public life is usually restricted to the ground floor. Here, it invades the higher levels of the city. You can have a spontaneous encounter. You can sit in your garden on the 10th floor and wave at the mailman who comes by on his way down, and when you have to go to work, you can jump on your mountain bike and ride 500 meters to the city level. It’s essentially allowing all these aspects — the spontaneous social encounter, the neighborhood feeling — to populate the highlands of the city. If we had done it the traditional way, keeping them separate, we wouldn’t have the same intensity. But when we put it all together, we get unique qualities.
Do you draw inspiration from existing buildings, or does this all come from your head?
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don’t come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
In this case, we were faced with a classic challenge. It’s a 600,000-sq.-ft. development — a really big building. We were asking ourselves, “If you’re doing 500 apartments in one go, how do you avoid it becoming an anonymous slab, like a housing project?” What you normally try to do, these days, is disguise that it’s a big project by putting different façades on. You add a cosmetic layer of diversity. We thought this superficial camouflage was less interesting than trying to see if we could nurture different qualities. We thought, “Maybe it’s not so interesting if you live 30 meters to the left or right, but if you live 30 meters up or down, it’s a world of difference.” So we tried stacking these different functions above each other, and gradually …
We looked at one of the most popular neighborhoods in Copenhagen. It’s called the Potato Rows, and it’s a townhouse neighborhood: very dense, very small gardens, very small streets, and the social life that happens between these buildings is really incredible. You have such a strong neighborhood feeling and a great quality of life. We tried to add that to the mix of apartments, terrace houses. We essentially sampled a lot of qualities that exist separately out there in the world, and pulled them all together. In pulling it together, we created a new hybrid entity that is basically a hybrid between a classic row house block and a sort of South Italian village on a mountain ridge, where you have narrow streets that climb the hill, turning into staircases. In some parts, you have dramatic changes of elevation in the block.
One commenter mentioned that you seem to take the difficulties of your work in stride; it almost seems there is no “failure” to you. What is failure to you?
(Laughs) Okay, like real failure? I think failure is part of the nature of all experiments. Any kind of hypothetical, deductive methodology involves a lot of failed experimentation. You find the successful experiment by having all the negative results. In my talk, I demonstrated the idea of evolution by showing this tower in downtown Copenhagen — the one that sort of melts together with the surrounding city, becoming the Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome. I showed that we built a hundred models to get there. Any one of the first 61 was a miserable failure. They were the results of hypotheses that didn’t deliver. For every success, we have a freak show of bastards that didn’t make the cut.
READ MORE: Bjarke Ingels talks about his inspiration, revisiting missed opportunities, and learning when to say “no” >> (more…)
30 October 2009
Giving the euphonium a new voice: Matthew White on TED.com
The euphonium, a tuba-like musical instrument, is rarely heard outside of traditional brass bands. Young euph prodigy Matthew White uses hip-hop rhythms and a wild new vocal technique to bring a fresh sound to this underappreciated horn. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 2:21)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/5l
Watch Matthew White’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
29 October 2009
Symmetry, reality's riddle: Marcus du Sautoy on TED.com
The world turns on symmetry — from the spin of subatomic particles to the dizzying beauty of an arabesque. But there’s more to it than meets the eye. Here, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy offers a glimpse of the invisible numbers that marry all symmetrical objects. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 18:19)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/5G
Watch Marcus du Sautoy’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
28 October 2009
The year I was homeless: Becky Blanton on TED.com
Becky Blanton planned to live in her van for a year and see the country, but when depression set in and her freelance job ended, her camping trip turned into homelessness. In this intimate talk, she describes her experience of becoming one of America’s working homeless. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 07:10)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4U
Watch Becky Blanton’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
27 October 2009
Architecture that repairs itself: Rachel Armstrong on TED.com
Venice, Italy is sinking. To save it, TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself. She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters carbon, too. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 07:32)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4R
Watch Rachel Armstrong’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
26 October 2009
Ask Karen Armstrong anything!
Religious thinker Karen Armstrong has written more than 20 books on faith and the major religions, studying what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common, and how our faiths shaped world history and drive current events. She argues that compassion is the core, fundamental idea behind the three Abrahamic religions, and she is working to help people of faith rediscover this principle.
Armstrong has given two TEDTalks (see her 2008 and 2009 talk), and the result of her 2008 TED Prize wish, the Charter for Compassion, will be unveiled on Nov. 12.
Don’t miss her recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in which she and fellow TEDster Richard Dawkins answer the question “Where does evolution leave God?”
Submit your questions on Reddit and we’ll ask the highest-voted ones as of noon Pacific time on Friday, October 30th. (Note: Any questions in the comments of this blog entry will not be eligible.)
Watch her 2008 TEDTalk:
See the results of past Ask Anythings:
+ TED and Reddit interview Hans Rosling
+ TED and Reddit interview Sir Ken Robinson
+ TED and Reddit interview Karen Armstrong
26 October 2009
A new way to explain explanation: David Deutsch on TED.com
For tens of thousands of years our ancestors understood the world through myths, and the pace of change was glacial. The rise of scientific understanding transformed the world within a few centuries. Why? Physicist David Deutsch proposes a subtle answer.(Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:39)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4G
Watch David Deutsch’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
23 October 2009
Navigating our global future: Ian Goldin on TED.com
As globalization and technological advances bring us hurtling towards a new integrated future, Ian Goldin warns that not all people may benefit equally. But, he says, if we can recognize this danger, we might yet realize the possibility of improved life for everyone. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 7:07)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4F
Watch Ian Goldin’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
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