In your photography and writing, one of your main themes is to explore the “borders of monotheism.” What does that mean?

I often focus on Judaism, Christianity (mainly Eastern Christianity) and Islam, to explore areas where the sacred crosses borders. I show the similarities between different religions and dogmas. This exploration naturally transfers into mysticism, where the borders are less definite. I like to show, for example, the common threads between Sufism (a Muslim sect) and Hasidism (a Jewish sect). They have the same concentration of energy, the same passion to explore meditation and prayer.

I also like to show the places where people of different religions — for example Egypt — frequent the same holy places. We are much more accustomed to seeing the conflicts, the violence, the extremism — and we don’t see the common ground that exists. For me, it’s important to explore these places and to show them to the world.

But my interest is really in the human beings themselves, in exploring human relationships, and in covering underreported topics. I also work a lot on nomadism, or rather the end of nomadism, and the problems nomads face. I work with the Gypsies in Europe, publishing a lot about the problems they are having in Eastern Europe and Italy. I also cover nomads in Afghanistan and Tibet.

I’m interested in social questions, and how all of these topics are interconnected. I report on the people living in the shadows of the world.

Tell us about your current project based in Central Asia.

I’m in the final stages of this project in Central Asia, which focuses mainly on the Afghani diaspora. Next month I’ll work in Pakistan, photographing people living in the Northwest part of the country, focusing especially on the symbolism light has in mysticism. I’m preparing two books: one about Afghanistan specifically, and one about the borders of monotheism, entitled Auras.

I just came back from Tibet, for a new project I will continue to work on over the next three years or so. This work will have the same kind of sensibility and the same interests as my other work — the relationship of people to sacred geography and spaces. It also looks at pre-Buddhist traditions and also some Tantric traditions, which are very sensitive and sensual. Instead of refusing the body, they exalt the body, and they exalt the space, materials, and ground around them.

You often photograph and interview people in conflict zones. Why do you choose to do your work in these places?

I use conflict zones not because of the conflict itself — I’m not interested in the wars. I hate war. I go because I want to learn about the people behind the scenes of war we see in the media. I want to share their life and to see with their eyes what is happening around them. I try to narrate it in my report and in books. I also go because we in the rest of the world are really victims of the stereotypes, of the propaganda we see in the news.

It’s very important to show the hope and the hopelessness of these people. After 10 years, there is a big prospect the Taliban will come back to Afghanistan. What will happen to women in this country? These women are very strong, but they are not free. It is very difficult for them.

I’m going to Pakistan for similar reasons. We forget about this country completely. We see them in the news sometimes during an emergency for a short period, but afterwards they disappear. For example, in Pakistan, during the 10 years of the Afghani war, 30,000 people died because of the violence. Yet this is a completely forgotten war. There are other countries like this, but I’m not able to cover them all in one lifetime.

When you travel in these countries, alone, as a woman, are you afraid?

I don’t know … sometimes, yes. But people fill me with hope, and they tend to be very helpful. Because I travel alone, and people see my fragility and my sincerity, they want to help.  The guest is sacred in Islam. When I arrive in an Islamic country, it is a strange situation, because I am both a stranger and a woman. I also am a married woman, and I have children.  So this situation generates a very great respect for me. It provides a protection. I live under this kind of sacred respect reserved for the guest. It’s the greatest in the world, I think.

Sometimes I meet people who believe that women should not travel alone. But I put these experiences out of my mind — it’s a very marginal experience.

Especially in Afghanistan, I’m humbled by the people’s generosity. Theirs is far greater than mine. For example, I once had an appointment there with someone I did not know very well. This person arrived to our appointment and brought his whole family — his own children — to protect me. I didn’t know what to do. I cried, I refused to accept it, but they obligated me to accept this kind of protection. This type of thing is sometimes too much for me. They are very fantastic people, so beautiful, so full of humor, full of vitality, and love for life. This country is so marred by war, yet there’s a sense of  life and generosity from the people that’s unparalleled.

What are your favorite ways to share the stories of people you meet?

I use what is a kind of photography and literary report. I have the privilege to narrate in two modes: both with photography and with writing. They help each other a lot. Because publishers are used to separating these two modes, it’s very difficult to publish a book with this kind of narration. But I love to mix them, and I think it is very important to do so. It can be very helpful to understand the reality of the situation.

During my photographic exhibitions, I also use a lot of text. An exhibition of mine is like a big book, exposed on the walls of the gallery. People come and see and also read.

I also collect a lot of audio recordings when I’m traveling. I have recorded many voices, music, songs, prayers, the sounds of the street, of insects, of children, of the night. I include the audio recordings in my exhibitions as well.

What first inspired you on this path of researching and reporting on underreported people?

Growing up in Poland, my family was Catholic, part of the majority religion. I learned at a young age that my country had held the worst genocide in history. When I was very young, 12 years old at most, I started to collect all kinds of information about it. I asked my grandmother, “Grandmother, what happened here? Who are the Jews?” She didn’t answer.  So I studied books and Jewish culture. I was a little obsessed with it. I wanted to learn as much as possible, but I shuddered to understand what had happened.

My work started this way, and after that I studied it at university. I started to explore the minority scene in Eastern Europe. I studied both ethnic and religious minorities — Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and others. I wanted to cover stories of minorities that suffered not only during, but after World War II. Many were deported after the war in order to make them disappear. Their culture was completely destroyed by the Communist government.

I later moved to Italy. In the Polish literary tradition, it is very common for writers and poets to go out of the country to write about us. Though I moved to Italy for personal reasons, leaving Poland permitted me to see my country from a distance, and permitted me to write about my country, which might not have been so easy to do from my homeland.

For a time, you were an avid participant in a unique kind of street theater.

Yes, I love theater. I developed an experimental street performance, a mix of acrobatics and Oriental martial arts, where we danced on stilts. We performed in theaters, and festivals, and on the street. It was choreographed, but also improvisation, with dialogue and music to narrate a story.

It was theater but in big open spaces, using the very beautiful and very rich scenography of the cities: old houses, natural light, fountains, rivers …. It was wandering theater. We moved from one place to another, and the whole group of people followed us. Sometimes my three sons performed with us. I loved it so much, but I found I didn’t have time to do both theater and my other work.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

Follow your passion with discipline, and without too much compromise. Study all the possible techniques to develop and grow. I was very fortunate to have the opportunities I did — maybe other people don’t have the same chances I had.

But I tell my children: the most important thing is to follow the small illuminations that we have sometimes in our lives, that give us a kind of security that we are sure what we really want to do. We sometimes forget about it, or we are afraid to realize it. But I think all human beings have a certain predisposition or special talent for certain things.

What was the TED Fellowship experience like for you?

It was a very interesting, amazing experience. It was completely new for me — I am much more used to living in the pastures in Central Asia than in the context TED provides. It was the first time I used the English language not with a Kabul taxi driver: I had only used English as a kind of international language before.

TED was excellent stimulation for the professional part of my work. I received valuable professional advice, particularly on how to develop outside of Italy. But for me the most important thing about the TED Fellowship was meeting with the Fellows and other people and hearing the talks. I loved it so much. It’s really a great global platform.

Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via TED Conversations. This week, James asks:

If you could give computers one magical power, what would it be and why?

Respond here!

Your studio explores new ways physical objects relate to digital information. Why is that mission important to you?

The way the human body and human mind are set up, we’re incredibly good at using physical objects and interacting with them. That physical world is so rich, yet it’s often neglected in the traditional ways we interact with computers — such as a keyboard and mouse, or even a touch screen. Whatever you’re doing, it feels the same, whether you’re writing a spreadsheet or a love letter. There’s no extra texture, or smell, or any other sensation, besides the visual element. It would be a shame to just totally ignore those other aspects of the physical world.

That’s why I use new technologies to bring back some of that physicality into the digital world. Sometimes the goal is purely functional, like helping somebody in an office do something faster — the sense of touch gives them this feedback that helps them do things more quickly. Sometimes the outcome is simply to be more fun — a richer experience. I try to integrate ways one can interact with computers that are faster, easier to understand, more social, and more fun. That’s something that’s been pretty difficult to do with computers in the past.

What are the kinds of projects you work on at your Patten Studio?

One of my earlier projects, the “Sensetable,” I talk about in my TEDTalk. The Sensetable has a circuit built into the tabletop surface, which tracks the movement of objects on the table. My favorite application of it is one where the objects on the table represent different atoms. You can bring them together to cause a “chemical reaction.” That project is now an exhibit at the museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Another interesting piece was the Gravity Harp for Bjork. Some colleagues here in my co-working space asked me to help them with the harp, because in order to get it to actually play music, they needed some very complex control of the motion of the instrument. The original design had 37 pendulums in a ring. That ring was 50 feet wide, and 25 feet tall.

We had a really tight production schedule, so ultimately, it was much smaller, but the core idea of pendulums that play a harp remained constant throughout the process.

Right now, we’re working on a series of windows for Barney’s New York. We recently had a series of kinetic installations with motors and televisions, commemorating Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue.

Currently we have a display up about a French shoe designer, Christian Louboutin. One of the windows has a man’s pair and a woman’s pair of shoes. The man’s pair sort of chases the woman’s pair around the window. We built this huge mechanism to use magnets underneath the floor to actually move the shoes. These window displays are kind of a crazy combination of technology and art. The people at Barney’s are really exited about having kinetic elements in their windows, and creatively, we see things from the same perspective, so it’s been really fun working with them.

How did you first come across this idea of combining the physical and digital?

I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and I was doing research in a virtual reality lab with Professor Randy Pausch. When people would wear the virtual reality head-mounted displays, they would often experience a phenomenon called “simulator sickness.” It’s kind of like getting seasick. Your eyes are giving your brain conflicting information about what you’re experiencing, compared to what the rest of your body is perceiving. The theory I heard about why this goes on is that your body thinks, “Something really weird is going on here. I must have eaten something bad, so I should throw up.” I felt like that was such a clear signal that this type of interaction was not well suited for the human body.

To help people acclimate, one thing we found worked really well was to give the person something physical to hold in their hand during the virtual reality session. We found they had a much easier time understanding their relationship between the physical and virtual world that way.

For example, we had this one demonstration called the “Light Saber Demo.” In it, the player is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and he or she had to fight with this light saber. We would just give the person a flashlight to hold in their hand, and they would see the image of the saber on the screen. That physical object made it a much more believable story, and people felt much more comfortable.

From that, I got really excited about this idea that physical objects give us this special kind of information that you can’t get visually. Later at a conference, I saw some work out of MIT from a professor named Hiroshi Ishii that just blew me away. He had a table with little building models on top of it, coupled with video projection on the tabletop. There were these physical models, but digital information was projected around them. As soon as I saw that, I asked one of his students, “Who’s your advisor? I need to meet this person!” It was a love at first sight thing. I went to MIT and studied with Professor Ishii, and wound up doing my PhD there.

You mentioned working with Randy Pausch, who is famous for his talk on living life to the fullest. Has his philosophy affected you at all?

Randy was a very dynamic guy, and we were a very tightly knit research group under his leadership. I think that when you’re in that context, there are going to be a lot of influences. Some you notice and some you don’t notice. One of the most important lessons I learned from Randy is that time is very valuable. He has another talk that he used to give often, his time management talk. That’s a theme that is there in both of his well-known talks: time is the most valuable resource we have. At any moment, you have to think, “Out of all the things that I could be doing, is what I’m doing right now the right way to spend my time?”

Being around him really inspired me to do the best I can to make sure the work I’m doing is pushing things in the direction I want to go.

Your work combines design, electronics, software, and requires picking up new skills on the fly. Have you discovered anything surprising about this eclectic type of work?

One surprising thing is how much the skills from different disciplines transfer. For example, before I had ever worked on electronics at all, I would see people working on it on screen, and think, “Wow, whatever that person is doing, it’s really beautiful.” The software that you use to design electronics is very colorful, because everything is color-coded. People inadvertently create these really beautiful images. And one of the things I realized, once I got better at electronics, is that often a circuit that’s better designed, that does it’s job better, is actually visually more aesthetically beautiful as well.

I’m always trying to go after projects that involve different kinds of skills, and that leads to unexpected places, like doing these windows for Barney’s. But it keeps things really interesting and fun. When we started this window for Barney’s, we were given these shoes that were $1,000 dollars each, and we had to drill holes in them. I thought, “Wow, I’ve never had to drill a hole in a $1,000 shoe before.” I feel like I’m always getting to do something new. Sometimes I stop and think, “How did I get here?” I’m happy to be here, but it’s certainly not where I thought I would be 10 years ago.

How has the TED Fellowship affected your work?

Being a TED Fellow has given me the opportunity to connect with a lot of people. Some have been face-to-face interactions at the conference, while others have been through the TED website. For example, at the conference I met a variety of people who have offered to help me or collaborate, and the most recent person I hired at Patten Studio learned about my work through TED.

Also, the TED Fellows participated in a pre-conference, which was extremely useful. I learned a lot about how to communicate about my work with the press and with the public.

Finally, it’s also been very valuable to have this group of peers in the TED Fellows. The group is so supportive and people within it have so many different perspectives to offer. There is a lot of trust in the group and a genuine willingness to help each other achieve big goals.

In general, work at my studio has picked up a lot since I was selected as a TED Fellow. We’ve gotten more interesting projects and more of them.

Part of your approach at Patten Studio is to think of the user experience first, and think next of the technology. Doesn’t it often prove impossible to make the technologies match up to the vision?

Well, it’s true that there are lots of technologies that I would love to have that don’t exist. Like the ability to track objects or people in 3-D space without using batteries. There are lots of ways to solve problems like that in a limited scope, but there’s no one off-the-shelf solution that solves the problem in the general case.

But a lot of times, if you come up with the user experience that you want to have, and you realize that the technology to do it doesn’t exist, maybe you can create that technology. I think that’s the most exciting outcome, because it’s using technology to expand what’s possible in the world of design.

There’s a list of technologies that people keep generally thinking, “Well, if we had this technology, we could do all these amazing things.” One that people think about a lot is digital clay. It’s the idea that you could have clay that would remember it’s shape, and then you could program it and get it to do something like transform itself into the shape it had yesterday. These kinds of technologies are really exciting, especially for people who design 3-D structures like cars or buildings. No one really has any idea how to make digital clay. But with technologies like these, there are people who recognize that the vision is really exciting, and they start taking baby steps towards that idea. Often, they eventually get somewhere really close that’s useful for a lot of things.

What kind of not-yet-existing technologies are you taking baby steps towards right now?

Well, one idea that I’ve been excited about for a long time is an outgrowth of my Sensetable. I built another similar table that not only tracks the objects, but also moves them. To do this, I used electromagnets, which are too power hungry for every day use. So I’m working on a more generalized, practical technology to do the same job. I’d like to create a bunch of small objects that you can put on any tabletop, where they can drive themselves around. By moving themselves to different orientations in front of you, they become the user interface: they become the way you interact with the computer.

For example, let’s say you’re editing a video. These knobs would move out onto the table in front of you, and arrange themselves in a way that makes sense for that particular task. Then, if you’re going to draw a picture, they rearrange themselves in another way. You have this constantly evolving palette of tools at your disposal. You can have this kind of give-and-take, tug-of-war interaction with the computer, where, if you’re doing something that you’re not supposed to do, you can sort of feel the computer pulling against you as you push an object on the table.

I’ve made the proof of concept of this, in the context of the magnetic array, but I’d like to make this something that you could put in your pocket, and pull out and use on any kind of tabletop surface.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

It’s important to be honest with yourself about what you’re good at and not good at. Team up with other people whose strengths are complimentary, in order to form a well-balanced team. I think that’s one of the most important things. It’s tough to go about starting a business by yourself, and it’s much more fun, and better in a lot of ways, if you can do it as part of a team.

Rumor has it your (not yet posted) TEDTalk gave a sneak peak of your piece ABACUS.

Yes, of all my current projects, I’m most excited about ABACUS, which I spoke about at TEDGlobal. I want ABACUS to start a conversation about our relationship to screens, and about how, in our culture, propaganda wins over content so much of the time. It’s a very visual, sixty-minute direct address to the audience. It’s about national borders, our relationship to screens, and contemporary persuasion.

ABACUS is going to take place at the Sundance Film Festival in January, as part of New Frontier, and we’ve just launched a Kickstarter campaign for it. We’re going to do some public performances on the streets, some choreographed paparazzi, and some impromptu press conferences and protests, which are also choreographed as part of the piece. One of the things ABACUS is about is increasing visual literacy so that people are better able to discern good content from bad, and truths from fiction or propaganda more easily.

What other pieces can we look forward to seeing from you?

I am working on a dance video installation with Nichole Canuso Dance Company. It’s called “Takes,” and it’s going to be in New York at 3 Legged Dog, January 5th to 8th. It’s a really beautiful dance video installation, very emotionally and visually driven, with no language.

The art lab I direct, Early Morning Opera, also just signed on with a new producer, MAPP International Productions, for a piece that I’m deeply excited about called Holoscenes, which is about global rituals. The name is a play on the current geologic epic that we’re in, the Holocene.

Holoscenes is going to be using documentation from all over the world. We’re making a computer program that generates 24 random land-based GPS coordinates. We’ll research rituals starting as close to those 24 points as possible. Hopefully those will be the rituals that we end up using in our performance.

The work is going to be a big outdoor installation in three giant acrylic aquariums. A custom hydraulic system will modulate the level of the water in the aquariums, according to environmental conditions around the world, in real time. It plays on the theme of popular water spectacles — the fountains in front of the Bellagio, for example — but primarily, the piece is about flooding. It’s about global catastrophe, the persistence of human behavior, and habits in the face of larger systems. It’s about our inability to change quickly — something that is both really gorgeous and so frustrating at the same time.

The piece will probably be shown in New York, but not for a couple of years.

A lot of your work explores our screen-based culture. How did you become obsessed with this theme? 

I think it came on slowly. I am an only child, raised by my mom, and like a lot of kids growing up in America, I watched a lot of television. I was also part of that generation where personal computers first came into the home.

Technology, computing, and screens are completely central to my work. I’m ambivalently obsessed with screens: I love how democratic they are, in the sense that they allow all this information,  and intelligent, aesthetic vision to travel the map in no time. At the same time, I’m very curious about screens as they relate to how we gather, and relate to live events.

Ever since cinema was introduced, screens have been kicking the teeth in of live performances. And I think that there’s something that has been a little bit lost because of this. Screens encourage people to stay in, and screens encourage people to look at an object in a public space as opposed to another person. The pendulum is swinging so far in favor of the screen, and it’s going to swing even further. Screens are going to be all over our public and private spaces, mapped onto cars, trees, architecture. Futurists talk about embedding them into contact lenses.

Unfortunately screens have become primarily created in the service of advertising. Executives want television shows to be good so that they can sell the advertising slots for more money. And now the same thing is happening on my cell phone and on the Internet.

I think it’s a really impoverished way of thinking about what’s possible with screen space, and what we could do with it educationally, culturally, and communicatively — in terms of encouraging diversity of aesthetic experiences, but also in terms of encouraging something that is closer to what a true democracy might look like. I think screens could be integral to that. But because of the direction screens are currently heading, I think live events and live gatherings are going to emerge as incredibly important in the next decade.

In promoting a renaissance of live performance, do you hope to see the prevalence of screens decrease?

It sounds like I’m damning screen culture or something, but I’m not. I love screens. Screens are in my work. Technology is in my work. Our lives have so much to do with that relationship. In the way that you would inoculate somebody with a vaccine by taking in a small amount of the virus into your body, in my work, screens are sort of like the vaccination. I use screens in order to put performers and the audience in relationship to the screen. It enables a very active dialogue that’s not formally about screens, but that somehow makes that relationship resonate with whatever the content is. It allows us to meditate on that very contemporary experience.

There’s a lot that’s happening in our culture right now that the screen-based media is not able to critique, because it’s working at the service of a lot of people who are actually causing the problems. I think working from the artistic and the financial fringe is the only real way to keep a separation between something like advertising or a corporate interest, and real artistic freedom. I believe the live event is a platform for artists to have a much higher level of true conversation within society.

You have a pretty strong stance on the ways you will fund your art. How do you manage to do it?

Well, I lie, cheat and steal. [Laughs]

The problem is, there’s not a single pathway. It’s always an improvisation. Being an artist in this culture, you have to use a tremendous amount of your creativity just to find a way to do your work with integrity. That means producing your work and aligning yourself with institutions, supporters, and festivals that you respect. It’s also about finding a way to bend what I’m interested in to the contexts that are available. It’s about jumping on those opportunities, and looking at them as interesting platforms that I didn’t necessarily conceive of in the first place.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

Anybody focused on increasing the quality of face-to-face human interaction is going to be riding a growing wave in the next couple of decades. Do everything you can to increase true face-to-face encounters and the quality of those interactions — whether it’s investing in community programs or international exchanges, in rethinking public space or public transportation. People are going to be hungry for that social contact, in order to counterbalance our increasingly mediated lives. Leverage that trend. I believe it’s going to be a very profound one, and will apply to a lot of different businesses.

You’ve said that before realizing you were an artist, you dedicated yourself to more conventional ways of working for social causes. When was the moment you realized you were an artist?

I took a directing class in college, and that was the first moment I realized I was able to collage a lot of different things I was interested in. I made a piece in the class where I integrated some short clips of videos from La Dolce Vita, which is one of my favorite movies, some poetry from Paradise Lost, which is one of my favorite works of literature, played with light in the classroom, and I performed a bit myself.

I don’t think I knew what I was doing, but I think I became aware that there was an impulse that was guiding choices I didn’t know why I was making. I think the moment that I realized I could stop making “logical” choices and just make instinctual choices, was when it occurred to me, “Oh, maybe that’s what it means to feel like you are inspired.”

That type of work made me so much happier than writing a paper or constructing an argument with three bullet points. I think what I recognized was that even though I love language and I love ideas, I feel like the way that we structure most of our arguments is far too literal. With my art I am able to express feelings in a way that is both more vague, and simultaneously more specific.

Why is being part of the TED Fellow community important to you?

The thing that’s most exciting to me about the TED Fellowship is communicating and working with creative people. I don’t really care if they are in “artistic fields” or not. The abiding commonality of TED Fellows is that whatever they do — if they’re astronomers or doctors or in some research field — they are just incredibly, hellaciously creative. The TED Fellowship has been the single group that I’ve been most proud to be a part of. They are truly smart, inspiring people.

America into the 20^th century was really about specialization, and I think we became overspecialized. That hinders vocabulary exchange. It makes certain things too complicated and opaque for other groups to understand and have a dialogue about. The finance system is a very good example of that. Systems have gotten so byzantine that only a few people know how to navigate them or even talk about them. I love being part of a community where a person like a TED Fellow who’s doing very, very complicated work in biotech, for example, makes it a point to communicate in a compelling way to people who don’t have that expertise.

Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via TED Conversations. This week, Kaustuv asks:

Despite the controversy over patents, what is a progressive take on authorship in the collaborative world?

Respond here!

In your TEDtalk, you tell us about the Sunglass Project, the latest software from your company dplay. What is the goal of the Sunglass Project?

The Sunglass Project is a web-based design platform that really democratizes design. It gives access to high-end design tools to people all across the world.

Thirty or 40 years ago, when computer-aided design (CAD) was pioneered, it was done by the manufacturing industry. Architects started using it in the 1970s, and now there’s practically no design that happens without a bit of computation. So some of these metaphors or ways of thinking have remained, while the context has completely changed: we now live in a networked, mobile world, and design itself has become more and more collaborative. But the design systems we use were not developed with this in mind.

So at dplay we wanted to develop a system that responds to this change in context. We thought, “What kind of a system would allow collaborative cooperatation in this networked world?” Immediately we went to a web-based delivery system. You don’t need to download or buy any software: you can get it from the web browser. Sunglass is a drag-and-drop design platform that you can use to share and build 3-D content. We are already working with universities, building up design and analysis tools on the browser, so the moment it is launched, everybody across the world will be able to use these tools. We want to make this a truly democratic space where everybody can join in design. We are planning our first launch for March 2012.

For us, success will be if a student in Bangladesh or India, using their $100 laptop, can access a high-end design tool developed somewhere in Stanford or Princeton.

You have said you are passionate about making platforms for collaborative design. What experiences developed this dedication?

My architecture undergrad studies in Kolkata were very formative for me.  It was a very orthodox, dogmatic place, and design was taught as almost rule-based. It was very frustrating.

Since I was very young, computer science was a favorite subject of mine. I simply enjoyed building systems. Early on in my architecture studies I would try to integrate small things like programming buildings and trying algorithmic ways of going about what people would normally do in other ways. It was purely out of personal interest, rather than any idea of where I was headed.

I was lucky because I had this mentor who told me that there are places that focus on integrating design and computation together. He suggested I apply to MIT — that was such an encouragement, and so exciting.

I was coming from a culture where experimentation, freethinking, and having dialogues with other kinds of sciences were not encouraged. There was no platform to do so. At MIT it was just the opposite. Disciplines don’t really exist there. You are never just an architect, or computer science person, or any one thing.

You were always doing projects that had various different perspectives juxtaposed, and everything was collaborative. I realized there is no one way to do things, no one perspective that is universally valid.

All of the projects I’ve initiated since then — like “Opening the Black Box,” or dplay — are collaborative. They come out of that vision that unless you can tell a story in many different ways, you don’t have a story.

Tell us about the forum you initiated at MIT, Opening the Black Box.

Opening the Black Box was a forum for designers to look at the world in different ways. For my master’s thesis, I was trying to build a machine that would design autonomously. At the end of the thesis I concluded to myself that you cannot remove the human out of the design. So instead, I started building systems to enable humans to design further. At that point I was also introduced to the cybernetics principles and some fantastic authors like Heinz von Foerster and Gregory Bateson.

I started discussions comparing artificial intelligence and cybernetics. Principally they differ in many, many different ways. Artificial intelligence supposes that there is an external world where objective reality exists outside us. But in constructivism or cybernetics, there is no reality that exists outside the designer. The world appears as it does because of the human’s nervous system. I tried to connect both theories to design.

So along with my colleague Daniel Rosenberg, I started this forum called “Opening the Black Box,” comparing the different narratives in each of these. We collected literature, papers and movies on the subjects, and we met one day every week and discussed them. It was so popular that it became an independent study course at MIT and was taught for two semesters for credit. I’m delighted that my personal intrigue blossomed and became a platform for others.

Is your definition of success, then, creating collaborative platforms for other people?

For me, the definition of success has really changed. When I was in India and also during my early days at MIT, it was very introspective, meaning it was about me. It was how many papers did I write, or how many talks did I give, or how many things happened to me. My definition of success was around that.

But now I feel there is a significant difference. Now I feel that my success depends on others. It’s not just about creating platforms, but creating platforms where other people become successful.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

First, you have to follow your passion. Very often we run after ideas that are socially validated. I would urge everyone to reflect on what they are really concerned about, and what they’re really passionate about, because at the end it’s all about persistence.

Second, you’ve got to take small steps. At times we have these grand visions of changing the world. It’s fine to be ambitious and have these large visions, but the step forward is usually with whatever resources you have at any moment that you can start. Small steps allow you to start off quickly. That’s always been the case for me, anyway.

The last piece of advice is that you shouldn’t reason too much. It sounds strange, but what I feel is that most of our significant decisions are emotional and not really rational. Looking back at my life, some of the things I’ve done … I couldn’t have reasoned it out. I would say too much reasoning is short-sighted, because you can only reason with things that you can understand and see. But in the long run there is something more to it — I don’t know what it is, but I would not create barriers by reasoning too much.

I would just finish it off with a quote from Kierkegaard: “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.”

After living in the US for several years, you moved back to India three months ago. Have you gained any new perspectives on your homeland?

When I came back to India, I noticed the Internet speeds were not as fast, things were slow in general … it seemed whatever took three days to complete in the US would take seven days here. There were a lot of frustrations at first, and my first thought was, “It’s simply inefficient.”

But now I feel that the idea of efficiency in the US cannot be directly transferred, simply because of the multiplicities and densities that exist here at every level. Because there are so many, the resources get distributed among a million nodes. Not just material resources, but also information. Delhi, for instance, is a city where small bits of information are distributed. So to get anything done, there is no global way to do it. If, for example, you are building a product and want to, say, get something laser cut, you have to ask a few people to find out who’s the nearest laser cutter. Then you’d go there and find out more about it, until you find where your laser cutter is. So of course three days would turn into seven days. And it would appear inefficient at the individual level.

So why does this work? Why is India doing so well in so many ways? In this environment, a different fabric appears. When there are many, everybody has small resources to share. You start depending on each other, and out of this sheer dependence arises a socio-economic fabric, which is efficient at a system level. One can see it surface everywhere from how the system manages energy, waste, and consumption, to how our cities evolve and how cultural municipalities exist in our society.

So a recent interest of mine is to understand such distributed systems and analyze a place of many. I’ve started writing about this and I’m trying to collaborate with a visual artist to write a book on it. We are calling it Many.

What collaborations have you had with other TED Fellows?

TEDIndia Fellow Nitin Rao is a co-founder of dplay. Skylar Tibbits and I, both from TED 2011, are constantly in discussion and work together at times.

However, the biggest thing the TED Fellowship gave me was belief in myself. I was overawed when I first met the Fellows. They are truly changing the world in their own ways. I felt like a small little ant. But it gave me the belief that if there is enough passion, enough will to give shape to an idea, you can go about doing it.

People say your independent online news source, Malaysiakini, was instrumental in establishing a two-party system in Malaysia.

Up until recently, Malaysia had a single-coalition government ruling party in control since the country became independent in 1957.  2008 was the first time, the ruling party lost a two-thirds majority: they won less than two-thirds of the total seats in the Federal system. They also lost control of five states. It was the biggest defeat ever for the ruling party.

The evidence shows that Malaysiakini and the Internet played a major role in generating the political change in the country. Obviously it’s not just us doing this work, however. There are key political parties that formed over the last ten years. Civil society has grown and played a major role. Yet most people agree that without the opportunity of the Internet, that change would not have happened. The Prime Minister himself, after being asked what he thought went wrong, said his single biggest mistake was to underestimate the power of the Internet.

In Malaysia, Malaysiakini is by far the biggest online news organization. We have covered practically every major story in the country for the last 10 years. We’re also the most popular online news source in the country: we’ve now reached 2.5 million readers per month. We are published in four languages: English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil, which are the four key languages in Malaysia.

What are the risks you run by operating Malaysiakini, and what compelled you to found Malaysiakini despite those risks?

There is great risk: laws that allow for detention in jail without the right to a trial, or media laws like sedition that allow you to be jailed, depending on what you publish.

In the late 1980s, when I was an undergrad studying physics in Australia, I became a social activist. At that time, Asian students were at the forefront of the protests for democracy. With the Tiananmen Square massacre, students challenging Suharto in Indonesia, protests against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines … everywhere in Asia young people were changing the political shape of the continent.

A lot of students like me had come from all over Asia to study in Australia, and it was obviously a very hot discussion about what was happening in our countries, what did it really mean, and what we could contribute. It was a phenomenal education about politics, ideology, and other crosscutting issues.

In Malaysia we have laws that render traditional media outlets very controlled by the government. But in 1995 the government officially decided to keep the Internet free of censorship. Following the “reformasi” protests in 1998, my former colleague Steven Gan and I decided to set up an independent online news source. Steven and I have been arrested and jailed before, but that’s very much a part of what social activism is about. You have to accept certain risks in order to voice dissent.

Malaysia has some laws based on race. As an ethnically Indian Malaysian, how have those laws affected you?

In Malaysia’s constitution, it defines certain Malays and indigenous groups as “Bhumiputera,” which literally translates to “son of the soil.” The constitution actually gives special preferences to Malays. We are one of the few countries in the world that has a race-based constitution.

So although I am a citizen of Malaysia, I have different rights than Malay Malaysians. Often when you’re very young you’re not really aware of it, but when it comes to getting in to universities or applying to jobs, you become particularly aware that there are differences in terms of citizenship in the country. That’s when the discrimination really hits you.

I was particularly affected when my father’s business was not allowed to grow because he was ethnically Indian. Eventually my parents had such a difficult time that they migrated to Australia.

There are lots of other people in Malaysia who have it far worse, however. I come from a middle class background. The working class and other communities not only face ethnic discrimination, but because of their class background, they don’t have access to basic facilities. You can see acute differences in how people are treated based on race. That kind of inequality colors my desire to fight against injustice and to remedy the institution.

What things can we expect to see from Malaysiakini going forward?

In regards to news, we’re heading towards another election, and it’s going to be a very interesting one. We’ll see if the government can recover the ground it lost last time. There’s been a lot of political upheaval in the country since 2008. The old prime minister resigned, there’s a new prime minister, there have been protests, there have been arrests … a huge number of activities going on in the country, and Malaysiakini’s been in the thick of things, so these are very interesting times.

One thing Malaysiakini is doing as an entity is promoting citizen journalism. Since 2008 we’ve trained over 300 citizen journalists. They are now producing thousands of videos and articles from their own countries, towns, and cities that can be viewed on www.cj.my.

What I want to do is ensure that citizen journalism happens everywhere, and not just on our site. We set up four chapters in four towns. This citizen journalism is not just eye-witness reports where citizens go out and take a picture and are done. It’s citizens exploring issues, understanding issues, and reporting it like a journalist would report it: being balanced, having credibility, and keeping it fact-based. It’s been a huge movement in the last couple of years, with quite outstanding results.

In Kinilabs you incubate new projects that promote the mission of Malaysiakini. What are you working on now?

We’re developing two new technologies that we hope to bring to market next year. One is called Jiranku, which translates to “my neighbor.” Jiranku is a mobile app that enables devices to link up directly with each other without a wifi network, 3G, etc. It’s a new type of communication between devices — laptops and mobile phones. Within a closed “society” you will be able to exchange files, share videos, and share photographs, even if you aren’t connected to the Internet. It will be a very useful application, especially in this part of the world, which doesn’t have 3G in excess.

The other thing we are doing is called FeedGeorge, which works with geolocated data. There are lots of online maps these days, and going forward we’re seeing data and maps coming together. With FeedGeorge we take all kinds of data –  SMS data, Twitter feed data, foursquare data, traffic jams data, health hazard data, videos from YouTube, and photographs from Flickr — and combine it with maps, so people can learn about what’s happening in the particular location they are in.

Currently these data sets are static — you aren’t easily able to apply them to maps. With FeedGeorge you can combine data with the maps, and keep updating it, and engage with other data sets and maps. Everyone is tracking different sets of data, but with FeedGeorge we are tracking data together.

For example, if a hurricane is going to hit Atlanta or Miami, which US companies will have their stock go down? You can plot all the companies based on where they are, and you can say well, if it hits here or here, these stocks are going to go down. That’s an example of how one app can work off another app: weather patterns, stock market prices, and the projected returns on these companies.

We are already pumping our data — Malaysiakini news stories — into FeedGeorge. So you can see where the news stories are, you can see stories around these stories, and you can see related stories, sorted by geographical region, and things like that. But the new version of FeedGeorge will be much more advanced than that. 

You’ve said that in 10 years you want to transition away from Malaysiakini so it doesn’t suffer from Founder’s syndrome. What do you want to transition to?

At the moment, we’re trying to get Malaysiakini on stronger financial footing and to institutionalize its independence, precisely so it does not depend on the founders. I think once I do that, I will look at a few more ideas about what I want to do.

But something a couple friends and I have started to do outside of Malaysiakini is a program called AllStars. It’s an idea like TechStars, or Y Combinator, where a bunch of entrepreneurs are put through a program with mentors to help them accelerate their start-ups.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

I do a lot of entrepreneurial training, I speak a lot about entrepreneurship, and I also speak a lot about social entrepreneurship.

A lot of the rules and the experiences of social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship apply in both areas. It’s still about being an entrepreneur. It’s about the idea, the concept, the execution, about resilience, about how to build teamwork, leadership … every single thing you learn about entrepreneurship also applies to social entrepreneurship. I’m very much a proponent of social entrepreneurship, but I tell everyone that just because you’re a social entrepreneur, that doesn’t make you any less an entrepreneur.

A lot of social entrepreneurs have experience in the non-profit world or charity work, and they don’t understand what it means to be an entrepreneur. Approach social entrepreneurship with a capital “E.”

How would you describe the work that you do at your revolutionary design studio, Superflux?

We are living in extremely uncertain times. Things are changing rapidly, and everyone is racing to come to terms with the changes being wrought on our society, economy, and culture. As a multidisciplinary collaborative design practice, we at Superflux are in a strong position to help facilitate that process. We’re particularly interested in emerging technologies, and the ways they interface with everyday life.

In the past, your projects have included imagining futures with synthetic bees and wi-fi enabled pets. What’s one of the most exciting things you’re currently working on?

We have been working with Newcastle’s Dr. Patrick Degenaar and his team of neuroprostheticists, who are using the technology of optogenetics to restore sight to those with degenerative visual impairment. We’ve been approaching this project both as designers, and as people interested in exploring the broader implications of new technologies.

In the proposed optogenetic retinal prosthesis, a virus is injected into the eye of a visually impaired person, infecting the cells with a light-sensitive protein. A wearable headset fires pulses of light at these sensitised cells, mimicking the “neural song” the healthy eye uses to communicate with the brain. This artificial song is then interpreted as “vision” by the brain’s imaging centers.

While much of this work is still at the research stage, there is one specific anecdote that highlights the value of incorporating a design approach at this early stage. The researchers have been testing some of their image augmentation concepts with a selection of visually impaired people with a condition in which the “resolution” of their vision is similar to the vision that will be possible with the first generation of these optogenetic retinal prostheses. The researchers learned that a simplified, cartoon-style vision might help participants be able to function more effectively. But the participants found the experience uncanny, often admitting that they’d “rather be blind than have my world look like that.”

So while the technology is exciting, the scientists were approaching their project from a very data-centric, strictly operational direction. As designers, we find ourselves thinking a lot about the emotional experience of such radical technologies, wondering what it might feel like to have your body modified to interface better with a machine, what it might mean to have prosthetic or augmented vision, and what the technology’s operating system and interface might look like. How will it affect the way users relate to other people and, more generally, to their world?

Through our conversations with the scientists, we realized that, while this prosthetic vision might have a relatively low resolution, the range and variety of potential inputs are vast. Users of the technology would be able to access parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are not visible to the ‘normally sighted’. People could, for example, shift into the depths of infrared light to see heat patterns in the environment, or access ultraviolet ‘bee vision’ to see plants and flowers the way bees do. They could also digitally augment their vision, projecting maps, diagrams, and information onto the world around them. We explored some of these scenarios in a short film, dubbed Song of the Machine.

http://www.vimeo.com/22616192

These possibilities had not been envisaged by the scientists, who began to consider what it might mean to live your life, lay down memories, and even fall in love through the lens of this technology. I really think that’s where the value lies in this kind of collaboration and exchange of ideas. In some ways, the most exciting part of this project is that it’s not just “science fiction” or some kind of distant future. We are already working on the next phase of this project: shaping the product invention for commercial purposes, in close collaboration with the technologists and visually impaired community.

You currently have some work being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Yes, two of our projects are on display at MoMA until November 7th, as part of Paola Antonelli’s ‘Talk to Me’ exhibition. One of the projects is Lukalive, a short film about a wi-fi enabled Dalmatian, and the other is the 5th Dimensional Camera.

With the 5th Dimensional Camera, we worked with quantum physicists and material scientists from Oxford University. For this project, the idea was to engage the public with a strand of science that’s extremely abstract and intangible, building on the work of a team of researchers who are trying to build a quantum computer. With quantum computing, parallel information processing opens the door to the fast factorization of enormous data sets. This is exciting and important, but the scientists didn’t quite know how to ‘sell’ their research to the public-at-large. So our brief was to help the public understand the possible uses and implications of this technology.

As part of our research, we spoke with Dr. David Deutsch, widely known as the “father of quantum computing” (he’s given two TED talks). His argument is that, if successful, quantum information processing will prove Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. Everett’s interpretation says that whenever we observe the outcome of a quantum event, the timeline splits, creating a second world, where the event produced an opposite outcome. It is Dr. Deutsch’s assertion that this is the mechanism by which a quantum computer will function.

We found this idea of multiple universes and branching timelines truly fascinating. For us, the most interesting aspect of quantum computation was not what it might be able to achieve, but what it would say about the very nature of reality. What if you could directly access these other worlds, instead of just using them for information processing? What if we turned that quantum computer inside out?

To create a prop that would help people engage with the science, we began working on something we called the “Fifth Dimensional Camera,” a fictional device that takes photographs of parallel worlds. Much as a quantum computer is said to take a ‘snapshot’ of the many worlds of informational possibilities within itself, the Fifth Dimensional Camera would take a snapshot of the many possible worlds at a human scale. In itself, this was still quite an abstract idea. To help locate the camera in a wider context, we created stories around three characters that engaged with the camera on a daily basis, exploring the potentialities and near misses of their everyday life.

You’ve said that you are passionate about building visions of a desirable future. Don’t you feel that some of your designs envision a dark future?

That’s a good question. I think that what we are most keen to highlight is that there’s not just one possible future, but many. We are upfront about the fact that some of our work can be quite provocative. It might not be strictly desirable to have synthetic bees as pollinators, but the technology that could allow this to happen is waiting in the wings. We are interested in imagining interactions: how might biologically-engineered bees coexist with natural bees? If we don’t create these experience prototypes and stories, it’s difficult to fully engage with the technology before it’s out in the world.

Even if we have to reject some of the prototyped possibilities – as impractical, say, or ethically dubious – there will be some that will spark the imagination, leading to real, tangible opportunities for new products and services.

We need look no further than some of the projects we have launched in India. With Project LiloRann, we are developing ideas alongside the local community, helping to combat desertification and looking for creative ways to tackle the impact of invasive species. As we work on a theory of change, our ambition is to design for “positive tipping points” — small-scale interventions with a disproportionate impact, capable of tipping the balance from environmental decline to a subtle remediation.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

You don’t have to be this fresh-faced 21-year-old to be an entrepreneur. If you have an idea, you can go with it at any time. Also, talk to everybody. You don’t know who might be interested in your idea, and you need to be looking for resources in places that you might not otherwise have considered.

In the future, some of your seemingly fantastical designs may become household items. Which of your designs would you most like to be remembered for?

That’s a difficult question, because I’ve increasingly moved away from the worldview of the designer as an icon or hero, known only for one or few “iconic products.” I would hope I’d be remembered for a legacy of thinking, a legacy of creating a new kind of design practice. It’s cheesy, but I hope we’re helping people engage with creating new models for the 21st century — not one particular product, but a widening of perspective.

Interactive Fellows Friday Feature:

Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Lope  asks:

What do organized communities achieve more efficiently than government? What could they achieve?

Click here to respond! 

What made you decide to move your Gopher Illustrated Magazine operations from Caracas, Venezuela to Austin, Texas?

The previous publishing endeavor in which I was involved was Plátanoverde magazine, a publication that is almost ten years old. The aim of Plátanoverde was to showcase emerging South American artists to a Venezuelan audience. After traveling extensively for almost a decade through the Latin American region, and, in parallel, consuming English-language media (magazines in particular), I realized my next dream project was to bring a modern perspective of Latin America to English-speaking audiences. My partner, Michelle, and I started the Gopher Project, and The Gopher Illustrated Magazine, with that in mind.

To that end, and after living in Caracas, Venezuela for over a decade, Michelle and I moved the project to Austin about a year ago. In a very short space of time, we’ve become a part of the cultural landscape of the city. My in-depth, hands-on approach as a journalist and cultural manager means that I try to immerse myself in where I am, and to be an active part of the community. Michelle and I have devoted a lot of time to understanding this city and seeing it from as many different approaches as possible. We spend a lot of time talking and collaborating with people from different fields in the arts but also with people involved in journalism, advertising, entrepreneurship, science, research and social work. We try to keep our agenda very busy, meeting different people, so we gain a more holistic perspective.

Do you think that a holistic, immersive approach to culture is important?

I believe that the arts and culture are pathways to coexistence and tolerance. I think that fostering tolerance is particularly important right now in the U.S., with its growing diversity. Over 50 million people in the US are Hispanic/Latino — roughly 18 percent of the population. In the last ten years, it was this demographic that made up 85 percent of the population growth in the US. So I think the challenges facing this country now and in the future, and those pertaining to the multiple facets of a Hispanic/Latino identity, need to be addressed — – not only through top-down policies, but also through work, media, and other initiatives that each of us can enjoy.

I remember a particular moment in my life when the power of culture really hit home. As a kid growing up in South America I would listen to music in English — rock, electronic, hip-hop, whatever. And then one day I heard this amazing record, and I found out that it was from my own country, Venezuela. I remember understanding that not only was it good in itself, but that it was something I could find pride in — I was part of it, in a sense, because it was a product of my country.

I have always come back to that simple idea: that people should have reasons to be proud of their cities, their culture, their heritage. Taking pride in what one is a part of is a force that is far more powerful — and frankly, far more consequential — than any policy, budget or anything like that.

The power to create something beautiful connects individuals to the feeling that each of us has a hand in creating better futures. And we can all create positive changes, whether it is through a huge project, a small magazine, or just deciding to do whatever it is in your hands to do.

How did that philosophy influence the creation of the Por el Medio de la Calle festival in Caracas?

Caracas has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Some 100 people are killed by violence each a week. This is unspeakably high, especially considering that it’s a city that houses some six million people. Nobody walks in the streets after dark because it’s just too dangerous.

After we had reached some success with Plátanoverde and related cultural projects, it just seemed that the only thing to do was to address some of the enormous problems that the citizens of Caracas face, even with the limited tools we had. When we sat down and talked about this, the first thing that came to mind was violence and the (understandably waning) pedestrian culture. We created the Por el Medio de la Calle festival so that, for one night, people would come into the streets of Caracas after dark to celebrate arts and culture together, to have an opportunity to reconnect with the freedom to walk after dark. It’s grown from a festival of 2,000 people to one in which 45,000 people attend. It is now in its sixth edition.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

Be honest, listen to, and support others. When you’re part of a community, it is as important to support others, as it is to support yourself and your projects. As a community grows, there are more opportunities for everybody, so you and your projects will benefit by extension.

With the new perspective of Latin America that the Gopher Project brings, what eye-opening things should we expect to see from it?

For the near future, we have three plans: The first is the next edition of the magazine, and an exhibition that will run along with it, in March of next year. It will feature even more collaborations in literature, visual arts and design — not only what’s happening in South America, but also what’s happening worldwide, and featuring some interesting things from Austin. We print “Proudly published from Austin, Texas” on the cover of The Gopher magazine. We are interested in conveying to our national and international readership that we are part of the exciting stuff that’s happening in this city.

The second is that we are bringing an exhibition called “Tipos Latinos” or “Latin Type” to the U.S. for the first time. It’s a biennial of contemporary typography from Latin America, and is among the most important events of its kind anywhere in the world. We’re working to have some conferences and workshops that run parallel to the exhibition, and are collaborating with the local chapter of AIGA (American Institute for Graphic Arts).

And lastly, we are opening a design studio called In House International. In line with our other projects, it’s showcasing emerging designers. It has two different locations: one here in Austin and the other in South America. It will bring together a number of designers, illustrators and other artists from Latin America and other parts of the world, who will work together remotely.

My really long-term dream is to run some sort of a cultural center that will celebrate Latin American culture in a cross-disciplinary way: visual and performing arts and music, as well as literature and design and innovative media. When Plátanoverde started, the idea was that it was a project that would grow in different stages. It would begin as a magazine, then evolve into publishing books, events, festivals, and finally a cultural center. It was slated to be a center based on the concepts of social inclusion and culture. Sadly, due to the really difficult political and economic situation in Venezuela, it’s not something that came to be.

It’s rumored you have a collection of over 2,000 print magazines. How do you feel about the transition to online magazines?

I once interviewed the editor of this very famous British magazine called Monocle. He said something very insightful. It was that the question is not whether we’ll be reading on paper or a handheld device or on the moon … it’s what are we going to be reading? From my perspective, having something on paper means that that content must earn its place as a permanent object in time. Publishing on paper should not try to compete with the Internet — they are different animals. But certain content earns the right to physical space, and to a spot on a bookshelf. A magazine is like a small gallery, a conversation and a cultural snapshot that you can hold in your hands.

The publishing of The Gopher’s platforms run at different speeds. The paper magazine is published every six months — it’s a highly curated process. Online we have small articles, interviews, features, and things in audio and video format — things that are more time-sensitive. The two parts complement each other.

Speaking of complementing each other, you’ve recently had a lot of collaborations with other TED Fellows.

Yes, the most recent edition of The Gopher featured four TED Fellows. One of the Fellows was Jon Gosier, who created an amazing infographic about “the population of the dead.” The data alone is amazing. We feature three different infographics in every edition of the magazine, because we feel that information design is a wonderful medium for conveying information.

We also featured TED Fellow Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo. Fellows Mitchell Joachim and Candy Chang both contributed their thoughts about the structure and future of cities. Candy had this amazing insight. She said, “I would have more places to sit down in the city. Because if you can’t sit down, you basically can’t live the city outside.”

I’m also working with Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran on a project to create an event in South America, bringing in different, alternative art projects and spaces in the region. We have a running joke — we call it “El TEDo.”

What’s your secret to growing healthy cells outside the human body?

It’s an amazing thing that these cells actually grow outside the body. But if we’re going to make them thrive, we need to do a better job of making the cells feel like they’re in their natural environment. That’s one of my main responsibilities — developing systems that we call “bioreactors” that mimic their environment. The cells are really doing everything; we’re just giving them the right environment. It’s like building them a little home where they’re happy.

Once you have the cells and the scaffolding in the bioreactor, you add the “schmutz:” food and chemicals that the cells need.

Then, at our lab we do something unique: we combine all those things with what we call “biophysical cues.” Biophysical cues, such as mechanical forces for the bones and electrical signals for the heart, for the most part have been ignored by biologists and people who study cells.  But biophysical cues are really important because the ideal “home” is going to be different for every kind of cell. Bones in the body, for example, experience a lot of mechanical stress. Those bone cells actually need that mechanical stress in order to be happy. To build a bioreactor for bone cells, you’ll probably want to copy that, and you’ll want to provide scaffolding that mimics what the cells would grow on in the body — probably something hard. To build a bioreactor for heart cells, the scaffolding would probably be something soft, like collagen, that is elastic and can bend and beat.

For which cells are electrical signals most significant? 

The three main places that I’ve looked for inspiration in terms of electric fields are in early development, the adult lifetime of the heart, and wound healing. Embryos have tons of electric fields, and they’ve been implicated in getting cells to migrate and transform themselves from “undifferentiated” stem cells into more specialized cells like neurons, bone cells, muscle cells, etc. These currents are really important for getting the cells to move around the embryo. Some of the migration is thought to be caused by electrical fields. A colleague of ours has reversed electrical fields and gotten the heart to beat on the right instead of the left.

In development and during an adult lifetime in the heart, we look for inspiration from the EKG and electro-mechanical coupling. That’s sort of what the field has focused on up until now.

Wound healing is also really interesting. Our bodies are full of salt water, and anytime a cell is cut — like in an injury — those salts spill out. Those are charged particles that are moving, which means it’s a current. So any time you have a cut, there’s an electrical field associated with that wound. Those electrical fields have been measured, and we know they decline with age. It’s a cutting-edge topic in regenerative and aesthetic medicine; people are working on how to stimulate wound healing through application of currents.

These are the three main sources of inspiration for my work. And each of these types of signals is going to require different types of bioreactors. Each of those technologies is going to look really different. I call them “enabling technologies” because it’s really the cells that do the work.

 What types of technologies are taking your work the next step?

Microtechnology, for one. We’re miniaturizing electrodes. Instead of having a piece of carbon rod that’s 3 mm thick, we work on scaling that down. We think, “How do we make a micro technology that mimics that?” We’ve started patterning electrodes onto glass using lasers. We can grow cells on them, and we can stimulate single cells.

We have much more control over experiments at a microscale than we do at a macroscale. For example, if you want to create natural flow for fluids on a microscale, you don’t have to have turbulence. In a river at the submilimeter scale the flow is perfect. It’s calm, you don’t need any turbulence in order to get it to flow, and fluids, when side-by-side, do not necessarily mix, except by diffusion. That means we can control concentrations both in time and space very precisely!

And it’s really amazing what we can use off the shelf in terms of technology. One of my students has been building an app for a smartphone so we can control our bioreactors from our phones, instead of having to build a controller from scratch!

So what’s the big, hairy dream behind all this?

To get rid of heart disease. The really hairy goal is not just to grow a heart, but that sort of “fountain of youth” element of being able to extend our lives.

Right now heart disease kills more people than all cancer combined. I’d love to see that change.

Have you experienced any controversy from your experiments based on animals and stems cells?

No, I haven’t, actually, at least not personally (we’ve all felt the effects of the changing political environment, though). I am vegetarian, and at restaurants people will say, “Will you get freaked out if I order a steak?” And I say, “No, there’s a karma footprint that each person has.” I choose not to eat meat, but do choose to engage in experiments that involve the sacrifice of animals. I put those things on the same spectrum.

But one thing that I will say is that, in my experience, everyone who’s involved in these experiments has always been very thoughtful, and there are a lot of controls that are in place before you can ever get anywhere near an animal. I think that those controls are really good. They involve members of the lay community — not just researchers and clinicians.

I just sort of hope that when judgment day comes, that, having led a thoughtful life, and having tried to make up for the damage that I’ve done to life and the earth, that I will be judged fairly. But I try to live by my conscience, and I try to see all actions and choices we make — not just scientific research — as sort of the same package. So far I feel OK with where I am on the spectrum, but it’s something I constantly revisit.

You’ve said your TED Fellowship has been incredible for you, and even led to a potential book deal. Have you had any interesting collaborations with other Fellows?

Suzanne Lee is growing clothing out of bacteria. We were talking and wondered, “What if we applied electrical stimulation? Would we be able to get the cells to align?” And Lucianne Walkowicz and I are collaborating on a science summer camp project for girls in India, slated for Summer 2013.

All the Fellows form this amazing community. They’re so cool and so nice!

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

Work your idea into every conversation you have, because you never know who can help. A project some of my colleagues and I are working on is a girls’ science summer camp in India. In my experience, you may even have to end up turning people down, because people get so excited about what you’re doing. Keep it on the surface.

The other piece of advice is kind of the same: live your mission. Be on your best behavior. If you believe in goodness, then live goodness. And when you’re talking about your good project, it will be authentic.

Do you really have a double life as an assassin?

[Laughs] I’m involved in the shadow government of Street Wars. It’s a three-week long, immersive water gun tournament. My name in Street Wars is “The Duchess.” And I’m a very accomplished assassin as well as bodyguard. We’ve played across the world, and it’s so much fun.

Street Wars started as a reaction to 9/11. A lot of us wondered, “What’s happened to our city? It’s not fun anymore. It used to be such a playground. Now it just seems like a tomb.” We were all so afraid …. We just really wanted to reclaim the city as a playground. That’s where it started. I think it was really successful in that respect.

Microclinic International has a unique philosophy of “contagious health.” What does that mean?

Common sense tells us that negative things like violence, smoking behaviors and unhealthy eating habits are socially contagious: they spread from person to person, family to family, and are even influenced by television and other things. If this is the case, why can’t we make healthy behaviors contagious? Why can’t we make a positive health epidemic? We can use these strong social interactions to actively prevent the spread of major chronic disease epidemics, and perhaps even reverse them.

What are micro-clinics, and how do they work?

 Micro-clinics are not an infrastructure of buildings; they’re an infrastructure of people, of human relationships. At Microclinic International, we recognize that we did not create these infrastructures: they already exist in a community. It’s important for us to find good local partners, we work with doctors and nurses, gain their local expertise and train them in ours. Then we recruit people to join our micro-clinic groups. We don’t ask them to come as individuals; they have to come as groups. Naturally, they bring their husband, wife, sister, cousin, or best friend who lives next door…

Together, they all go through the program, which shares access to basic education about the disease. They learn how to change important behaviors like how they eat and exercise. They learn about medication, how to take it, how to use certain technologies like a glucose monitoring system, and how to interact with their doctor. They participate in group activities such as, eating healthy meals together.

Because they go through the program as a group, there’s less chance of being ridiculed at home for eating strange foods or coming up with weird ideas from strange doctors and nurses. The group acts as a support system and the positive changes are implanted back into the home. If the husband — in a traditional culture — says, “We’re going to eat healthy meals,” and the wife (it is usually the women who cook) has the ability to prepare the meal, then the other members of the family will not put up as much resistance. Maybe the children will even encourage the parents to exercise. They all learned together, and they made friends with other people going through similar problems.

Microclinic International initiated programs in the Middle East in 2005, yet you’ve already expanded to four different continents.

Yes, we initially focused on diabetes, first in Palestine, and now in Jordan and India.

In Kenya we’re working on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The project is based on Mfangano Island in the middle of Lake Victoria. Kenya suffers from one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world, not to mention the economy is simply devastated. This project is particularly interesting because we’re working closely with the Organic Health Response, which has built a solar powered community center that will have Internet access. People will have the incentive and cover to come to the clinic for the Internet, and then once they are tested for HIV/AIDS, they can be placed in micro-clinic groups.  This will reduce the stigma.

Interestingly, we’re now bringing the insights we’ve gained working in those countries back to the United States. We’ve started a project in Appalachia in Kentucky. We’re really excited about figuring out how to tackle the obesity-diabetes epidemics here in the US, focusing on the root behaviors — diet and exercise — that contribute to them.

In all of our global operations we’ve partnered with a range of institutions, because we believe these massive global health challenges are not challenges that can be solved by a single institution working alone. These are global problems and they need global solutions with the private sector, government, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions working together. I think that is the model for the future: to get every single stakeholder involved and at the table.

One of those partners is the Queen of Jordan, who I hear recently made a visit to one of your micro-clinics.

Yes, we’re very fortunate to have the support of Her Majesty, Queen Rania, and also the Ministry of Health. She recently came to one of the areas where we are working. When she visited, she got to see first-hand how enthusiastic the participants of this program are about it, and how they’ve really taken ownership of it. Significant numbers of participants have lost weight and have reduced their blood sugar levels. These sorts of outcomes could have real implications for the health of the nation as a whole, because we want to replicate the program and spread it around the kingdom. Depending on how much we’re able to scale it, many thousands of lives and millions of dollars could be saved.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

Be very, very cautious with your ideas, because ideas can be very good things, but they can also be very bad things.  A German poet once warned that ideas were so dangerous that they could in fact bring down entire nations.  At the same time I urge courage: take an idea that is sound and think about its implications. Think about how to test it on a smaller scale, where the damage can be limited if there are mistakes. If it’s successful, one can observe its success very clearly, and demonstrate that success before taking it to the next level.

That’s why we, as an organization, are doing what’s necessary to very rigorously test our ideas using the best scientific resources that we have available, to make sure that not only aren’t we doing any harm to the local communities, but that we are doing good.

You have a long-standing passion for the Middle East affairs, and have said you hope to address the violence there. What’s the link between that goal and Microclinic International?

Years ago, when I would talk to people about the program, I would say, “This is not simply a health problem. This is also a problem for governments and institutions concerned about stability, peace and security.” And in response I would maybe get a nod.

But this year we’ve seen the Middle East completely transformed. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but one thing that’s for sure is that things are changing quickly, and they are quite eruptive. I really believe that at the heart of the changes are people who are concerned about the basic essentials of life.

A few years ago, there was a major poll done in the Arab World, where people were asked, “What are the things that concern you most?” Not to my surprise, the first thing on the list was health. In my experience, people are really concerned with the most basic things in life. They’re concerned with, “Do I have adequate health care? Do I have adequate education? Is our family suffering financially? Do my kids have a job?” I really see our work in global health with Microclinic International, and more generally, the field of international development, as being inextricably linked to future peace and stability in the Middle East. There can never be a resolution between the nations of the region, there can never be internal harmony within the countries, until the most basic essentials are addressed. And I would put health right at the top of that list, because it affects every aspect of life. It affects the way families function, it affects the way they live their lives, it affects the way they work, their buying power, their ability to relax and to reduce stress levels.

There’s an old Arab proverb that says, “When there is health, there is hope. When there is hope, one has everything.” I think that really sums it up. The future of the region is really changing forever, and governments around the world really need to think seriously about evidence-based programs that improve the quality of life for people in the region. These things don’t have to cost a lot, but they have to be evidence-based, and in my view, some of the greatest challenges really have quite simple solutions.

With something as simple as changing our eating and exercising habits, we can combat major disease epidemics that some have said will rival the plagues of the Middle Ages. These simple steps can dramatically reduce human suffering, improve economic productivity, and create a more equitable and peaceful world.

You work on problems from a “network” or “systems” perspective. How has this practice evolved for you?

In the past, I’ve mostly focused on networks in nature: how species are interconnected. Then I began to see how networks could be applied more generically, and I got very interested in the potential applications network thinking had to other types of complex problems.

What are some of the complex problems you are working on now?

Currently, I’m working for a foundation on mapping the structure of successful non-violent movements in the Middle East. In particular, we’re focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are all the moving parts of a successful non-violent movement? How are they all related? Are there some positive feedback loops, with points of entry that we haven’t thought of before?

I have also been working with a large corporation on the future energy supply and it’s relation to food and water security. If, for example, we replaced all fossil fuels with bio-fuels, they would conflict with land for food production. And if we powered everything with electricity, that would strain water resources, because a lot of electrical production, even renewable electricity, is water-use intensive. There’s a lot of interest in mapping out how we can meet our need for energy, food and water simultaneously.

Additionally, I’ve just started collaborating with an interesting start-up, Open Data Registry, on sustainable supply chains. For example, we worked with data from Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles project. For a number of their clothing articles, you can go online and trace where the raw materials came from, how much energy and carbon emissions were expended, how much waste was produced, etc. We compiled all the data for all the supply chains of every product and mapped it as a clothing ‘ecosystem’. Then you can visualize the entire web for the whole corporation, and see which one aspect of the whole production would have the most impact in increasing efficiency for the entire company. Maybe there’s one factory or shipping route that, with increased efficiency, would change everything down the line from there.

To me, the most interesting thing about diving in to complex problems is that, on the one hand, one problem leads to many problems, but that also means that a single solution can cause many solutions.

I can think of lots of situations where one problem causes many others. Can you give an example where one solution causes many more solutions?

Some time ago I designed and built a house in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. I wanted it to be sustainably designed, but I had a very tight budget. It’s really a whole complex system of trying to figure out how to get the biggest bang for your buck when building a green home.

Many people would ask me, “Did you put in solar panels for electricity?” But actually, when you look at the whole system, that’s the last thing I’d do to get the most for my money. It turns out that the most important thing for achieving low-cost sustainable design is having a small place, that’s well insulated, with windows and overhangs in the right place for that location and climate.

The second biggest controllable cost was heating for the building, and for water. In that case, the cheapest thing was, in fact, to have solar thermal panels to heat water. The water goes through the concrete floors, the sun heats the concrete floors in the day in the wintertime, it heats the shower water, and also heats the hot tub on the way back. So, with one pretty low-tech and cheap system, I’m heating the house, the shower, and the hot tub — while saving hundreds of dollars a month in the wintertime on propane. I’d choose solar panels for electricity last, because with efficiency efforts my electricity bill is only $30 a month.

I give that example, because most people initially focus on the means, rather than the end goal. Amory Lovins has a great quote: “People don’t want gas and electricity. They just want hot showers and cold beer.” In my case, my goal was: comfortable temperature inside, with the minimum amount of energy input and a minimum cost.

So what’s your advice for the Average Joe who is overwhelmed by a complex problem?

Well, you can map things out till the cows come home, but as the Amory Lovins quote illustrates, if you don’t really know what your goals are, then there’s no point to it. More often than not, people get overwhelmed because they’re confused about what their goal is. They conflate a goal with an implementation strategy. A perfect example of that is when people have a goal to be happy, and they think the way to get there is to make more money. So making money becomes the goal, and they forget the goal was to be happy. Then they wonder why they’re disappointed later.

Do you actually use the kind of visual map that you used in your TEDTalk to solve the problems you work on?

Yes, though before I had those tools I did it more by hand.

The kinds of tools that I use now were developed by my good friend and colleague for food web visualization. If you have more than 10 or 15 moving parts, you can’t really visualize that in your head. When you have 100 moving parts that’s 10,000 possible connections, and it really pays to have some aid to plot it all out and let the patterns emerge out of the pile.

Once all those things are all plotted, the human brain is really good at detecting patterns visually. Think about how, in a room of 100 people, you can pretty quickly and instantly tell the difference between everybody’s face. Those are amazing visual recognition skills.

I do a lot of plotting of the who’s connected to who stuff visually, turn it upside down, look at it in different ways, and order it in different ways. That way I can quickly see where clusters emerge, where things pop out at the center, which are the most important, and that sort of thing.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation’s Social Citizens blog.

I’ve been an academic researcher for years. But I have been seeing so much innovation and potential in the private sector. So a couple weeks ago I quit my university job in order to pursue these things more seriously. It’s scary, because I know how academia works, and it’s pretty secure, but I was feeling a little bit constrained in my ability to be creative and take risks.

So I’m just kind of jumping out there into the unknown. The main thing that I’m trying to focus on is my values. There’s definitely temptation and opportunities to just make money applying my skills. But I keep realizing that I really only want to work on projects that I feel have potential for exceptional social or environmental good. So remember to stick to your values and what’s really exciting to you. The more excited you are, the better you’ll do, and you’ll have infectious enthusiasm about what you do.

The other thing is, I’ve found doing my research that I’m most successful when I’m doing projects with people that I really like to work with. Life is short. We spend a lot of our time working. We may as well be working with people that are really fun, exciting and inspiring to work with.

Besides working, you also spend a lot of your time skiing. Why are you so dedicated to it?

I do spend a lot of time in the Sierra Nevada skiing, and I would say most of my good, creative ideas come while I’m skiing uphill. To ski uphill, you put what are called “skins” on the bottom of our skis, and your heel is free, so you walk uphill with your skis, take the skins off, and ski down.

I’m a very kinetic thinker … my entire mini-TEDTalk was written in my head while I was walking uphill. And I pretty much wrote all of the paper for my thesis that was published in Nature while skiing uphill.

How did the idea for your TED Fellows retreat, “Think Weird Go Big” get generated?

TED2010 was amazing and I loved it. Afterwards, I realized that my favorite part was actually meeting the other Fellows. I realized that as a group we were all doing such different things, but everybody was taking their little project to the next level, trying to go bigger with it. And it made me think, “I can do that, too.” That’s how Jessica Green (another TED Fellow) and I came up with the Think Weird Go Big project. The idea was to have a small self-coaching retreat to support each other in reaching our next goals.

We’re all at a place in our lives where we have similar kinds of constraints and obstacles. By hearing about one person getting past their obstacles, everybody else gets something out of it. Living together, cooking meals together and getting to know each other in that intimate setting, even for just a few days, makes it extremely easy to follow up with each other for advice and even collaborations .

My personal project that I discussed at Think Weird Go Big was figuring out how to use my background in ecology and network theory and apply it for social and environmental good in the private sector.

I also got feedback on the company I’m going to start, called Brazil Nut Effect. The name refers to when you shake a pile of mixed nuts and the large Brazil nuts rise to the surface. The company will create tools to help the important nuggets emerge out of the mess. I feel like I’m just at the beginning of this new phase in my life, and that’s pretty exciting.