Five years ago, the non-profit tech company Ushahidi exploited existing technology to create a powerful platform that allowed users to crowdsource crisis information sent over SMS. Now the Kenyan company is set to do the same with the BRCK, a wireless, rugged, battery-powered modem ready for any environment. As the BRCK’s Kickstarter campaign gathers steam, Ushahidi co-founder and TED Fellow Erik Hersman tells us his vision for the BRCK and how it could change how we connect — in Africa and beyond.

It sounds like the BRCK could be a pretty groundbreaking device.

Yes. It’s always hard for people in the West to understand, just the same as it was hard for technologist to understand Ushahidi. They looked at it and said, “Yeah, what’s special about that?” To be honest, technologically there’s nothing special, and there wasn’t even five years ago. It was that we were just using technology differently to solve a certain type of problem.

Same thing with the BRCK. It actually uses a 15-year-old technology. Modems and routers are not new — it’s the way we’re putting them together into a package that makes it really valuable. So sure, you can tether your phone. Sure, you could buy a wifi device. Those will each last two hours and can be shared with five people. Ours lasts 8 to 12 hours and can be shared with 20 people. Ours is made to deal with power on/power off all the time.

Then there’s a cloud backend. You can go to our site and get into your own devices from anywhere in the world, and write software for it from that level. There’s also a hardware side where you can basically plug anything into it, and the devices stack like bricks. So you can plug in extra batteries, maybe a water sensor. Maybe you want connect a Raspberry Pi CPU to it and make a little server. Fine — you can do all that and actually control that anywhere in the world. So layer two is how the BRCK becomes this bridge between the cloud and the internet of things.

Who are the intended users?
At the moment, I think there are two kinds of users for the BRCK. In Africa, it’s will be anybody who needs to connect to the Web often, and who feel the pain of power outages and the less-than-stellar ISP activity that we have in Kenya or in Nigeria or wherever you are. Small businesses across Africa will use it for connectivity.

In the West, I think the user type are the people who travel, who go camping, who go backpacking or hiking and want some type of internet connectivity in a rugged case. We’re happy if it gets picked up in the US and Europe, but we are much more interested in providing a device that works for people like us here in Africa.

But I’m guessing there are many other possible applications we haven’t even thought of yet.

Where did the idea for the BRCK come from?

It came to mind as a product during a meeting with some colleagues in South Africa. On the plane back, I pulled out my notebook and started writing down the different things that would make a router/modem for Africa really work. At that time, it was just a fun idea.

It wasn’t until last summer that we got serious about it. We got a prototype level and said, “Oh, this might actually work.” We got a guy that came on part-time and would do the prototyping with us, and it kept accelerating. Rapid prototyping is very hard to do in Kenya, because you don’t have all the tools you would have elsewhere and you can’t overnight components that you might need, if you bought the wrong ones — which we did. But when we realized this was at a very serious point, we hired two people, one with expertise in actual product prototyping in manufacturing, and a firmware guy who’s really deep into the IO side of firmware design, which is difficult stuff.

Everybody says you can’t do hardware in Africa, and we’re like, well, let’s try before we just say you can’t. And what we’ve found is that they’re wrong. You can do it, it’s just harder.

Will the BRCK come with a network connection?

It’s made just like your normal everyday router. So you can plug an ethernet cord into it and just use it that way, or of course use it over a wifi network. We want it to come with a SIM card in it. We’re still trying to figure out who will be our global partner on that – we’re talking to various providers right now. Either way, you can just pop any SIM card into it for 3G connectivity. It’s unlocked, so you don’t have to worry about that. That automatically creates a wifi hotspot that you can move anywhere. And if you have more than 20 people, you can put more BRCKs around, and they automatically mesh, so it makes it easy to expand.

What about battery time?

Our minimum requirement is that, if the power goes out, you’ll still have a full eight-hour work day’s worth of connectivity. We’re trying to make sure that it can take almost any type of input as well. You can plug an extra battery pack, for example. It has this micro USB slot, but underneath it is also has a GPIO port, which allows you to plug in any type of sensor.

The BRCK can take anything from four to 15 volts, so you could plug in any solar kit. You can plug it into your car charger. If you want something seriously off-grid for a long time, then grab a car battery and that will last you, with full-time usage, probably 10 to 20 days. It doesn’t have a huge drawing power, but it does decrease depending on the amount of people on the device.

It has 16GB of on board storage as well, so you can make a DropBox sync right there if you want, or you can make the whole device into a BPN, that kind of thing.

I can imagine this will be a godsend for rural communities, boat communities, photojournalists, and other off-grid folks.

Yes, I think there will be many people we didn’t expect who will need what the BRCK will provide. In fact, what I want to know from the TED community is: What other circles of people or communities be interested in the BRCK and should know about the Kickstarter campaign? Are there other niche communities — or even big communities — that this would make sense for? I think we’re closing in on $90,000 of the $125,000 we need. We need at least that amount to get to our minimum production run to get our economies of scale on certain components.

How does the BRCK fit in with your vision at Ushahidi?

At Ushahidi, we believe that older technology is not fully utilized. Where in the West people move to a new technology really quickly, in Africa we don’t. So there’s a reason why USSD and SMS are still really big things on mobile phones here. It’s why we think Ushahidi worked — this idea that you don’t have to throw away the old right away, you can actually use it for other things. And sometimes the problem sets that you’re solving for aren’t going to come from places that look like Cambridge or Camden; they’re going to look more like Nairobi or New Delhi. And these neighborhoods and communities are sometimes using technology that isn’t made for them. They’re trying to shoehorn in a newer technology.

Part of our job at Ushahidi is taking a look at those things and questioning the very nature of where they are and why they stand there. And then if possible — if it has something to do with increasing information flow from ordinary people, we’ll look at it. That’s why the BRCK is something that Ushahidi is interested in doing as well.

Astrobiologist and geologist Louisa Preston looks for analogues to possible life on Mars in the most extreme environments on Earth. Now she’s also considering how humans might someday make a home on the red planet, and is raising funds on Kickstarter in support of AstroGardening – an educational exhibit designed to explore how we might someday grow food on Mars.

Tell us about your Kickstarter campaign for the AstroGardening project.

It’s based around the idea of Mars gardening. If humans want to go to Mars, how would we live when we got there? What would we need, and what would it look like? With the advancement of space exploration, we’re finding that ideas like this are actually becoming a lot more real – not quite science fiction.

The exhibit, which will be hosted in a number of planetariums and museums in the UK, will be inside a plastic geodesic dome, within which is a beautiful, peaceful garden full of different types of plants, fruits, vegetables and flowers. The soil will be red, just like Mars. There will be signs and information everywhere where people can learn about the different plants, how they might grow on Mars, and the various ways we need to develop tools so we can garden on Mars. Mars is frozen, so we need to be able to extract water and keep plants warm, for instance.

And there will be a rover — the first-ever rover designed solely for gardening. It will be automated to be planting a garden at the end of the exhibit, so people can see it in action.

My project partner, installation designer, maker and guerilla gardener Vanessa Harden, and I are designing and building the rover right now. The Kickstarter funds will be used to build the rover, the exhibit itself — plants, soil, the dome — and so on. Most of the venues have agreed to house the exhibit out of kind, for education purposes, so we’re not paying a fee, and it’ll be free for anyone to come and visit it.

Video above: Introducing the AstroGardening project — and the automated gardening rover.

Does this mean that plants that grow on Earth could be transplanted directly to such an environment?

Yes, absolutely. There have been a number of studies that show that if you plant things like asparagus or potato or sweet potato or different types of grains in soil that’s exactly the same as on Mars, they will grow as long as they have water and sunlight and things that plants need. I think one experiment actually showed that you could grow marigolds in ground-up meteorites, and meteorites from Mars. So we know the planet’s soil will allow it. We just need to create the environment.

The exhibit will explain this to people. It will also teach about the conditions on Mars, how plants grow, what they need, why it’s hard for life to grow on Mars, what therefore makes the Earth so special — and from there why it’s so important for us to protect the environment.

I wasn’t going to lead it on to terraforming, but actually I was speaking to my 10-year-old cousin about it, and he asked, “Well what about if we could change Mars to be like Earth?” Terraforming is a really interesting topic, and sounds very much like science fiction, but there are people looking into it. So hopefully the exhibit will address that point and allow people to ask questions, and we’ll be able to provide the answers about how it might be done, and what the ethics are around whether we should be allowed to change another planet to suit us.

The whole thing came out of a desire to get the public involved in understanding that we’re not very far away from gardening in space becoming a reality — actually being able to garden and set up colonies and civilizations on other worlds — and how it might happen. So we came up with an exhibit that the public can be involved in and not only looks beautiful, but is scientifically relevant and accurate.

How does this dovetail with your work looking for analogue Mars environments on Earth?

It works brilliantly. I look for environments on the Earth that mimic Mars, and I study how life can grow there. In the past, I’ve studied how microorganisms survive in these environments. Are these places really hot, really cold, really acidic, really dry? So it’s a natural step for me to then start thinking about how you might grow plants or how we as humans might survive in these areas, too.

I grew up watching TV shows and films about humans and aliens living on other worlds and I kept thinking, Well how would we live there? These worlds look completely different from ours; how would we survive? And now I’m finally in a position to actually be able to think about this question and use science to answer it.

Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain is a wonderful natural laboratory where we can study acidophiles (acid-loving bacteria) living in the iron-rich waters today (above), and study fossils of their ancestors that have been preserved for up to 2 million years within iron-rich rocks along the river bank (below).

How did you get into the field of astrobiology?

I was following along a geology career, studying mining, looking at all the different types of minerals that the Earth produces and how we might utilize those as a society, and I met a PhD student who was working on life preserved within rocks in Antarctica. Up until that point I didn’t completely realize or understand that you could actually look for life on other planets as a job — that it was actually a facet of what I was doing. So I did my PhD on a combination of looking at mineral deposits like I’d been studying before, but trying to incorporate the idea of life around these rocks and then life on Mars — to try and merge the two. And I was hooked. I knew that all the rest of the work that I would do from then on would all be geared towards trying to identify and find life on other planets.

Now my main work is looking at environments on Earth that mimic those on Mars. I look at places such as Antarctica, which is the coldest, driest desert on the Earth and is actually the most Mars-like environment we have on Earth. I look at areas in Spain such as Rio Tinto, and I work at impact craters. I’m going to Iceland this summer to do more work on volcanoes and hot springs. What all these environments have in common is that they are places where life lives at very extreme limits. It’s either very, very hot or very cold — places where humans couldn’t survive without lots of help, but some organisms can live perfectly happily.

I try and figure out how they’re able to survive there, what adaptations they have that allow them to survive there. And I study nearby rocks as well, because as these are forming they trap the organisms in them. When I open up these rocks, I can see fossilized life, similar to the type of life we think we might find on Mars. We won’t necessarily see life scuttling around on the surface of Mars, but we might be able to break into a rock, open it, and see fossilized life inside. I look for DNA and proteins, and try to understand how these fossils are formed and identify organic molecules that indicate this fossil was once definitely an organism, not just, say, a wiggly pattern.

You’re working with Senior Fellow Angelo Vermeulen on the HI-SEAS Mars simulation project, where they are investigating how humans might be able to cook their own food on Mars, and his own research on this mission about growing food on Mars is very similar to yours. Did you arrange this together?

Actually, I didn’t get involved in HI-SEAS through Angelo. I do a lot of analogue mission work myself — I was a flight director for a Canadian Space Agency analogue mission. So when the call came out that they were asking for people to be involved in HI-SEAS and to support the mission, I got contacted just through my prior experience.

Angelo didn’t even find out I was supporting the mission until he was actually in the simulation. It was a wonderful moment: we had a kick-off meeting on Skype for all the mission crew to meet the astronauts, including Angelo. When we went around and introduced ourselves, I just said, “Hi. My name is Louisa Preston. I’m an astrobiologist based in London.” All I heard in the other room was, “Louisa??” Now we’re communicating, him on Mars and myself here — and I’m trying to help him with his research as he goes through the mission. It’s really good fun. Every so often he’ll send us a call asking if anyone’s seen any good papers recently or research we might be able to incorporate.

At the moment, I’m studying something that’s a little bit different from what he’s doing. He’s looking at plants that basically don’t need any kind of pollination. They don’t need bees; they don’t need anything to help them reproduce. They just naturally do it. I’m asking, “How would we actually get bees — or use something like bees — on Mars to pollinate plants, and how would we breed them?” So we’re removed at the moment in those areas, but we’re looking to try and join our studies eventually, so it could be interesting. Angelo and I had already been looking for a reason and a way to work together, and this was a perfect opportunity.

Testing the temperature and acidity of hot springs in Iceland, looking for life thriving within this extreme environment.

What does it mean to be a flight director on an analogue mission, and why would a astrobiologist need to have such an experience? You’re not actually flying anywhere…

Our analogue mission was based in Canada, and it was to send a team to the Canadian high arctic where they were going to study an impact crater. When you have a mission, whether on Mars or on Earth, you have a team that goes into the field, or to Mars, and a mission control. Leading mission control is the flight director who basically manages the team. And that was my job.

There are a number of things you get from these scenarios. The first one is management experience, which doesn’t sound particularly exciting. But in these teams you have engineers, scientists, computational experts, field specialists, medics, psychologists, and a number of different people working together. In our field, if you’re going to stay in space science and you want to work in missions and help extend our knowledge of the solar system, you need to be able to work in a very dynamic team full of extremely different people from disparate backgrounds, and who therefore all think very differently.

There’s a very common clash between scientists and engineers, for example. The scientists want to go to this rock, say, to look at a cool bug. The engineer says, “Well I don’t know how to get you there.” And the scientist says, “Well I want to go there.” There’s always this clash, but it’s a friendly clash with a joint goal. You need the skills to be able to negotiate through this. So to be part the larger picture and to work in these situations and planning missions to other planets it’s an invaluable experience. It’s really good fun as well.

What has your TED experience been like so far?

The one thing about the TED conference is I think everyone spends an entire week with imposter syndrome, because you go there very confident in what you do and very excited to tell everybody about it — then you speak to even one single person and hear what they do and think, “Oh, that’s so much cooler and more interesting than what i do.” The Fellows community is very active; I’m talking with and potentially working with three Fellows at the moment on a number of different projects, which will be really exciting. And a lot of really great publicity has come from being associated with TED, even in the UK where it might not be as well known as it is in America.

I’m also now one of the directors of TEDxLondon, which is happening in July. Its theme is visions of the future, which is not at all in my area, but that means I’ve actually spent a number of weeks speaking with architects and designers and science-fiction writers about their visions of the future, which is absolutely fascinating.

We caught up with Damon to get a better sense of why he feels that social media may have an asocial downside.

You argue that the electronic umbilical cord that connects us to others – Facebook, Twitter, etc — may, in fact, be strangling us. But you also say that this only happens if we let it. How so?  

Technology has always been an issue for us, whether it was a child in the 1950s watching too much TV or a prehistoric caveman playing with a new discovery called fire. Like our ancestors, what we really need to do is find a smart way to integrate our newfound technology into our lives. The only difference now is that today’s tech is being discovered or created more rapidly than before. That, to me, is still no reason for us to throw up our hands and say our lives are suddenly spiraling out of our control.

Tech isn’t going away, either. In fact, it shouldn’t! But it should be balanced with old-school, classic ways of connecting. We shouldn’t believe that letter writing, phone calls, or even face-to-face meetings were rendered obsolete, just as email, texting, and Facebook messaging are not the ultimate ways for us to connect. I think saying technology is making us less attentive is a cop out. Now we should be focused on tech integration — not subservience.

This isn’t a new problem, as you suggest with your caveman example. We’ve struggled with these issues for thousands of years.  

It is definitely not a new problem. In Our Virtual Shadow, I talk about Socrates having as much trouble with then-new technologies as we do with modern tech. Culturists seem to fall into two camps: Believing tech is our devil or that tech is our savior. Both are false, just as they were in the past.

In your book, you discuss the importance of ‘anchors of memory’, which are markers we use to remember a moment. How are those changing in our new tech-saturated age?

Anchors of memory are symbolic items we make to help remember a special time. It could be a photo of your grandfather coming back from the war or simply a Facebook check-in saying you are at a rock concert. You make them for something you deem important enough to note. Our anchors of memory today are becoming more virtual than physical, like our Instagrams and tweets, but they are just as valid as the physical photos and letters of yesteryear.

My concern is that we seem more and more focused on creating these anchors of memory – FourSquare check-ins, status updates, and so on. Unfortunately, the tools we use to create our modern anchors of memory, like the smartphone, require a level of multitasking that takes us away from the very experience we’re trying so hard to capture! It is the ultimate irony.

The computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier said he feels that social media makes us all feel blandly similar. Do you agree?  

Lanier wrote the book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. To paraphrase, he talked about social media flattening people into one big pile of mush. How can you represent the contradictions, dimensions and ideas of any one person in a simplified social media profile? You can’t. It’s like those business commercials where they promise to not treat you like a number. In my interpretation, Lanier said that social media’s architecture and format essentially turned everyone into another number. It is rubbing all the rough edges off of everyone’s personality and making them fit into a fixed box. These varied people, then, turn into a big, non-descript pile of mush.

In Our Virtual Shadow, I argue that Lanier’s theory not only applies to social media, but also to how we interpret and receive news on the Internet. For instance, I can tweet something right now to my couple of thousand followers and, because they trust me, they will retweet it to their followers, and so on. It could be shared to so many degrees that people don’t even know that it came from me. Is what I said true? There is no way to prove the voracity and, at a certain point, it’s not going to matter to the reader. It will just be accepted as truth because someone they trusted shared it. That “news” has been scrubbed of all its edges – and its accountability – and it just becomes something someone heard on the ‘net.

There’s also a lot of good that social media brings us, though, on a personal and professional side.  

There is definitely much good that comes from social media. I’m a huge Twitter fan and even cofounded my own social media app, Quote UnQuote. I think we just need to ask the same question we do with other activities: Is this affecting my quality of life? For instance, if you’re spending quality time with your family and you feel the urge to pull out your smartphone and do a Facebook post about spending quality time with your family, consider if it is really necessary at that very moment.

Social media has the ability to make things feel more urgent than they actually are. We jump from attention-stealing activity to attention-stealing activity and, before we know it, time has flown by. The point of the book is that we use these potentially-distracting tools to capture a moment, but they are just time consuming enough to significantly pull us out of the moment. We will never again, say, watch our toddler walk for the first time or have a virgin meal at the famed The French Laundry. Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the networks, however, will be right there waiting for us whenever we want to visit. Life disappears, social media doesn’t — though we are often operating based on the opposite assumption.

How do we balance out the good with the bad? How do we become more present?

The best solution is to remember that there will always be a new social media tool, a new gadget, or a new technology that will ask for our attention, but there will never be a tool that replaces our memories when we allow ourselves to be fully present. There are several recent studies that say not only can’t we multitask successfully, but that multitasking prevents us from remembering life experiences as well as we could. The next time you are having a breath-taking experience, try not to do a Pavlovian reach for the smartphone.  Researching this book made me really question my own social media habits, and, if you put the smartphone aside for a bit, I think you’d be surprised at what you recall — what you notice — and even what you feel.

“Our Virtual Shadow” is available for the Kindle, Nook, or through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. Read more »

TED Fellow Kellee Santiago has won numerous awards for the video game, “Journey.” Here, we talk to her about her craft.

In recent months, That Game Company’s downloadable PS3 game Journey has swept up an armload of awards — the Game Developers Choice Award for Game of the Year and BAFTA Video Game Award for Best Game Design, to name just two — not to mention a Grammy nomination for Best Original Soundtrack. Company co-founder and TED Fellow Kellee Santiago tells us why she believes this remarkable game is touching so many people’s lives, what it might mean for the future of gaming. Bonus: we ask what’s next on her own horizon.

This is a lot of awards  at once, isn’t it? How does it feel?

It’s been totally amazing. We did have a good feeling about Journey: the responses we got last year just from our players was totally overwhelming — people really felt they were able to have personal catharsis through it.

By December, which marks the beginning of game awards season, we’d already been getting so much good attention already — people doing costume plays of the characters, making videos, playing the music on YouTube. So we suspected Journey might get nominated as a stand-out game of the year, just as Flow and Flower, our previous titles, had. But amazingly, it also started showing up in best game of the year categories, as well as best story and best soundtrack and graphics, which put Journey in the same category as what’s known as triple-A games — the video equivalent of blockbuster movies — the high-budget disc titles like Halo 4 and Mass Effect 3, Borderlands 2 and Dishonored. Seeing Journey in along with them was amazing. Then we started winning, which was really unbelievable.

I think it really speaks to a shift happening in the games industry around the idea of who can make a quality game, and what defines a quality game experience. The emphasis wasn’t on hours of gameplay or weapon-changing abilities, but on personal, deep experiences.

Tell us about the game experience.

In the game, the player is a robed figure. You wake up in the desert, and you see this giant mountain in front of you. The goal of the game is to go on this journey to the mountaintop — very much inspired by Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey structure.

On each level you’re exploring what appears to be a ruined civilization. You’re in this long robe, and when you encounter pieces of cloth, they can give you energy. And that energy you can use to fly, not infinitely, just for short periods. And you can build upon your ability to fly. But the idea is that cloth is really the only living thing in this desert environment. And as you move through the world, you encounter more complex life forms of cloth, and you start to learn more and understand more about this civilization and what happened there.

It takes about 90 minutes, maybe two hours, to play. We wanted to allow people to play through in one sitting.

How does the multiplayer aspect work?

As you’re going on this journey through different environments to the mountaintop, you can encounter another robed figure like yourself, and that is another real person. We don’t have an AI system, as some people think. It is always just a one-on-one connection, to give you this feeling like you’re in this vast world. So when you happen upon another person, it’s very significant.

One of the goals was to make an online console title that actually made you feel connected to another person, as opposed to the traditional online console gaming experience in which you start up a competitive, usually fighting or shooting game, and get yelled at by people from across the world.

In Journey, there’s actually no language, no voice chat system, and no in-game messaging. You’re also totally anonymous — you don’t have a user ID or a name, nothing that could take you out of the world that we were creating, which also leaves it totally open to players of any age and also from anywhere in the world. Because we don’t rely on language, we can actually have a global server, so you could be playing with someone who doesn’t even speak the same language as you. Yet you share the experience.

Then do you have to play the game together?

You don’t have to. People have different play styles: I could be really into exploration, and they just want to go around and collect everything — then we’d naturally separate and be disconnected and left open to connect with someone else. This offers an organic way of players finding players who are similar to them.

How do the players communicate?

The only way of communicating is through a shout or call system. When you press a button on the controller, you’ll make either a tiny shout or a large call. It can act as a way of saying “Hey, I’m over here!” if you’re in the level but can’t see each other very well. But when two people initially find each other, they “speak” in lots of short chirps. It’s amazing how much actually people can communicate this way. It gets enough across, I guess.

Is there no way they can ever find each other in the real world?

We’ve struggled with this, because from a game design stance, it can be very powerful to allow people to invite friends to play. But we felt the anonymity was really important, because the game is about humanity in general, not the specifics of this particular person. But if you play through the entire game, it’ll take you back to where you started again. At that moment, it will show you the other journeyers you encountered along the way, so people have connected to one another through the Playstation network messaging system afterwards.

There’s also a Tumblr blog actually called Journey Stories, where people post their experiences of playing and try and find each other if they’ve had a particularly moving experience with someone.

But it’s funny to think about how originally it was really just a theory when 13 of us were developing the game. We really felt that simply moving through these environments with another person would be something really compelling to share online. I guess it turned out that we weren’t alone.

Is it meant to be played again and again?

Yes. There are collectibles that you can go and get through multiple playthroughs. But mainly people play again because the environments are beautiful and it’s a really interesting place to be — and you can always encounter another person. That really does change your experience every time.

So even though you know what you’re going to encounter at the end, it’s still worth exploring and making contact with somebody else.

Yeah. A metaphor we used a lot during development was hiking — especially that feeling like we can pass each other on a busy street in an urban environment, we don’t even recognize each other. But when you’re out hiking somewhere, when you see another person, you feel a connection to them. And everyone’s pretty nice usually when you go out hiking. I’ve hiked in Griffith Park on some of the same trails many, many times now because I live right here, but it’s still a beautiful place to explore. I’ll still go back to it.

You’re no longer with That Game Company. What happened, and what are you up to now?

We pretty much disbanded after Journey was shipped, about a year ago. It had been six years, and myself and co-founder Jenova Chen and the other people that had been there for a while, we had just really grown and changed. Your art imitates your life, and it was true for every single one of our games, and Journey was no exception. Jenova said in the acceptance speech that he gave at GDC that, if you played through Journey, you’d understand our own struggles as well. It reflects everything we were going through.

So when it was over, it was time for us to hit the start-a-new-journey button, like we have in the game. I didn’t know what was next. In games, I love the practice of game development and game design, but I’m also passionate about empowering different voices in game development to be successful so that we can have a wider variety of experiences in games. I’m interested in how our business model can impact that. Because the games industry is relatively young, there’s still much room to change that and switch it up. I’ve been doing that also with an angel investment fund called Indie Fund, which I co-founded in the beginning of 2010.

My period of exploration vacillated between both. But I thought that in order to really impact the finances and the business model of the games industry, I would ultimately have to go work for one of the large studios or large console manufacturers and work my way up to being in a position of power. I got connected with Julie Uhrman, who’s the CEO and founder of Ouya, which I joined as Head of Developer Relations a month ago. Ouya made a lot of waves last year. They ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign: making $8.5 million dollars for a new console, which is crazy. It could have only worked on Kickstarter: investors were just laughing them out of the room. No one wanted to get into hardware manufacturing.

With Ouya, I really feel there is an opportunity to have all of the accessibility for development that mobile devices and PCs do, but in the living room — still have developers be able to develop a variety of gaming experiences, but with all the ease and openness of a platform that’s been provided through App Store and Google Play. That really excites me.

Any regrets?

That we lost the Grammy to Trent Reznor. But that’s OK.

Joshua Prager uses his journalistic eye to tell his own story at TED2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Almost twenty-three years ago, Joshua Prager experienced a moment that could only be described as “a great hinge in my life,” one that divided it “like the spine of an open book.” Just 19 years old then, Prager was in Israel for a year after high school. He was sitting in the backseat of a minibus bound for Jerusalem when a truck behind him lost control and slammed into the corner where he sat. His neck broke and, in a second, he went from an athletic teen to a hemiplegic. It would be weeks before he could breathe on his own, four months before he would leave the hospital. For the next four years, he navigated the world in a wheelchair, then a cane and braces – and embarked on a career as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal.

Joshua Prager: In search of the man who broke my neckIn today’s talk, given at TED2013, Prager tells the story of going back to Jerusalem to try to find the man who had been driving that truck: Abed.

“[He was] a man I never met, but who had changed my life,” says Prager in this wrenching talk. “So on an overcast morning in January, I headed north in a silver Chevy to find a man – and some peace.”

Prager had returned to live in Jerusalem once before, after college. While there, he’d read Abed’s testimony from the morning after the accident and felt an intense wave of emotion.

“It was the first time I’d felt anger toward this man and it came from magical thinking. On this Xeroxed sheet of paper the crash had not yet happened,” says Prager. “Abed could still turn his wheel left so I would see him whoosh by out my window … and I would remain whole.”

He contacted Abed on that trip, but the two didn’t meet. It was only last year — as Prager wrote a book about his experience — that he realized he needed to meet Abed face-to face. “Finally I understood why,” says Prager. “To hear this man say two words: I’m sorry.”

To hear how Prager found Abed, watch this talk. In it, he shares the unexpected trajectories this meeting took — and the lessons this unpredictable encounter taught him about human nature and the core of our identities.

Of course, Prager was only able to tell a sliver of his story in an18-minute talk. He shares much, much more in his book Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. Below, two excerpts from this recently released book – one from the prologue and one short selection from later.

Through the faded blue metal frame of my open window, I watch the morning light approach. It crests the skinny cypress trees atop the hill just over the valley, rolls down the bone rooftops of Jabal Mukabbir, rises to ripen the red-yellow nectarines on my sill three stories above Naomi Street. My floor, tiles of salmon and olive, brightens, and my glass tabletop reflects the worn copy of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly upon it.

The light reminds me that I have just come back to Jerusalem and I smile at a thought: “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” I appropriated the sentence long ago from the Psalmist and I slide my left foot into my plastic brace, calf-high and erect in an empty brown shoe. I take hold of my wooden cane and walk to the staircase. There is no handrail on my right so I descend the three flights slowly, right forearm pressed against the powdery concrete wall, left hand unable to grasp the banister available to it, left leg — hard to bend–preceding the right down each of 55 steps.

I turn right on Naomi Street, right again on Hebron. My left foot is closer to the street than my right. Sidewalks the world over slant down toward the gutter and I am careful to give the extra smidgeon of clearance the slope affords to the half of me that swings forward from the hip. I have now done so for half my life.

Before May 16, 1990, I had not noticed the slant underfoot. Nor, as I ran over rise and fall, had I contemplated much what made me me, or that unfairness has theological implications, or that life might end each and every day.

But right now, because my neck broke, I am carrying a question to a windmill aware not only of the topography of the stone molars below but also, as every day, of these higher burdens.

And yet, I am lucky. Twenty-two years ago, at the base of the hill that rises to Jerusalem, a careless truck driver almost killed me as I sat in the back of a minibus. He would have but for the machines and people and tubes that saw to it that my body breathed and fed and pissed. A medical jet flew me home to New York where at age 19, I quietly observed the goings-on; I could not speak or move or feel anything below my neck save one well placed prick of a needle.

Improbably, the swelling in my neck receded. I would walk in the land of the living! But imbalanced. My right side moved freely. My left, restrained by spasticity, a neurological tightness of sorts, did not; it furled and shook. A doctor explained that I was further divided: I had Brown-Séquard syndrome which roughly meant that one half of me could move better, the other half feel.

I told myself to work now and think later. And so I pushed myself, learned to eat and dress and steady a suppository in spastic fingers, to sit and stand and walk. Walking, however gratifying, was at any real length an impractical exhaustion, and I used a wheelchair for four years until, back in Israel after college, I put in another year of exercise and rose from the chair for good. I returned to New York and became a journalist, walking through six continents with an ankle brace and cane, typing articles and a book with one finger.

I tried to write of the crash but failed. Instead, for a decade, I wrote of secrets. There was the reclusive boy who inherited the royalties to the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. There was the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment, The Shot Heard Round the World. There was the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a photographer in Iran. There were the unknown suicides of the parents of the most famous missing person in World War II.

It took a friend to point out to me the obvious: all of these stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that changed in an instant — owing if not to a crash than to an inheritance, a swing of a bat, a click of a shutter, an arrest. Each of us had a before and an after. I had been working through my lot after all.

A second friend helped me to see that I was, in effect, forcing my subjects — one solved secret at a time — to live with their altering moment just as I did: openly. Whereas a depressed person can choose to conceal her disability, to meet me is to see that I use a cane.

But as I continue now on my walk and turn left onto King David, I am less sure of what I, not others, see in me and my broken neck.

I have returned to Jerusalem to find this out, to become again whole where I was once divided.

I cross to the right side of the street so that my left leg is to the curb and I see the windmill ahead amidst cypress and carob and olive trees. It is beautiful, a narrowing white stone cylinder with an iron cap and sail. A wealthy Brit named Moses Montefiore had it built in 1857 to encourage Jews to leave the safe but confined walled city just over the valley and support themselves milling flour. Though a community rooted about the mill, the mill was not used for long.

I turn into the park, step onto its stone path and walk between puffs of rosemary toward the windmill. I have walked a mile and my back is tight–all that swinging of a leg–and I put my right hand on my hip and lean back quickly at the waist. I hear the familiar crack deep in my back, my left leg stiffens and kicks forward, my left arm bends and shakes in spastic confusion. I balance flamingo-like a few seconds on my right leg, then sit.

I reach the windmill and look up. And then I, who once ran about it, asks my question: with no wind and no mill, are you still a windmill?

***

I am standing on a rooftop in the old walled city of Jerusalem when at 4:04 on a Friday afternoon a siren sounds as it does here every week. It stops and the Sabbath, silent, begins. And I remember another silence that followed another great sound not far away. For the crash blew out my eardrum and for a time, I heard nothing.

And then the world was full of noise — beeps and alarms and intercoms and voices — and I was silent. And the absence of my voice was audible. So I listened and heard what I had not before — the wee squeak of a first sneeze, the echo of smacked lips, the soft click of my thumb pressing a blue square button embossed with the white silhouette of a nurse.

In the quiet of my first night at Sinai, I heard a scream. It was a sustained, bloodcurdling scream, a woman in a horror film. My body jerked. The scream stopped, then returned, words articulated but incomprehensible. Then more screams descending into a frantic cough.

Then I saw her — a girl, maybe 16, skinny and tall, with half her head shaved and long dark scraggly hair falling from the other. She looked like a demon and ran screaming from my door.

My heart pounded. I began to sweat. My call bell was clipped to the railing on the right of my bed and I put my thumb on it and pressed. No one came. The screaming continued. Sweat wet my face and I pressed the button repeatedly. Where was help?! I felt dizzy. It occurred to me that perhaps there had been a mistake: I had been sent to a mental institution! Minutes passed. I was dizzy, drenched and bewildered when the nurse entered my room and told me that the girl had been in a car accident and could not speak.

I calmed. I listened. I thought of the girl. Wrote William Carlos Williams: “The poem springs from the half-spoken words of such patients….”

Time passed and I readied for bed one night when a man I could not see began to moan. Minutes passed and still he moaned and then an hour passed and I was exhausted and began to count the moans and time the moans, their metronomic parabolic rise and fall. The nurses did not make the moans stop and the moans continued for nights until the man was gone and I did not care to where.

There was more noise too. Margaret was loud. Tufts of black and white hair did not conceal a scar on her scalp and she blurted out unpleasant words and glowered at all. And one Saturday night as my father recited a prayer to mark the end of the Sabbath and I held a forbidden candle, middle-aged Margaret pushed open my door with her foot and wheeled in.

My father stopped. We closed the door. Margaret looked at the flame and we looked at Margaret. Her expression contorted. “You can’t have fire,” she said.

“Hi Margaret,” I said.

“Hi sunshine.”

I explained that this was a special candle and the fire was a secret. Margaret listened as my father resumed the prayer. She left and never told.

Years passed and I thought of Margaret and the moaning man and the screaming girl and their half-spoken words and my own words that were whole. And I appreciated the words I spoke more for having once not been able to speak them. Wrote Melville: “Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”

Contrast. It is the short sentence that stands out in contradistinction to the long, the sound to the silence. You are mindful of what you do not have and so are truly mindful of what you do have. And if the gods are kind, you truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive when you live in a hospital or break your neck or are sick or lose someone you love or suffer in any existential way. You know death and so may wake each morning pulsing with ruddy life. Some part of you is cold and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm. And even to be cold. When one winter morning years after the crash, I stepped onto a tile floor and the underside of my left foot felt a flash of cold stone, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow.

The excerpt above comes from the new Byliner Original by Joshua Prager, Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. It’s available for $3.99 at Amazon’s Kindle Store and Apple’s iBookstore. It is also a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com, and a Short Read at Kobo.

So how did Prager come to TED? He spoke at the New York stop of our worldwide talent search. There he gave a shorter talk, about reaching his “half-life” – the exact moment when he had lived as long after the crash as he had before. Below, hear what he spent this moment, which calls “a looming uber-anniversary.”

And here, read the TED Blog’s Q&A with Prager after his talent search talk »

Maker, innovator, and cottage industrialist Dominic Muren wants making to be open, global and modular. He’s just launched his latest project, Alchematter – an online open source platform that breaks down and spells out instructions on how to make, well, anything. He gives us the ins and outs of the site, covering everything from reverse crowdfunding to bricks made of eggshells and pee.

When you first became a Fellow in 2010, you were pretty amped about the concept of skin-skeleton-guts (SSG) manufacturing involving modular electronics — a watch could be modified into a camera, and a camera into a phone, and so on — as well as local production. You wanted to make invention on a small scale possible again.

My design lab the Humblefactory began with this idea of how could I actually be a manufacturer, because it would be fun to make stuff. And then it grew into, “How might I, as an outspoken individual, help this small-scale manufacturing movement grow?” SSG is a design framework that I am still exploring. I’m actually working on putting together a little travel laptop netbook that’s human powered.

But I’m not as single-mindedly focused on electronics anymore. Right now, the main project coming out of Humblefactory is Alchematter.org – a platform that allows makers to share open-source designs for objects. What makes it different from Thingiverse, Instructables and such sites is that what you share on Alchematter is a whole procedure for the creation of objects. Those procedures are defined in a very modular way — which allows them to be really easily remixed or adapted or searched for.

For example, Thingiverse is excellent for describing things 3D printed from plastic or things laser cut, but they basically have to be monolithic, one-off objects. It was meant for: “Here’s a 3D printed part. You want to print this part? Great.”

But what if you wanted to share a procedure for creating, say, a woven piece of cloth? Thingiverse doesn’t have a lot of functionality for instructions. You can write whatever you want, but it doesn’t tell you “Here is the pattern for the cloth, and here is the procedure for using a loom.” Those things — the pattern you follow and the procedure for the loom — are two separate pieces. If you separate those, which Alchematter does, then anytime you want to weave something, you can use the technique for the loom and all you have to switch is the pattern.

Give me an example of something I might want to go to Alchematter for.

Let’s say that you are Peter Haas or one of the other Fellows that has a non-profit that makes a thing, that wants that thing to get massively distributed. The global maker community is a cool way to do that. If you can tell them how to make the thing, then they can just make the thing. You don’t have to spend time replicating it and shipping it, and so on.

The problem with that is the raw materials and the skills and the tools and everything that are available in any one locality are very different from one another. How could you know how to adapt a technique for making a stove, for example?

Let’s say that your non-profit had successfully launched stoves in Rwanda, and you decided, “This is great, we’re going to do it for Bolivia also.” Those are two different places, and it will cost you a lot of money to do the on-the-ground research or partner with an organization. Alchematter lets makers share information about what they’re capable of in Bolivia, building up a knowledge base of what materials are available, what tools are available, even what makers are available — in other words, who are the people who have made projects that look like your stove? And then you can just get on it and say, awesome, here are some of the ways we could tweak it. Here are some of the people we need to get in touch with. These are the materials we might use.

So you’re offering instructions from one place and allowing people with resources, tools, and materials in another place to adapt them.

Yes. The fundamental idea is to separate the description of the object from the restrictions imposed by reality — either because of skills, tools or materials — and to allow much more easy adaptation of designs for things to your local situation.

Another cool thing is that Alchematter modularizes stuff. Again, let’s think about the stove. Let’s say that, in most places, those stoves tend to be made from some kind of factory brick. Let’s say that you wanted to make these stoves in a place that had very low fuel availability, and you wanted to make some kind of method for making a fireproof refractory, so that you didn’t have to fire it — or maybe you had to use a lot less fuel than normal, which would lower the price of the stove.

But this is tricky. How do you do that? There are some methods — for example, there’s this woman who makes bricks out of bacteria and urea, of all things. You can basically pee in a jug, feed it to this bacteria, and its adds urease, an enzyme that breaks down the urea, using that energy to precipitate a calcium ion out of a solution. This makes a marble-like substance.

Out of pee?

Out of pee. It has to be calcium-rich pee, but you could still do that. You could grind up some eggshells with some vinegar that you could make locally using whatever sugar you had. And then you get a bunch of pee. If you put those two solutions together on sand, you get a solid because the calcium sticks the sand together. It’s a ceramic — there’s no glue.

This is the kind of thing that Dow Chemical or Raytheon or somebody develops, but not people in their garages. But Alchematter breaks that fundamental innovation out. You can still define a hypothetical product that uses this pee bacteria thing, and you can say, “Hey, I saw this research that somebody did. I would like to have it adapted to stoves. Here’s the procedure for the stove and here’s the stove I could make if I had this thing and this hypothetical material. I will pay this X bounty for this description.” And then somebody else can come in and say, “Oh, I would pay X bounty,” or “I would pay twice that bounty. My organization can use that too,’ because the thing will be open once it’s shared.

Essentially, you can crowdfund in reverse: instead of a smart person with an idea coming to the community and saying, “Hey, I know how to do this thing. Pay me for it,” you can have someone with a need come to the community and say, “I want this thing pretty bad. Make it for me.” And other people who need it can chip in. So it’s a different model.

How would they know they had a need before the solution was presented?

Since Alchematter is built around these modular procedures, it’s fairly straightforward for a designer to make, say, a table with a marble top. Another maker could pick that procedure up, and make a copy with a hypothetical material in place of the marble — a sort of placeholder, with certain specifications defined. Again, they only know what their limitations are, what skills, materials, costs, levels of energy, or tools do they have access to. So they can pitch in as much as they know, and then rely on the rest of the community to fill in the blanks. In the case above, some other maker might create a new derivative procedure which fills in the marble material with the pee rock from Professor Dosier. That’s how makers help each other be smarter than the sum of their parts.

Where’s all the data coming from, and who’s feeding the information into the system? And who breaks down all the information into modular chunks?

We’re initially targeting hackerspaces, mostly because they do the biggest variety of making. At least in the beginning, this site will look like Thingiverse or Instructables. But when you define a procedure, the platform asks you very clearly: What are the components that are going into this? What’s the technique that transforms them? Defining an entire procedure from scratch is actually a significant amount of work. This is not just like uploading a 3D file and writing a really short description.

But because it’s modular most of the procedures that get made will ultimately actually be remixes of existing pieces. So for example, let’s say that you wanted to make a wood table. You could literally take an existing table and just go into one part which shows the cut list dimensions and change some of the dimensions, or you might add a piece in the assembly drawings that adds a drawer. You append things onto this existing table rather than doing the whole thing from scratch.

But the maker who wants to upload an object is in charge of breaking it out into modular pieces that are going to be understood? That’s a lot of work. Do you provide guidelines?

This is a stepwise, scaffolded process that makes it easy and can distribute the labor. We’re like Wikipedia. Let’s say that you want to define “Barack Obama,” and in order to do that you have to define what a US president is, and in order to do that you have to define what the US is, and that gets complicated. But you can make a stub, and somebody else can improve a procedure by adding what’s missing. And we can encourage people to help flesh out broken pieces of procedures using game mechanics kinds of things — like you get badges or points. Alchematter is just a tool that lives online and has a community that organically participates and grows around it.

We might also offer contests to encourage participation. A competition to make the best stove would encourage a hundred stove design entries. Only one of them wins, but we get a hundred procedures that flesh out the site.

Or there could be a contest asking: “What could you do with pee and eggshells?” It’s really meant to be a cross-disciplinary experience. We want to give undergraduates in mechanical engineering and chemistry and electrical engineering an opportunity to a Capstone project that actually matters rather than a fake startup that you know will never go anywhere. I was part of that machine. The engineering and sciences in undergrad create a lot of work that is unvalued, never given a chance to be used. Alchematter gives such ideas a chance to become a real, practical resource.

How do you ensure safety and quality?

We are actually in the process of figuring out how to deal with liability for users and liability for the community as a whole. Within the method of description, it asks you a number of times, “Enumerate the dangers of this process.” Once you have those things checked, it can do a rating of procedures and it can this is this difficult and dangerous, this is less difficult and dangerous. We also will have a terms of use that basically outlines what is appropriate for the community. It will be very specific. And we will have a community standards review process.

What are the components of the site?

The main two pieces would be that you have a procedure editing facility, searching and editing facility. You can browse as a non-user, but as soon as you want to make something you’ve got to be on the system, because we need to know where that thing came from and how you did it. So you can search for something, browse through, pick up bits and pieces either by taking a procedure and saying, “I want to start with that and I want to make some adjustments,” and that will copy it into your editing space. You can also learn techniques for materials or tools. So in your editing space you have these pallettes of commonly used materials and commonly used techniques and that sort of thing. This chain of nodes combines and combines until you get to one final thing until you get to the point where you find what you want to make.

The site is GUI based. You can also upload photographs, and we encourage videos. But it does have to be scaffolded within that structure: just having one giant video is not the best way. Instruction needs to be modular.

All of the stuff on Alchematter will be on a viral license, a “you have to share and share alike” license. So if you use this thing and you want to share it, then you need to share it in some way, you need to show the whole thing. We would hope that people would be excited to contribute back, but really we’re much more interested in getting to the point where somebody makes the thing from the site. That’s number one. And thing number two is somebody contributes something back to the site.

Dominic Muren on why electronics recycling is stupid, filmed at TEDGlobal 2010.

Do you cater to any kind of maker? Chemists, woodworkers, cooks, knitters?

That’s the most important piece. The coolest things that happen in making happen because you get experts in various domains interacting. You smush them together and end up with something that’s actually new — something that actually never would have happened before.

Whenever I talk about this, everybody immediately says, “Oh, yeah. And the wealthy people in the West would totally be able to give all their knowledge to those people in the developing world.” To me, that misses the point: most of the knowledge that people in the developed West for making stuff is crappy because it requires huge infrastructure and a lot of capital investment and a lot of space. Much of the manufacturing technologies that are being used in the very informal developing world – even the more formalized developed developing world – are smaller-scale tools and small shops and raw materials that actually come from farms rather than coming from Dow Chemical.

I want to catch that information, number one, before globalization of the economy succeeds and wipes them out; or, number two, before shit hits the fan — this massively centralized, industrialized economy runs on oil and it runs on a stable climate — and Dow goes out of business and we don’t have any raw materials. There’s so much good knowledge that is out there that is in danger of dying, either by success or by failure. Both of them are going to kill it.

I’m hopeful that through efforts like Alchematter will be able to capture enough of the knowledge that exists as well as generate new knowledge that doesn’t exist yet that will help us to more gracefully make the continuing transition. It’s going to be all transitions from here on out. We’ve never had stasis. I don’t know if we’ve ever had stasis, but we want to be more graceful in our transition and more resilient in our response.

I also want Alchematter to be an active exchange between art and science. I intend to see, artists who work with science — such as Fellows Kate Nichols or Suzanne Lee — come on the site and learn how to do scientific procedures in order to serve the arts. And I intend to see scientists doing stuff in order to serve the arts rather than only to serve biotech startups because they pay you a lot of money. That’s not the only reason that you should be excited to be a scientist.

How will you get to far-flung places that don’t have the digital reach?

The maker community is quite well distributed around the world. We also have some exciting partners in the Maker community. TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is working with us with Open Source Ecology, Fellow Catarina Mota with Smart Materials, and PopTech Fellow Amy Sun, who runs FabFolk, the social organization that is aligned with fab labs.

This is a powerful community to start with, but we recognize that there will be parts of society that we’ll never be able to reach through a rich web content application. We already are thinking about how are we going to deal with using SMS, or how are we are gisting this stuff so that it can be made into a PDF, or printed on paper. The exciting thing is, because we are modularizing these pieces, it’s easy to omit stuff or restructure this data so that it can fit into a different viewing format, and fit into bit-sized chunks. We know that that is a crucial piece, and we want to capture that information. I want to know how the Maasai make everything. I want to know how the Yanomami make everything. I don’t know how to get to those guys. They don’t even have cell phones. We may have to send Fellows out to gather that information at some point.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud

At TED2013, Mitra invited the world to embrace child-driven learning by setting up Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) and helping him design a learning lab in India, where children can “embark on intellectual adventures.”

We gave Mitra a call and asked him to reflect on his TED Prize win, dive deeper into his thoughts about learning and share the personal experiences that inspired his passion for igniting curiosity in children across the globe.

Here’s our conversation:

What does winning the TED Prize mean to you?

To me, it is a great symbol of recognition — that my work of the last few decades does have acceptability and is of real interest to the world. I was nervous that my work would get put aside as “out of the box,” a phrase I dislike immensely, and forgotten. I am more confident now, thanks to TED.

How did your upbringing shape your interest in self-directed learning?

I did not know anything about self-directed learning until 1999 when I stumbled upon it because of the Hole in the Wall experiment. I grew up more or less by myself in a big bungalow in Delhi with a large garden that had lots of trees and all sorts of birds, animals and insects. We used to learn together, if that makes any sense.

If you were part of a SOLE as a child, what big question do you imagine you might have asked first?

I think I have always been in a SOLE. I grew up quite alone and used to experiment constantly with my surroundings — trees and animals and birds and myself. There were no computers, so I used to ask questions to nature, and often, she would answer.

What is the first thing you remember learning on your own? Did you enjoy the process?

When I was 4 or so, we used to live in my mother’s house in Calcutta. The morning newspaper was rolled up and tossed into our first-floor balcony by the newspaper man. I was always up very early and used to pick it up and take it to my grandfather. I did not know he was dying from cancer. One day when I went to his room with the paper, it was empty and there were people crying. I went back to the balcony and put the paper back where it had fallen and stood for some time wondering if I should pick it up and try again. I learned you can’t turn back time. I did not enjoy the process, I am afraid.

Some people have misunderstood your strategy as anti-teacher, when in fact you are arguing that teachers have a crucial role to play — just a different one — in this technological age. Who was your favorite teacher and why?

My favorite teacher was Father Lewicki at St. Xavier’s High School. When I was 16, I told him I don’t see why I should believe in God. He said I should read Teilhard de Chardin and decide for myself.

Will child-driven education work differently depending on a child’s culture, gender and access to resources?

Easy access to an unsupervised, publicly visible computer with broadband is critical. But children are impacted differently depending on their reading comprehension, particularly in English. Culture does not matter so much when you are dealing with 8-12-year-olds. Neither does gender.

How has parenting informed your perspective on self-directed learning?

My father did his Ph.D. under Benjamin Bloom in Chicago, in the days of objective-driven and “programmed” learning. He then became one of the first psychoanalysts in India. I think he taught me a lot of things by not telling me to do things — by not teaching and only listening.

I learnt how to listen and that people will tell you everything if you listen and say “hmmm” once in a while. My mother, who was once a student of Rabindranath Tagore, taught me how to do lots of things just by thinking about them.

Your Hole in the Wall experiment inspired Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, the book that Slumdog Millionaire is based on. How do you think your TED Prize wish will impact popular culture?

In an age where “knowing” may be obsolete, Homo sapiens will have to reinvent ourselves. The wish, I hope, will be a tiny step in that direction. If children have wings, they will learn how to fly.

Did your experience as a parent impact your views about self-directed learning?

The Hole in the Wall experiment was based on what I had learned from my son when he was 6. It was 1987 and I had bought my first PC, spending nearly a year’s salary at the time. When it arrived, I said to my son, “Don’t even think about it.”

About three days later, I was looking for a file on the DOS system. Every time I typed DIR, all the file names would scroll up too fast for me to read them. As I was trying the third time, a little voice from behind said. “If you type DIR/W/P, it will show up like a page.” I was a bit shocked. “How did you know that?” I asked. “Well, that’s what you did yesterday!” he said. From then on, I let him use the computer.

In a couple of weeks, I was asking my son how to do things that I did not know my computer could do. I wrote a paper suggesting that children can learn to use computers by themselves just by watching each other. It was very badly received. Twelve years later, in 1999, my friend and employer Rajendra Pawar let me do the Hole in the Wall. He had no clue what I was trying to find out. The rest is history.

Learn more about Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize wish »

We called Raz in his office to talk about what’s new with TED Radio Hour, and about his deep love of pop music.

What will feel different about TED Radio Hour this season?

In short, everything. The core of the show is the same — it’s TED Talks. But what’s changed is the way we’re using sound and music and soundscapes. The first season was a different show — really good at finding awesome TED content and bringing on amazing TED speakers. Now we’re taking the opportunity to experiment, even radically experiment, with the way we deliver not just NPR content but TED content. It will still be mind-blowing — but even more so, enhanced with music and an experiential quality. We want to somehow replicate that feeling you get at TED. You actually feel it in your soul, right? We can get pretty close to that through this radio program.

So what’s your vision of how people will experience the show?

My “Barbie Dream House” vision of what a listener would be doing: you’re walking down the street, you would have your headphones on and you experience this show in a full 360-degree way. It’s designed to come and grab you and pull you in and take you on a journey. I know it sounds sort of new age-y and hokey — but that’s what it’s supposed to do. And we’re so excited about it. The first three shows are done and we just love them. We hope that people love them too.

Our goal is basically two things with every show: first, we want the person listening to somehow be changed every time they hear the show. That doesn’t mean that all of a sudden they become a Buddhist and move to Bhutan, right? It means that they will see something different about the world. It might be that they think about insanity in a totally different way, or they think about the stars in a different way. Second: we want to create a new way of telling stories on the radio. It’s this incredible opportunity for NPR because we’re this news organization with a huge following, and we’re respected. And TED is this huge thing that people are just obsessed with. Everywhere I go, I say I work for NPR and people say, “Oh my God! I love NPR. What do you do there?” And I say, “Well, I’m working on this new partnership with TED,” and they say, “Oh my God! I love TED!” There aren’t that many things in America that elicit that kind of response from people. It’s just incredible that we’ve got all these talented people on both ends of this thing.

I’m curious — what’s the one episode this season that you can’t wait to air?

The second episode. I love the first one, but the second one to me was such an incredible personal journey. It’s called “Peering Into Space” and it’s about the wonders of the skies above us. I wasn’t ever super interested in astrophysics but the way that Brian Greene can talk about it and the way that Jill Tarter's call to join the SETI search Jill Tarter can just create such a sense of wonder about what might be out there and the way that Phil Plait can talk about asteroids in this way that makes you really think about what’s right above us. I think people who haven’t taken the time to look at the stars recently are going to be amazed by what they hear. You look out at the brightest star in the sky — which is Polaris — and it’s eight and a half years ago. You are looking at the past in real time. That idea to me is so beautiful.

In that show, we tell the story about how the expansion of the universe was discovered — through Brian Greene’s TED Talk and also through Brian’s conversation with me. Then it pivots 180-degrees. All of a sudden, it’s 1998 and two research teams discover that the expansion is happening faster — it’s not slowing down. And this completely revolutionizes physics. Brian tells the story in his TED Talk, so we hear lots of his talk, but then [for the show] we found two scientists, Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess and interviewed them. We use really interesting production techniques to bounce back and forth. That episode to me is about this universal sense of wonder and I can’t wait to hear that on the air. It’s totally changed my world. Even the way I look at the stars — it makes me think about how small we are, how small our lives are and problems are.

What else is in the works?

Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model.So we’ll do 30 shows this season. Right now we’ve got eight episodes in production. We’re looking at things like beauty — with Cameron Russell, Dan Dennett and Nancy Etcoff. We’re looking at violence with Phil Zimbardo and Steven Pinker. We’re looking at the question of whether we will need humans with Andrew McAfee, Cynthia Breazeal, Sherry Turkle. We’re going to do a show with Julian Treasure with sounds and music. The possibilities are infinite because there is so much amazing TED content. What we do is try to find a connecting thread between three or four TED speakers and then bring them together. Each show is a carefully thought-through hour. It can take, really, many weeks to put together an episode of the show but we hope that people will Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen betterhear something that they’ll find inspiring, interesting, entertaining, even educational.

What’s your secret skill?

My secret skill is that I’m an incredible, unbelievable judge of pop music. I knew Carly Rae Jepsen was going to be awesome two weeks before she hit number one. I liked Taylor Swift before anyone else did. I love pop music. I’ve been an NPR reporter my whole life, going overseas and interviewing politicians and prime ministers and stuff, and this is my secret thing. Of course I like indie music and I love classical music and I listen to a lot of jazz, but no one in my peer group ever wants to admit that they listen to pop music and I think it’s a shame because it’s great now. We’re in this amazing time. I would say that right now, we are living in a pop music renaissance. I mean, “Scream & Shout,” the collaboration with Britney Spears and Will.I.Am — that song’s amazing — and electronic dance music folks like Calvin Harris and David Guetta working with Rihanna — it’s just awesome. Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z, “Suit & Tie?” What’s happening is so interesting to me. So my secret skill is being able to identify awesome pop music.

What’s something that’s ignored when it comes to radio shows?

Silence. It sometimes is a really effective thing in radio. It’s like a car coming to a screeching halt and it just stops.

What are some of the things you’re most looking forward to at TED2013?

Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactorWhere do I begin? I’m going to need an intravenous feed of 5-Hour Energy to do everything that I want to do. I don’t know when I’m going to sleep. I’m really looking forward to hearing from Jared Diamond, Elon Musk, Bono and that kid who built the nuclear reactor in his bedroom. I’m also just really excited to experience that community because TED has built something that hasn’t been replicated. It’s something that everybody I know who goes or has been can’t quite articulate — they can only really say, “You know, you just have to experience it.” There’s so much energy and innovative thinking and inspiring ideas. I’m just really excited to be in that environment.

While our culture tends to laud extroverts — people who are outgoing, social and high on charisma — Cain stood up for the introverts of the world in her talk.

Susan Cain: The power of introverts

“Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts’ need for lots of stimulation,” says Cain. “This is our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues’ loss and our communities’ loss. And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world’s loss. Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best.”

In the past year, Cain’s talk has been viewed nearly 4 million times. Meanwhile, her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking became a New York Times bestseller. With the paperback of the book now on bookstore shelves, the TED Blog spoke — softly — to Cain about the experience of the past year.

Do you feel like Quiet has made a dent in the cultural bias toward extroversion?

Yes, and it started within minutes of giving my TED talk! One member of the audience was Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase — a self-identified introvert and just a lovely fellow. He told me he’d been thinking for years about ways to encourage employee privacy at work. His company has spent the last year working on this question. And Herman Miller, the office furniture manufacturer, is following the same path.

Since then, I’ve heard from other businesses who are using the ideas in Quiet to rethink their corporate culture, and from schools asking their teachers to read the book and question practices like grading children on class participation.

I’ve also heard many stories of individuals empowered by the message of the book. Just last night, I met a lovely young woman who said she’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur but was afraid she was too quiet to pull it off. But after she saw my TED talk, she started her own company.

What are some of the most basic things we can do in schools and offices to make sure introverts are in their element and that their voices get heard?


In workplaces, we need to dramatically rethink open office design. These spaces are so economical that I don’t expect them to disappear, but they desperately need to be balanced with private nooks and crannies. Also, it’s fine to organize people into teams, but that doesn’t mean the actual work has to get done collectively. Most people think better when they’re on their own and not subject to constant interruption and scrutiny.

In schools, I am just going to repeat what I said in my TED talk, almost a year ago now: stop the madness for constant groupwork. Constant groupwork is even bad for extroverted kids. According to psychologist Anders Ericsson’s research on how people become stars, excellence depends not on talent but on sustained, deliberate practice that is often conducted in solitude.

Now that you’ve been speaking about this book for a year, do you feel any more extroverted?

No way! Yes, I’m more comfortable giving speeches than I used to be. Yes, I feel lucky and grateful to connect with so many great audiences. But I will always feel most at peace when I’m home with my family, or lounging around a café with my laptop and a latte in hand.

If you were starting over in writing this book today, what would you include that wasn’t in the original text?


I wouldn’t change much about the book. But I wish I’d had reader resources ready and waiting to go, at publication date. Every day, teachers and businesspeople ask me for tools they can use to harness the talents of the introverts in their lives. And regular people ask me for help with dating, schmoozing, public speaking and career choices.

Right now I’m developing an online course in public speaking for introverts. And I’m planning a young-adult version of Quiet. But there’s so much more to do.

The truth is, this is a job not for one person but for hundreds, thousands, maybe millions. Luckily, many other people have started to write about and work on these issues, too. (I’ve listed some of them in the “Resources” area of my website.) There truly is a Quiet Revolution afoot. I really hope that people reading this will think about the places in your own world that you’re in a position to influence.

Is there anything new that readers will find in the paperback?


Yes, lots of stuff. The paperback now opens with my 10-point manifesto for introverts. And in the back of the book, there’s a new reader’s guide, list of introverts in literature, and other resources — tips on public speaking for introverts, tips for parenting an introverted child. Also, tips for educators.

Want more? You can find Cain on Facebook. Or head to her very comprehensive website »

Teen reporters Sadie Cruz and Nia Ashley conducted lots of interviews with speakers at the TEDYouth conference on November 17. Their Q&As will run on the TED Blog over the next few weeks. Here, a interview conducted by Sadie. 

Photographer Rick Smolan brought the flavor of homes across the United States to life, helped 25,000 photographers capture the spirit of American life minute-by-minute and cofounded A Day in the Life books, an ‘80s cultural touchstone. Smolan’s new project, The Human Face of Big Data, is about information in our world today. It’s just the latest in his long career, which began at age 16.

At TEDYouth, Rick spoke with me about his road to success, as well as what it’s like to be an amateur, a professional and the big, bad editor all in one.

Sadie Cruz: What drew you to be a photographer?

Rick Smolan: I was painfully shy when I was a kid. I always thought when most people were born, part of the toolkit was teaching you how to relate to other people — and it was just left out of my toolkit. So I sort of thought if I kept watching other people enough, and hung out close enough to them, I could figure out how they did it. Having a camera was a great excuse to kind of be there but not be there.

SC: Which project is your favorite, and why?

RS: The Human Face of Big Data has been by far the most challenging, and now the most satisfying, of any project I’ve ever done, because I think that we’re trying to start a global conversation about big data.

SC: So, how did that book start out?

RS: A friend of mine, Marissa Mayer, is the CEO of Yahoo, and I’ve known her for a long time. She said, “You should look at the world of big data.” And I said, “What’s that?” She started explaining it to me, and she said, “It’s like watching the planet develop a nervous system. All of us have become human sensors, with our phones and we’re all helping give this feedback loop that the human race has never had before.” So we started looking at it, thinking, how do you photograph that?

SC: If you weren’t a photographer, what would you be?

RS: Wow. You stumped me. This has been my whole life since I was 16, so it’s even hard to imagine. I’m not very good at science or math, even though I pretend. And I’m not very good at teaching. I’m not very patient. I don’t know the answer.

SC: Did you ever think you were going to be as successful as you are today?

RS: No, never. My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings. He told me I was being totally unrealistic because I wanted to work for Time magazine and National Geographic, and he said, “You never complete anything. You never finish any job. How could you ever work for these great magazines?” And I don’t know, somehow it happened.

SC: So when was that moment that you turned from amateur to professional?

RS: I don’t think it ever happened, because amateur means something you love, and I still really love what I do. Now I mostly photograph my kids, and I hire the best photographers in the world to work on my projects, so I sort of have the best of both worlds. But all of my friends who were really great professional photographers, they always had one camera which was their job camera and one camera which was their personal camera. So while they were shooting their assignment, they were also shooting personal pictures the whole time.

SC: How have cameras evolved from when you started to now?

RS: Oh, it’s so different now. I mean, the idea that we used to carry rolls of film around, and that when you got to 36, you had to stop for two minutes to change the roll of film — or that maybe the film you were using had been baked in the truck and you didn’t know it — there were so many things that could go wrong.

Now the fact that you can look down at the camera and see the results instantly, it’s called “chimping.” What they say is, while you’re chimping, you’re missing shots. Because instead of shooting, you keep reviewing what you’ve just done while the stuff keeps happening out there.

SC: Have you ever found any bizarre pictures that make you say, “oh no, we cannot put that in the book?”

RS: Oh, sure. You see a lot of things like that. I mean, what amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person’s perspective, rather than the situation itself. So I love hiring photographers who can be in a pack of a thousand photographers and they always come back with something very distinctive.

The hard part for me when I do my project is that I can’t be fair to every photographer, so even though we hire people, there’s no guarantee they’ll get a picture in the book. I feel like I’ve become the bad editor that I used to hate when I was the photographer, but we have to do what’s best for telling the story of the book. So sometimes there’ll be a kid on our staff who’s an intern, and he or she will get a better picture than one of our Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers. That’s just how it works.

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Check out more of the TED Blog’s coverage of TEDYouth »