Radio host Julie Burstein has found the perfect analogy for creativity—raku pottery. A Japanese art form in which molded clay is heated for 15 minutes and then dropped in sawdust which bursts into flames, what makes this pottery so beautiful is its imperfections and cracks.

Burstein interviewed hundred of artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers for her book, Spark: How Creativity Works, and heard many of them describe their process in similar terms — that the best parts of their work came from embracing challenges, misfortunes and the things they simply couldn’t control. As Burstein explains in this talk given at TED2012, “I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you would think.”

In this talk, Burstein identifies four lessons that creative people should embrace:

1. Pay attention to the world around you, and be open to experiences that might change you.
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2. Realize that the best work often comes out of the life experiences that are most difficult.
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3. Get comfortable with the fact that pushing up against a limitation can actually help you find your voice.
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4. Don’t be afraid to explore loss — be it rejection, heartbreak or death — because making beauty out of these things is so powerful.

To hear how Burstein learned these lessons from filmmaker Mira Nair, writer Richard Ford, sculptor Richard Serra and photographer Joel Meyerowitz, listen to her wonderful talk. And after the jump, nine more talks on the nature of creativity.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Your elusive creative genius
Author Elizabeth Gilbert is confused by how our culture regards writers and other artists—as people on the brink who are too easily undone by their talent. In this talk from TED2009, Gilbert reframes how we think about creativity—that rather than there being “geniuses” among us, that all of us have a bit of genius within us.

David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence
David Kelley of IDEO fully agrees with Elizabeth Gilbert. In this talk from TED2012, he shares why he believes it is problematic to think of society as split into the creatives and the technical-minded. Here, he shares how people who think of themselves as the latter can build up their creative muscles, as we all have them — whether we know it or not.

Isaac Mizrahi on fashion and creativity
Where does Isaac Mizrahi get ideas? From pretty much everywhere. In this talk from TED2008, Mizrahi shares how his creative process heeds him to pay attention to tarot card readers and to the unique coloration of film, as well as to hop out of cabs and follow people who strike him as interesting on the streets of New York City.

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide
Amy Tan became a writer because she found herself fascinated with one question: why do things happen the way they happen? In this talk from TED2008, Tan shares why it is so appealing to be the creator of her own universes — the one responsible for pulling strings and creating meaning.

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from
When people tell the story of an invention, they usually describe a “eureka” moment. But author Steven Johnson wonders if that might be a fallacy. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2010, Johnson looks at how breakthroughs are slow to build and usually happen in dialogue with other thinkers of the time.

Janet Echelman: Taking imagination seriously
Artist Janet Echelman is known for creating enormous, undulating sculptures out of fishnets. So how did she come up with this unconventional form? In this talk from TED2011, Echelman explains that she found her voice when her paints went missing on a trip to a fishing village in India, and she was forced to work in a new medium.

Kirby Ferguson: Embrace the remix
In this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Kirby Ferguson unleashes a bold idea: that maybe creative types shouldn’t be so concerned with originality. As Ferguson sees it, creativity is all about copying, transforming and remixing things that already exist. In Ferguson’s eye, everything is a remix.

Malcolm McLaren: Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture
The manager of the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren helped shape the counterculture of the late ‘70s and ‘80s. In his final speech before passing away in 2010, McLaren shares his fears about what he calls “karaoke culture,” where success is about mimicry rather than emotional honesty. Because as McLaren sees it, no one should be shielded from the messy, difficult struggle of creating something new.

Tim Brown: Tales of creativity and play
What is the difference between being a designer and just playing around? Not as much as most people think, says Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO. At Serious Play 2008, Brown shares how building a successful firm was as easy as giving employees a place to experiment without fear of being judged — just like kids do on a daily basis.

Announcing TED Live, a year-long membership that offers individuals, schools and small businesses remote access to TED, including “virtual seats” at both the TED and TED Global conferences.

“TEDsters have asked us for a convenient and affordable way to enjoy TED all year long. By watching both conferences at their home, work or office; receiving a TED Book twice a month for a year, delivered automatically to one of this season’s hottest items, the Kindle Fire; and getting private access to the TED Live community, members will enjoy exclusive access to TED all year round,” said Tom Rielly, TED’s community director. “And for some, it makes a pretty great holiday gift.”

The membership is available for individuals and primary/secondary schools at $995 a year, and for colleges, universities and small businesses at $2,500 a year. Both options include:

Live webcast of TED and TEDGlobal Conferences
Virtual seats at TED’s flagship conferences from anywhere in the world. Individual/home members can view the conferences with up to 10 people, and schools and businesses up to 50.

Year-Round TED Live Online Community
Dedicated TED Live chat rooms for TED Live community during each conference; exclusive content, inside access and live reporting from on-site TED Live liaison, bringing TED Live voices into the physical conferences; year-round access to an exclusive Facebook group and TED.com messaging features.

Kindle Fire + TED Books Subscription
Amazon’s New Kindle Fire 7″ color tablet plus a one-year subscription to TED Books (twice a month or approximately 24 books) – short eBooks by TED speakers and Fellows that elaborate on powerful ideas from their TEDTalks. Authors include Nic Marks, Gever Tulley, Juan Enriquez & Steve Gullans, Cindy Gallop, and Graham Hill. TED Books will be automatically delivered to the member’s Kindle Fire or other Kindle device or software. The Kindle Fire also supports watching TEDTalks, acclaimed videos of the conferences’ amazing luminaries, as well as other books, music, video, apps and web browsing. (1 per membership)

Unlike previous TED virtual memberships available only for one conference, TED Live may be purchased any day of the year, and members will enjoy access to the next TED and TED Global.

Learn more at TED.com/TEDLive >>

Deadline extended to submit your short video: Dec. 5! For our next conference — TED2012: Full Spectrum — we’re looking for 10 of the world’s best teachers to take the TED stage during a special session we’re calling The Classroom. We’re accepting video nominations to help track these people down. You can nominate yourself or a remarkable educator we should know about — who doesn’t have to be a teacher in the traditional sense.

How to nominate: Make a video or point us to an existing video, read the details below, and then nominate yourself or another person >>

After TED, talks from The Classroom will have a life online as part of TED-Ed, a new initiative we’re launching in 2012. With TED-Ed, we are creating a library of videos just for educators and students. The videos will be arranged using teacher-centric/learner-centric categories and tags, designed to help teachers quickly discover the perfect video for the lesson at hand. The videos will also be arranged into playlists to give students a multidisciplinary, immersive insight into a learning concept.

The talks we’re looking for will each:

+ be shorter than 10 minutes
+ contain informative material, not just inspiring messages
+ be delivered with a huge amount of passion for the topic
+ engage an audience from age 14 to adult
+ be something you might imagine a teacher using in the classroom as video to supplement a lesson.

We’re especially keen to include brilliant EXPLANATIONS, meaningful A-HA moments, powerful STORIES, indelible IMAGES.

Here are a few links to talks that fit the bill:

Vilayanur Ramachandran on mirror neurons

David Gallo shares underwater astonishments

This explanation of special relativity

Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?

Now, a couple of notes about what we’re not looking for. For this session, we do not want talks about teaching methods, education reform or education in general. We are not looking for an inspiring, “go forth,” commencement-style talk. We do love those sometimes, but they’re not a fit for this session.

You must submit a short video to enter.

The deadline for nominations is December 5, 2011, at midnight Eastern. We’ll contact the speakers we’ve chosen with invitations (or more questions) by December 12, 2011.

TED2012 takes place February 27-March 2, 2012, in Long Beach, California. The Classroom session will take place on March 2. We’ll cover coach travel, good accommodations, and a pass to TED for those 10 amazing teachers who take the stage.

We hope you’ll share your best lessons (or teachers) with us. Good luck!

Nominate yourself or another person >>

Photo of David Gallo by Ryan Lash

Apply now to join the TED2012 Fellows class, and attend TED2012: Full Spectrum in Long Beach. Artists, scientists, inventors, change-makers … Learn more about the amazing TED Fellows program >>

UPDATE: Application deadline is Monday, August 1, 2011, 11:59pm US/Eastern.

Performer Joshua Walters is based in San Francisco; he capped a several-week road trip this spring by playing the TED Full Spectrum Auditions in New York. His wiry, thought-provoking comedy bit about mental illness earned him today’s spot on TED.com. TED’s Will True spoke to Walters just after he jumped offstage that night in Manhattan.

What did you think of your first TED experience?

Wow, it was like being in a dream, like I was living my dream — I could see it happening, but it didn’t seem real. Here I am in this place with red lanterns, it’s a club, it’s glowing, and the sound is so low I can’t really hear anything. I can’t feel anything. I’m really detached from the whole experience, I’ve kind of got a headache, maybe I could drink some more water, I’m a little tired. You know, this is my third week of being on the road. It’s so much stimulus, being up there, I’m like: Is this happening? Is this going? I guess it’s happening, and then I get off and it’s over and people are ‘wow, let me get your contacts — let’s book you.’ And now, I’m just kind of aloof about the whole thing, like I don’t have any focus or charge about it.

What did you think of the preparation for it? Did you prepare differently?

You know, I almost overprepared for this. The last two weeks I’ve been writing, re-writing, scripting, practicing, listening to the audio, doing it at small venues, doing it in front of dinner parties, doing it in front of other people, and there came a point in the last 2 or 3 days where my people really close to me went ‘Yo, don’t over-rehearse, because you’re going to get up there, you’re going to have 4 or 5 main bullet points and you’re just going to let them flow.’ The best moments for me as a comedic performer are the stuff that’s in the moment, stuff that I didn’t write down. So I was just letting it flow and I wasn’t really worried about it. I had a few other theater and club shows in New York this week, and the whole time I would get up and I’d be like. I got this TED thing on Tuesday so this other thing is just practice, just warming up. This is just getting my sillies out! And then, when I was here I had built up to it, and it’s happening, but it doesn’t feel real! I’m just here; I’m just in it. It’s hard to see it.

How did you put your audition together?

I did my talk, but mainly saying the headings, the sub-points. I didn’t go into any depth, but I did it with a lot of charm, and a lot of smiling. I had my roommate record it, and we did a bunch of takes, maybe 20 or 30 takes. And the first take was just so serious; I didn’t really have it down. And by the 10th or 15th take I had the knowledge down, but I was just so over what I was saying that we had to come back a second day to just do it fun. I had to learn to have fun, which I do all the time, you know? I make people laugh like punching their stomach, that’s what I do, and I needed to get back to where it was fun and it wasn’t work, and it wasn’t so serious. And the last take we did I was smiling, I was relaxed, and I knew: This is what it is. It’s got to be enjoyable for you and it translates to the audience.

Tell me about your trip.

It’s been a wild ride man; almost all of May has been on the road. New York, Texas, and I came back to New York … and it’s been really mind-expanding. This is the first time I’ve come to New York with career on the mind, I’ve been to New York a lot of times, but I’ve never had it so focused. And there is just a lot that someone in my field can do here. It’s made me appreciate that I’m at this breaking point in my development and take a step back and celebrate the moment.

Did you enjoy the experience overall?

I did! It was a great way to end my trip here. It was surreal.

We’re thrilled to announce the results of our Full Spectrum auditions — TED’s first-ever audition for the main stage of TED2012.

Seventeen finalists gave short TEDTalks in the onstage auditions at New York’s Hiro Ballroom on May 24 (you can watch the archived video stream). An audience of 200 friends voted, using a ranking system of 1 to 5. And the results are:

Audience favorite: Reggie Watts! This boundary-breaking comedian will be speaking at TED2012. His reaction: “Wowie!!”

Three more audience favorites will have their talks posted to TED.com in coming weeks:

BeatJazz inventor and controllerist Onyx Ashanti
Bipolar comedian Joshua Walters
iPad storyteller Joe Sabia

And for a few more audience favorites … we’re exploring projects with them that we’ll announce in the coming months. Watch this space for news.

See photos of the show and portraits of the speakers on Flickr >>

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

The honor of kicking off the evening of TED Full Spectrum auditions fell to Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and deputy project scientist for operations for the James Webb Space Telescope (the planned successor to the Hubble Space Telescope). Together with fellow NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn, she put together a slide-blizzard — a rapid-fire series of images — to illustrate the extraordinary beauty and scientific power produced by space telescopes.

We caught up with her after the talks to ask about the audition experience.

How did the night feel for you?

It was really fun. I thought all the talks were interesting. Some of them I need to go think about. I think they were really profound, so I had a blast.

How did you put your audition video together?

I saw the call, and thought that would be something different. We’ve been thinking about how to reach different audiences, how to break out of what we’re doing and experiment with social media and different ways of connecting with people.

We through it together on a Friday, before the deadline, in a couple hours. Some of the artists here have amazing skills at editing things, and making these beautiful videos, and we did a Keynote presentation, that’s our technical skill.

We thought it was a long shot, but we also thought it was a compelling story. Humans made space telescopes and we wanted to talk about that.

Have you done a lot of outreach and public speaking about the James Webb Space Telescope before?

I just joined Goddard in September, but I do a lot of public speaking. I think there’s a duty for a scientist who takes public money — astronomical research is funded by tax dollars — there’s a duty to talk about what we’re doing, what we’re discovering, what we’re learning, and to talk about that in a really personal way. That’s a very serious part of what we do. It’s not an afterthought, it’s core to what we do. If we don’t explain what we’re doing, and if the public doesn’t think it’s important, then we’ll stop doing it.

So, I do a lot of public talks, but this was a little unusual. I was not used to the loud rap music before hand — it was awesome.

In your talk, you said anybody can send in a proposal to use the Hubble Space Telescope?

Last year there were proposals from 40 countries, and 43 states, so almost the whole USA and a lot of the world. There were observations last year of Hanny’s Voorwerp ‑ Voorwerp means ‘object’ in Dutch’. It is a strange object that was discovered by a high school teacher in the Netherlands though a project called Galaxy Zoo. She posted in Dutch, “I have discovered a weird object.” So, Hanny’s Voorwerp is this really weird thing that’s happening in a galaxy, and Hubble observed it last year. So, that’s an observation that was inspired by amateur astronomers. That’s not the only one. There was an eruption in the Orion Nebula that was discovered by amateurs.

So, anyone can apply, and I think that’s very noble. NASA and Europe built Hubble, but we don’t want to restrict it to scientists in those countries. We want everybody who has ideas.

What’s your favorite Hubble image?

My favorite is one we took on March 1st. It’s not public yet. We’re going to do a press release this summer. It’s of a lensed galaxy that I’ve been studying. A galaxy that’s been gravitationally lesned by the mass of a cluster of galaxies. This galaxy appears seventeen times brighter than it normally would be, and stretched across the sky seventeen times more than it would be. It is crazy bright and huge, and we’re using it to study what galaxies were like seven billion years in the past.

Two more in our continuing series of Q&As with Full Spectrum speakers:

The astonishing Onyx Ashanti took the stage with an iPhone strapped to his arm, a brick-size controller in each hand and with a tube extending from his mouth like scuba gear — and proceded to improvise beats and loops and an orchestra of instrumentation (and explain the whole thing simultaneously in a series of PowerPoint slides). Paul Spinrad writes more about Onyx’s gear on the MAKE blog >>

CR: How did you feel about your amazing presentation?
OA: I felt really good. You never know with improvisation how it’ll go because you’re making it up.

CR: Do you think it went better than you expected?
OA: It went better than I expected. Most of the time it goes well. I feel like the ideas I wanted to translate, translated well [to the audience].

CR: What do you hope the audience walked away with?
OA: I hope that they see that with the possibilities we have now being created by technology and information, how we can pull all of this information to realize things within us. We can say, “Hey, I want to make some musical rollerblades.” There’s enough information out there that you can piece together all the information you need to help you realize that.

CR: How did you discover our TED Auditions, Full Spectrum?
OA: A friend of mine in Berlin said, “Hey check this out!” I immediately thought, “Oh yes, yes, this is way too good to pass up.” TED was like my pie in the sky thing for two years down the road. So when I heard about the video auditions, I was in. I literally just got the prototype version of this [his gear for the presentation] working at that point.

Meet medical visualizer Virgil Wong — who told a moving story of making medical data personal, using sensitive portraiture overlaid with the kind of opaque-looking medical data that becomes an intimate part of your story during a major illness. He told the story of his own mother and her recovery from near-blindness …

CR: How did you feel after presenting at TED Full Spectrum?
VW: I really enjoyed it. It was great to have a chance to present it in a more conversational mode. What I love about TED is that it’s still such a great humanistic experience. It’s really about the human side to all the great design, technology, entertainment aspects of the world. I feel that’s what’s so unique and that’s what I was hoping to encapsulate.

CR: What were some of the challenges you encountered while preparing for Full Spectrum?
VW: I think just sort of making it more personal as opposed to something that was showy was really important to me. Part of what I’m constantly struggling with is how do you have a high level of engagement, but at the same time fill it with the clarity of information that doctors want. How do you have this data driven piece that is as accurate and empirical as possible, but human at the same time? It’s not just about making it pretty, but about making it human too.

CR: What’s the goal of your talk?:
VW: I really wanted to make medicine, or at least health, more fun, engaging, and not just something you don’t want to think about because it’s obligatory.

CR: I think you did.

Virgil Wong. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

The amazing Reggie Watts. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson

The speakers were brimming with energy and excitement about what was to come. Before making their portrait, Mike and I spent a couple of minutes talking with each of the speakers, and their passion for their subjects was palpable. Every single one of them was ready to give their all onstage and thrilled to have a chance to participate in the auditions.

Performer Joshua Walters. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson

Space and time were limited for our little experiment. We didn’t have the luxury of bringing in a bunch of lighting gear and backdrops to set up a temporary studio. Instead, we embraced our constraints and found a spot on the balcony of the Hiro Ballroom that provided an interesting background composed of the illuminated paper lanterns hanging over the main ballroom. For my primary light, I used a single remotely triggered Speedlight on a lightweight stand.

Surprisologist Tania Luna. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson

The lighting may have been simple and battery powered, but the speakers provided everything else needed to make a great portrait with their own high-energy output. You can see it in the photos above of Reggie Watts, Joshua Walters and Tania Luna. All three of these wonderful expressions came out within seconds of the speaker stepping in front of my camera. Full spectrum, indeed.

See the full set of speaker portraits >>

See the rest of the photographs from the Full Spectrum Auditions >>

See some of Duncan’s personal work on his Flickr stream >>

Kevin Carroll was one of 17 presenters at Tuesday evening’s Full Spectrum Auditions in New York. He brought along beatboxer Shamik Dynamic (you can just see Shamik’s head at left in the photo above, or see the gorgeous double portrait below) to help him tell the story of how his life had been saved by a ball — and of his work now, going around the world spreading a message of peace and play. Check out his book Rules of the Red Rubber Ball for more, or watch the archived livestream to see the show.

The TED Blog caught up to Kevin after his talk.

CR: How did you feel about your presentation?
KC: I’m always my biggest critic. Shamik and I got a wonderful opportunity to do a lot of rehearsing and practicing around it. To cull down your passion into 3 minutes is challenging. But I really love that challenge. I had to be direct. I had to be very succinct. I had to be very clear about the message around a ball can change the world.

CR: What do you hope the audience took from your presentation with Shamik?
KC: I felt like it was important for people to get that and understand that a ball saved my life. So, I really was selective about the things I wanted to share. I’m hoping that people took pause, changed their perspective a little bit and all the things that I tried to inject in that short pithy message.

CR: What does Shamik bring to the table with your presentation? What was the purpose of the collaboration?
KC: Selfishly, I’m a lover of The Roots. I’m from Philly. So my roots are all about Philly soul, R&B and hip-hop. I’ve always been a person that has tremendous respect for those genres. Music is apart of me and allows me to express myself and enjoy myself even more.

When I met Shamik, we met at a TEDx in Vancouver. We didn’t know each other. Now, fast-forward two years later and we’ve done an event in Philly with 10,000 people. We did my one-man show together and now TED Full Spectrum. TED is about building relationships and creating those moments, so TEDxVancouver created this for us. When I heard this wisp of a man beatboxing and all those sound coming out of him, I thought it was ultra cool. He’s my Roots.

Watch the archived video of Kevin and Shamik’s Full Spectrum talk >>

Speaker Kevin Carroll (left) and beatboxer Shamik Dynamic, at the portrait session for TED Full Spectrum Auditions, May 24, 2011, New York, NY. Credit: James Duncan Davidson