Saunders was one of ten speakers featured at the event, which took place at the Unicorn Theatre, supported by TED partners Intel and frog. The evening’s theme was “Exploring Possibilities,” and the 220 attendees heard stories of exploration in an eclectic set of fields: from Saunders’ extreme geographies to the frontiers of science, from the writing of a new national constitution to the creation of new markets.

Hosted by TED’s European director Bruno Giussani, the Salon was opened by NY-based designer E Roon Kang, a TED Fellow who pointed to the “chain reaction of complications” that we bring into our lives and work as a byproduct of our quest for efficiency. (Ever thought of whether your smartphone, besides expanding the scope of your possibilities, has also made your life more complicated and stressful?) His design projects are informed by this paradox, for example when developing the new visual identity for the MIT Media Lab. For that project, with his collaborators, Kang took into account fluidity and ambiguity by avoiding a “fixed” institutional logo in favor of an algorithm that creates, based on set criteria, a different logo for each staffer.

In times of crisis, a general concern is how markets can create new economic opportunities. The second speaker, British policy entrepreneur Wingham Rowan, suggested that in order to expand opportunities, we also need to create new markets. He argued that there is a well of untapped economic potential in online marketplaces where people at every level of the skill scale and with spare hours to “sell” could meet the micro-demand for anything from last-minute warehousing personnel to teaching. Sure, websites likes Craigslist are doing some of this matchmaking already. But they have none of the sophistication, automatization and legal framework of, say, financial electronic markets. “Why only some — rather than all — can benefit from this kind of market infrastructure, where qualified offer and demand can meet and match immediately?” he asked.

Speaking of crisis, while a lot of attention is focused on the Southern edge of Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal), up north a small country is digging its way back from a dramatic 2008 financial meltdown: Iceland. One of the answers that the country gave to that crisis was to re-write its Constitution from scratch. (Side note: Unlike most other countries, the UK, where the TEDSalon took place, does not have a document called a “Constitution”: its constitutional law is disseminated across many written and unwritten sources, from treaties to royal prerogatives.) The third speaker was one of the people who led that effort, political scientist Silja Bara Omarsdottir, from the University of Iceland. The new text is ready for a final parliamentary discussion, and it was developed in a very open way, with a citizen assembly, hundreds of proposals submitted, a committee coordinating and having meetings on live webcast, online feedback loops to which every citizen could participate, and more. “It wasn’t crowdsourced,” Omarsdottir said: the committee held control of the text. But it was transparent, open and participatory at an unprecedented scale. “People felt involved, they felt ownership.”

Azerbaijani violin virtuoso Sabina Rakcheyeva was next to take the stage, with a cross-genre performance fusing Eastern and Western influences.

Every year, Intel, one of the TEDSalon’s partners, organizes the world’s largest pre-university science competition, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Millions of high school students around the globe take part, and the event plays a major role in motivating young people towards science. The winner of the 2012 Fair, Jack Andraka, is 15, and was awarded first place for developing a new method to detect pancreatic cancer. He explained how he researched the illness on the Web after a close family friend died of it, and hit upon a potentially interesting approach after smuggling into biology classes (“a stifler of innovation”) a science article about carbon nanotubes. Andraka said he wrote 200 letters to professors before finding someone willing to give him a chance and access to a facility at Johns Hopkins University. It took him many months, “and a lot of mistakes,” but he did succeed in creating a new, better, cheaper, simpler and more effective “sensor” for pancreatic cancer.

The Salon took place the day after the US presidential election — a big news day. The news ecosystem has been shaken up in recent years by ubiquitous cellphone/Twitter/YouTube reporting. Many important recent stories have been reported this way, from war zones, catastrophe areas and more. In many cases, however, the source of information may not be immediately recognizable or verifiable. Markham Nolan, editor of Storyful, spoke about methods to validate crowdsourced news. He detailed an example related to a gruesome piece of video footage filmed in Hama, Syria, showing dead bodies being thrown into a river from a bridge — and how via the aerial images of Google Maps and a series of other online tools it was possible to identify with certainty the place and verify the credibility of one of the three sources. “But while tools and algorithms can check and channel all this information, truth is fluid and human — and will forever remain a uniquely human trait.”

Geopolitical analyst Parag Khanna was next, introducing the concept of “Hybrid Age,” the age in which we are living, which is characterized by the blurring of traditional boundaries — between disciplines, between cultures, between political structures, between biology and technology. Earlier this year Khanna co-authored a TEDBook on this topic, Hybrid Reality, and in his talk he explored the impacts of these developments on work and political systems, advancing the idea of the TQ, the “Technology Quotient,” measuring an individual’s (or an organization’s, or a State’s) adaptability and preparedness for emerging technologies and the need to integrate and leverage them. After his talk, while answering questions from Bruno Giussani, he discussed North Korea, which he recently visited, and the massive railroad projects that — with Chinese financial backing — may in a not-so-distant future link up Eurasia, the landmass that goes from Europe to Vladivostok and Singapore. It is the biggest landmass on Earth and includes most of its inhabitants.

UCL neuroscientist Molly Crockett took the stage with a cautionary talk about the nature of the recent advances in her discipline, and how in particular brain scan images and data can be used and misused. Newspapers publish daily stories based on neuroscience results. But Crockett pointed at products sold with brain images on them that actually have no science to support the marketers’ claims, and at hand-picked study results used to support theories (and news stories) that the same results could also disprove. “The promise of neuroscience has led to high expectations and unproven claims. But we haven’t yet found a ‘buy’ button in the brain. We cannot tell if someone is in love by looking at their brains. Brain scans cannot read people’s minds. We have to be careful not to let these sorts of claims take away from the actual science of neuroscience.”

A performer who is very adept at exploring the future of music followed: Tim Exile. On top of creating a special performance for the TEDSalon, Exile also brought back Sabina Rakcheyeva for a surprise duet between two virtuosos, one playing the violin, the other playing an impressive array of electronic tools, creating a mesmerizing musical moment.

Back to science — to using genetic engineering to fight one of the deadliest viruses, dengue fever. Dengue affects tens of millions of people every year, and is becoming increasingly lethal as it travels north. A British company, Oxitec, believes it has found a technology that’s more effective and much less damaging to the environment than the currently used chemicals and pesticides: They genetically modify male mosquitos so that they cannot procreate. It’s controversial, like every time the words “genetic engineering” are used. But CEO Hadyn Parry calmly described the problem, and his team’s solution: while genetically modified crops are about giving crops an advantage, Parry said, “we use the same techniques for the exact opposite end: to introduce in the insects a big disadvantage — basically, birth control for mosquitos”.

The closing speaker was TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong, a doctor working at the intersection of biology and architecture at the University of Greenwich. She offered an exploration of designing and manufacturing with living materials. And she did so using a clever rhetorical device. “How might we design a chicken?” she asked. A metaphorical chicken, of course. But that allowed Armstrong to detail the principles of design that would apply to living materials — materials “that know what they are to become.”

Giussani took the opportunity of the TEDSalon to announce the publication of the newest issue of Design Mind magazine, published by TED partner frog and completely devoted to the TEDGlobal 2012 conference, which took place last June in Edinburgh, and to its theme of “Radical Openness.” The magazine, which is available online, expands on the theme through interviews, essays and graphics, including a debate about the connected world between Clay Shirky and Don Tapscott. TEDGlobal 2013 will take place June 10-14, 2013, in Edinburgh.

(Photos by Robert Leslie. TEDster Nesta Morgan was in the audience and sketched some of the attendees).

More than 8 million children live in orphanages worldwide. But as Georgette Mulheir shares in today’s brave talk, given at TEDSalon London Spring 2012, an estimated 90% of them are not true orphans. These children are sent to orphanages because a single parent is not adequately able to care for them, because of rampant poverty at home, or because they have a disability or special needs.

This is something that Mulheir’s organization, Lumos (interesting fact: it was founded by JK Rowling), hopes to change, because children who grow up in orphanages do not integrate seamlessly into larger society. As Mulheir shares, children raised in orphanages are 10 times more likely to be involved in prostitution, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record and — shockingly — 500 times more likely to commit suicide.

Mulheir has visited hundreds of orphanages in 18 countries, and notes a similar feedback loop at work in each — children have limited contact with caregivers and don’t get the stimulation they need for optimum development. They develop self-soothing behaviors — like self-harming — that get them labeled as disabled and keep them in institutions long term. This is not necessarily because orphanage personnel are bad people — it’s because they simply have too many kids to care for.

In her talk, Mulheir wonders if there is another way and calls for a radical resource redistribution. She points out that giving support — both financial and otherwise — to desperate parents and foster families would cost governments far less than maintaining large care institutions. With the saved funds, better services could be created for children who need them.

“Children are amazingly resilient,” says Mulheir. “We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays and go on to lead normal happy lives.

How bad can orphanages be? Listen to the vivid description in Mulheir’s talk. And after the jump, Mulheir shares a blog post she wrote as she visited an orphanage in November 2009.  She’s happy to report that the last of the children moved out of the institution by summer of 2012.

Mulheir writes: 

The first thing that greets you is the smell: it is a specific stench that, unless you’ve experienced it, is hard to define. It is a combination of stale urine, boiled cabbage and fear.  It remains with you long after you leave the building. And, no matter how much they wash, it is a smell that remains on many children for weeks after they leave an institution and move into a family home.

This residential special school is a three-hour drive from the capital. It is remote, isolated and inaccessible. It is typical of everything that is wrong with the institutional system of caring for children.

The main building is familiar to me even before we arrive – an immense, grey, concrete block, like so many others in the former Soviet bloc. I know the layout immediately, because they were all designed in the same way. I imagine that a factory in some former Soviet republic produced all the institutions for children, in the same way that all trams were produced in what was Czechoslovakia and all the parachutes in what is now Transnistria. An identikit building, designed to homogenise an entire population, and to raise a generation of children loyal to the Party and the State.

Such thoughts are reaffirmed as I enter the lobby of the building: 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, we are greeted by a bust of Lenin. I have been visiting this country for 10 years and I have never seen such open homage to the old regime, whatever people may think privately.

The Director is also there to meet us, eager to show us around her empire. We walk to her office through corridors that are dark and dank. The floors are wet and, as we walk around the institution, 20 metres ahead of us there is always the same elderly woman mopping the floor furiously. Those children we pass do not raise their eyes to look at us. Even when we try to engage them in conversation, their gazes are fixed, firmly, to the floor.

We are taken to the Director’s office for the obligatory discussion about the institution’s history and its incredible success as a school.

“We have 120 children here,” she tells us. “They all have special educational needs and we do our very best to provide a good education for them. But more than that, many of these children come from terrible families. Here we provide them with the care they need – we are their parental home.”

I think about the stench, the damp, the deadened eyes of the children and wonder what sort of home this is.

“We opened in 1956,” she continues, proudly, “and since then more than 5,000 children have come through this institution. We have many successes to be proud of: some of our ‘graduates’ have established their own families and now their children are living here with us.”

There is no irony in her statement. She appears to believe this is a genuine measure of success.

“Our children have many problems, illnesses and terribly difficult behaviours,” she explains. “So many of them have enuresis, but the doctor gives them pills to treat it.”

Enuresis – or bedwetting – is a common problem for children in institutions. Here, it is exacerbated by the toilet situation. I am sure the Director had hoped we would not visit the toilets when she showed us around the building, but we do. The floors are sparkling and, bizarrely, covered in brand new rugs. The stench, however, cannot be hidden. And when I enter each of the five cubicles I find that each is covered in old excrement: none of them is functioning.

It is clear that there are no toilets here that work. For the 120 children who live here, going to the toilet means visiting the latrine outside. In winter, the temperature falls to minus 25°C. No wonder that so many of the children wet the bed.

The next stop on our guided tour is the kitchen. Here, two cooks are preparing a chicken dinner for the children. This, I’m later reliably informed, is a rare occasion. The children don’t often receive meat. As we’re there, a piece of meat falls on the floor. One of the cooks picks it up, hesitates, looks at me, and even though she sees that I’m watching, she throws it back into the pot.

The dining room is next door — dark, dank, huge and Dickensian. Row upon row of bare tables and wooden benches.

We move on to the classrooms. Here we meet some of the children and see them at their lessons. The six and seven year olds are so small. My colleague bends down to speak to one the girls.

“What are you working on?” she asks.

“I want my mum,” she responds, her eyes filling with tears.

Several of the other children also look on the verge of tears. I sit next to one little boy and try to engage with him. He turns away, refusing to make contact. He is terrified.

We enter another classroom, filled with 10- and 11-year-olds. They cope better with our visit. They answer our questions, jump up and say a few words in English, and offer to help me improve my Maths. They are all bright kids. I have yet to see one child who I think would need special education. Again, though, there is a girl looking sad. She sits in the corner, on her own. My colleague asks the Director what is wrong with her.

“Oh, she was at home with her mum for a month,” the Director responds loudly, “but she came back to us yesterday and she isn’t used to it yet.”

The girl begins to cry.

After visiting several more classrooms we are taken to a room you would find hard to imagine. It’s clearly a type of bathroom, dank and dirty, with rusting pipework and chipped and broken tiles on the wall. In the middle of the room is an odd contraption: half shower, half primitive bidet.

“What’s this room for?” I ask.

“This is the female hygiene room,” a member of staff responds. “The girls come here to clean themselves when it is their time of the month.”

A flustered member of staff tries to demonstrate the contraption, but the water is turned off and the boiler is broken. So we move on.

Next are the bedrooms. They are not too large, with eight to ten beds per room. There are brand new blankets on the beds. Their colours are so vivid that the contrast to the rest of the building is almost an assault on the eyes. There is, however, nothing personal in the rooms. There are no personal spaces. There are no personal possessions.

There are just a couple of broken-down cupboards and a shelf. One toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste and one bar of soap sit on the shelf. All of them are still in their packaging, unopened.

There are three corridors of bedrooms, with 40 children on each corridor. For some bizarre reason, there are boys’ and girls’ bedrooms on each floor.

“How many members of staff are on duty at night?” I ask.

The answer is three. They are untrained and unqualified. The Director refers to them as babysitters.

How can one member of staff ensure the protection and safety of 40 children? How easy is it for one child to distract the staff member, while others sneak into bedrooms so they can bully those more vulnerable?

I have seen it before in institutions where I have made unannounced visits. The staff members are drunk or asleep. The children do what they want. The law of the jungle prevails.

Finally, we’re taken to the piece de resistance: the hall where the children ‘play’. A feast has been prepared for us. So much food. So much variety. I am sure the children never see anything like this. I feel sick. We try to refuse, but in the end we must take a small bite to eat. We do, however, successfully refuse the Director’s invitation to a drink of vodka. It is only 10.30am, but she is clearly disappointed.

“What do you think of the reform process and the future of these institutions?” we ask her.

“The reform is a very good thing,” she responds. “We support the reform, but you can’t just leave these children with such terrible families. And if they closed our school, where would our children receive such a good education? We agree with the reform, but only when the community is ready to look after children.”

I know there is no point explaining to the Director that the educational outcomes of her institution are appalling and that studies show repeatedly that children raised in institutions in this part of the world do not do well as adults. I hold my tongue, because I know that I will never convince this Director of the truth.

Thankfully, the local county council agrees with us that this institution has to go. They asked us to visit because they want to close it and they want to know if we can help them do this.

As she leads us to the door, we pass a huge sign on one of the walls. It summarises the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: Children’s right to family, to a good education and healthcare. Their right to speak up and be heard.

We thank the Director for her hospitality and say goodbye to Lenin and his young charges.

This place must close. These children deserve better. After our visit, the County Councillor agrees a date for us to meet very soon in order to finalise the plans for closing this institution, so that she can convince all of her colleagues.

By the summer, we hope to able to start finding families for these children. So they have a place they can truly call home.

To hear more about what’s it’s like to grow up a “ward of the state,” listen to Lemn Sissay’s powerful TEDTalk, “A child of the state.”

“Journeys can be of many sorts,” TED European director, and the evening’s host, Bruno Giussani said, opening the Salon. And indeed the program was eclectic, featuring nine speakers, two performers, a fireside chat and the unveiling of the new issue of design mind magazine — published by partner frog and fully devoted to TEDGlobal 2011. The audience was also very diverse: 250 attendees gathered at the Unicorn Theatre from all over the UK and from several European countries.

The latest work of the opening speaker, Taryn Simon, is on show (until the end of the year) at the Tate Modern in London and at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Titled “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters,” it is a remarkably insightful investigation into the nature of genealogy and the way our lives are shaped by the interplay of many different forces. Simon spoke at TEDGlobal (see her TEDTalk) three years ago, and has been described by the Observer as “the most important photographer of her generation.” Through powerful and surprising storytelling, she took the audience on a narrated tour of her new work, from India (where we met Chandraban, the man who gives the title to the work, who walked one day into an Indian land registry office to find that he had been declared dead, at the instigation of members of his family who wanted to appropriate his land) to Kenyan healers, modern China, a Ukranian orphanage, occupied Poland, and more.

Mark Rock was next. The founder of Audioboo and creator of a technology that makes it seriously easy to “capture the spoken word,” he believes that the explosion of technology and of online innovation in the last few years has left oral history behind. From the treble of a child’s sadness, to water washing on the shore, an earthquake, or a mother’s voice forever silenced by death, the audience was reminded of the fundamental power of voice, and shown ways to make oral storytelling more permanent.

British soul singer Alice Russell took then the stage, accompanied by guitarist Alex Cowan, for an encore of her TEDGlobal 2011 performance, singing her unique take on “Crazy.”

“There is that other singer, or rather that intriguing pop phenomenon,” said Giussani introducing the next speaker, “a young woman who has gone in four years from absolute anonymity to first-name global recognition.” He was referring to Lady Gaga of course — the topic of Jörg Reckhenrich‘s talk. A German management thinker and artist, Reckhenrich tracked and analized Gaga’s rise and the rules of “Gaganomics.” (Some hints: You gotta have talent, work hard, create a narrative and an emotional impact, and need the ability to orchestrate human relationships.)

Giussani then unveiled the latest issue of design mind magazine, published by frog. The magazine, printed in big format, is rich in articles about TEDGlobal 2011 (of which frog is a partner) and in further explorations of its theme, “The Stuff of Life.” Its cover image is a photo of one of the hundreds of actions around the world prompted by the InsideOut project by JR, the winner of this year’s TED Prize. One of those actions took place in Bastrop, Texas, which was devastated by wildfires — and whose population gathered nonetheless around this artistic project, led by the magazine’s editor Sam Martin, showing strength, resilience and hope. The story is told in this video.

The closing speaker of the first session, Catherine Mayer, Time magazine’s London Bureau Chief, offered in an insightful and witty way her “anatomy of a (new) species” composed of the growing number of people who seem to be living agelessly, as if “the ages of man” had disappeared under the conjunction of higher life expectancy and better socio-economic circumstances. Mayer calls this group — of which she acknowledges she’s part — “amortals.“

The second sessions was opened by neuroscientist Neil Burgess, who tackled the very basic question: “Where did I park my car?” by discussing in details how the brain navigates space and develops virtual “maps” of the locations we have been to. Sensory information from the environment, especially distance and direction to boundaries, captured by place cells and grid cells play a key role in letting us know where we are — or in allowing us to remember where our car is parked, and to find it.

Erik Johansson, a young übertalented Swedish photographer and retoucher, discussed some of his work, which involves the creation of photos that show impossible scenes, but manage to maintain a sense of realism. This “impossible realism” plays on the moment’s hesitation, when seeing his photos, before realizing that while they feel familiar, they have unexpected twists and do not make sense. Photos like this one:

The TEDSalon audience was presented with a copy of The Wiki Man, the just-off-the-presses book by ad guru and TED star Rory Sutherland (see his TEDTalks here and here). Giussani sat down with Sutherland for a conversation about the book — a brilliant pastiche of insight, irreverence and debunking. The often-amusing discussion ranged from behavioral economics (Rory looks forward to the time when Daniel Kahneman’s bus tour will be “overturned by screaming, admiring Japanese school girls”) to the nefarious impact of spreadsheets and from technological innovation to the appropriate age for reading Brave New World.

A glimpse  into the future was then provided by Lisa Harouni, the CEO of Digital Forming, which brought along a series of complex 3D-printed objects to make a convincing argument that 3D printing will disrupt the landscape of manufacturing, and will do so soon. As “additive manufacturing” (the technical name) becomes more available and ubiquitous, Harouni said, we will be offered the possibility to download product data from the web, customize it and print locally, instead of shipping the product itself.

Next, Somali archeologist Sada Mire took the audience to the land that she had to flee as a child and where she now heads the Department of Antiquities (when she’s not lecturing in London). Discussing some of her discoveries — cave paintings, ancient writings — she made an impassioned plea for us to start considering cultural heritage as a human right, and culture as an essential building block for reconciliation and healing in countries torn by droughts, wars and ethnic conflicts.

Preston Reed then erupted on stage, and rocked the house with his mindblowing, unique way of playing the acoustic guitar, mixing chord-based grooves and wild polyrhythms with percussive uses of the instrument.

The closing speaker was author and Member of the British Parliament Kwasi Kwarteng, who revisited the hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles of the British empire, the theme of his recent book Ghosts of Empire. Analyzing how we became the societies that we are today, Kwarteng posited whether the empire was really “nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who had very different ideas about government and administration.”

(Reported by Caitlin Kraft-Buchman. Photos by Robert Leslie. More photos of the event: TED’s Flickr stream. Also, TEDster Nesta Morgan was in the audience and has been drawing the speakers: her sketches are also on Flickr.)