In this new playlist, Robinson selects 10 talks about education that he finds both inspiring and insightful. His list, given in no particular order, contains talks from Alison Gopnik on what babies think, TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra on his vision for a School in the Cloud, and Shane Koyczan on the ways bullying sticks with us. Check out the full list of talks here »

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built to illuminate ideas in context. A new playlist is added every week. We hope you enjoy this installment.

So how did Hansen happen upon such fascinating methods? By embracing a major limitation — a hand tremor that made it impossible for him to do the pointillist drawings he loved.

The theme of transcending constraints and roadblocks was a major theme at TED2013. While Hansen said in his talk, “Embracing the limitation can actually drive creativity … We need to first be limited in order to become limitless,” filmmaker Martin Villeneuve echoed the sentiment in his talk about making a sci-fi movie for $2 million. He said, “If you treat the problems as possibilities, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing ways.” And TED’s own Lisa Bu shared how she found her true calling when her dream of being an opera singer died. In a powerful moment of her talk, she said, “‘Coming true’ is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you.”

Fascinated by this message, I asked Hansen a few questions at TED2013.

The power of limitations has been a real theme so far this conference. Why do you think this hasn’t traditionally been a part of the conversation about creativity?

I think due to the economy, we’ve been running into a spike of constraints while at the same time being more culturally fascinated with creativity than ever. One of the speakers, Danny Hillis, said “It’s hard to get people to focus on plan B when plan A is working so well.” Now we are in a place where lots of “plans As” are no longer working. Being forced to reevaluate is allowing us to see this connection between limitations and creativity that has always been right in front of us. Within this process, we are bringing curiosity back — curiosity about new possibilities that we hadn’t explored when plan A was working so well. And we are discovering better alternatives, as I’ve witnessed here from a lot of speakers so far at TED.

I’m curious — have you had any ideas for works since being at TED?

There’s really not an off button — I’m always running ideas in my head. A lot of ideas have surfaced in conversations with other attendees about possible collaborations that I’m really excited about.

I’ve been contemplating a text art project where I ask people to share their stories about limitations with me. I’ve had so many people come up to me and share their stories that I feel inspired to take this project on a bigger scale. I want everyone who looks at this piece to be able to find a story that they can relate to in looking at their own limitations.

So let’s say you’re a writer/artist/musician and you’re feeling a bit blocked. What are some things you can do to get the juice flowing again?

Creativity is simply connecting information, so we have to be in a relaxed mental state that is open to seeing these connections, but aware enough to capture them. Getting to this mental state is different for everyone, so I always suggest people experiment and find what works for them. Whenever I feel creatively stumped, my first instinct is to do something to get myself relaxed. I usually go on a long walk, like two hours long, because it takes at least 45 minutes for me to get out of my head and into the ether.

In order to be in the creative flow, it’s really important to be process driven and hold the results loosely. Sometimes it’s better to keep pushing through it. If you’re a writer, keep writing — even if it’s gibberish — and eventually it will flow again. Sometimes it’s better to destroy and start over. Or, if what you’re working on is too broad, impose a limitation to spark your creativity.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Martin Villeneuve’s Mars et Avril is a luscious sci-fi film, set in Montreal 50 years in future, where the subway line takes you straight to Mars. It’s a dreamy love story in which the acting is top-notch, the shots are stunning and the visual effects unreal. And Villeneuve made it all for $2.3 million. To put that in perspective, Star Wars Episode III was shot for an estimated $133 million.

“I made a film that was impossible to make, only I didn’t know it was impossible,” says Villeneuve in Session 6 of TED2013. “This is the kind of movie I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, reading comic books.”

So how did he make the movie? Well, it took seven years.

“When you don’t have money, you must take time,” Villeneuve says. “The more problems we had, the better the film got.”

Villeneuve, like Phil Hansen, says that constraints boost creativity. The first constraint he faced: He wanted Canadian superstar Robert Lepage to be in the movie, but Lepage only had a few days available for filming.

“How do you get someone who is too busy to star in a movie?” asks Villeneuve on the TED stage.

The answer: he turned Lepage’s character into a hologram (At 0:13 in this clip, see how Martin solved the problem). He gave another actor a mask of greenscreen material, and had him stand in for Lepage in scenes. The greenscreen was then replaced with Lepage’s face and voice, meaning he could play the part.

Constraint #2: “How do you pay for something that you can’t afford?”

Villeneuve needed seven not-yet-made musical instruments, inspired by women’s bodies, for the movie. Only he had no budget for them. So he got someone else to pay for it — he sold the hypothetical instruments to Cirque du Soleil and got to use them in the movie for free. And he presented an artist friend with a dream project, in creating these wildly imaginative props.

Constraint #3: How do you get top-notch visual effects?

Villeneuve’s answer — you ask the best people in the field if they’ll do it. Even though his budget was tiny, Villeneuve approached his effects heroes, offering them the opportunity to dream rather than money.

“If people tell you it’s impossible, it’s an even better reason to want to do it,” says Villeneuve. “People have a tendency to seek the problem rather than the final result. If you treat the problems as possibilities, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing ways.”

See the trailer for Mars et Avril below.

The speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a full recap of their talk:

In his film “Mars et Avril,” Martin Villeneuve brings his sci-fi romance graphic novel to glorious life.

Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society.

Dong Woo Jang turns an unusual stick of bamboo into an archer’s bow — an exploration of his cultural heritage and a metaphor for his perfect world.

Jinsop Lee is an industrial designer who believes that great design appeals to all five senses.

Barb Stuckey makes food for a living — and wants to help you taste things better.

Yu “Jordy” Fu‘s dream is to make this world a better place through art, design and architecture.

Jacky Myint designed the boundary-breaking news feature “Snow Fall” for NYTimes.com.

At Novalia, Kate Stone and her team use ordinary printing presses to manufacture interactive electronics, which combine touch-sensitive ink technology and printed circuits into unique and cost-effective products.

A paper on carbon nanotubes, a biology lecture on antibodies and a flash of insight led 15-year-old Jack Andraka to design a cheaper, more sensitive pancreatic cancer test.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In art school, Phil Hansen developed a shake in his hand. He couldn’t so much as draw a straight line anymore. After years of excelling in pointillism, his tight grip of the pen had caused permanent nerve damage.

“To me this was doomsday. This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist,” says Hansen in his talk in Session 2 of TED2013.  ”I left art school and, then, I left art completely.”

Hansen was lost. But a neurologist helped him find his way again with three words: “embrace the shake.”

At this unusual prompting, Hansen decided to let his hands do what they wanted to do — make scribbles. He realized that he could create beautiful portraits using this approach. He started experimenting, using his feet to paint or a blowtorch to create faces in wood.

“Embracing the limitation can actually drive creativity,” says Hansen, who describes a moment of unproductivity that came, ironically, when he had all the supplies he needed. “We need to first be limited in order to become limitless.”

Some of Hansen’s surprising works:

• a portrait on stacked Starbucks cups
• a painting done with karate chops
• asking people to tell him stories about life-changing moments, which he then wrote on a revolving canvas
• live worms assembled into an image
• a tattooed banana, created with pushpins
• a painting done with hamburger grease

Hansen also found himself fascinated with the idea of destroying a piece after creating it. Calling it Goodbye Art, he made a scultpture of Jimi Hendrix out of matchsticks — and then burned it. He did works in frozen wine and sidewalk chalk. He also set up images in candles, blown out before they fully existed, and only captured on time-lapse video.

“Destruction brought me back to a neutral place where felt refreshed,” Hansen says. “As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go — let go of failures, let go of imperfections. I found myself in a constant state of creation, thinking only of what’s next and coming up with more ideas than ever.”

Hansen thinks this might be a good process for others, too.

“Now when run into barrier or find myself creativly stumped, I sometimes still struggle … but I try to remind myself of the possibilities,” he says. “Perhaps instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves each day to seize the limitations.”

Amanda Palmer — performer, writer, former Dresden Dolls frontwoman — speaks at TED2013 on Wednesday morning. And to prep, she rendered her talk on paper in Sharpie. She writes on Tumblr, “It is about eight feet long. I am taking this as a good omen.”

Back in Boston, the “Queen of Kickstarter” also held a prep party with friends — which was covered by The Boston Globe. Look for her talk in Session 4 on Wednesday.

Young-ha Kim

Young-ha Kim: Be an artist, right now!

In today’s talk, given at TEDxSeoul and TED’s first ever in Korean, Kim says, “You think, ‘I’m too busy. I don’t have time for art.’ There are hundreds of reasons why we can’t be artists right now. Don’t they just pop into your head? … Perhaps you think art is for the gifted or for the professional trained. Or perhaps you think you’ve strayed too far from art.”

When we were kids, says Kim, we were constantly creating art — drawing on the wall, making up dances, singing nonsense lyrics, putting on plays for our family, making up stories, building sandcastles. But as we get older, this impulse dulls. Not only because we hear judgment from others, but because we start taking formal lessons and it becomes less about having fun and more about doing something well.

“Art is about going a little nuts … Kids do art for fun. It’s playing,” he says. “If you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you’ll increasingly feel pressure. People will question your actions.”

So what happens? According to Kim, we suppress our artistic spirit. We learn to be critics, rather than taking the risk of making. Kim calls us “dictators with a remote control,“ yelling at the people on reality-TV dance and singing competitions for a flat note.

To hear more about this tragedy — and what we can do to overcome it — watch this hilarious talk. An especially amazing image in it: Kim writing fast and furious, so that the artistic devil cannot catch him and fill his head with doubts.

Young-ha Kim is one of the most popular writers of his generation in Korea. The author of five novels, four short story collections and numerous essays, Kim’s work mixes high and low genres and focuses on the meaning of Korean identity in increasingly globalized world.

How popular is Kim in Korea? Not only has he won many a literary award, but two of his books have been turned into feature films with a third on the way. In fact, at the Jeonju International Film Festival taking place in spring 2013, there will be an entire program of short films based on Young-ha Kim’s short stories. Fans have even created “Kim Young-ha Bingo,” where you read 50 pages of any of his works and mark off the themes he touches on in those pages — from art references to paranoia.

Here, some excerpts from Kim’s works, to get you better acquainted with this writer. Even though he is more interested in making sure you start typing than read what he’s created.

From his debut book, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

I’m looking at Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 oil painting, “The Death of Marat,” printed in an art book. The Jacobin revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat lies murdered in his bath. His head is wrapped in a towel, like a turban, and his hand, draped alongside the tub, holds a pen. Marat has expired — bloodied — nestled between the colors of white and green. The work exudes calm and quiet. You can almost hear a requiem. The fatal knife lies abandoned at the bottom of the canvas.

I’ve already tried to make a copy of this painting several times. The most difficult part is Marat’s expression; he always comes out looking too sedate. In David’s Marat, you can see neither the dejection nor the relief of the man who has escaped life’s suffering. His Marat is peaceful but pained, filled with hatred but also with understanding. Through a dead man’s expression David manages to realize all of our conflicting innermost emotions. Read more »

Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga’s Korea (excerpted from Words without Borders)

Marilyn Monroe came to South Korea in February of 1954. While honeymooning in Tokyo with Joe DiMaggio, she had boarded a military plane and was en route to Seoul even before the marriage was fully consummated. At the airport, she was swarmed by hundreds of GIs who had been awaiting her arrival. When she came down the gangway, Monroe was dressed in a flight suit. Reporters noted that “half of the buttons on the top were undone, offering tantalizing glimpses of her chest, which got the troops even more riled up.” According to Korean news reports from the time, the GIs were disappointed to see her immediately board a helicopter bound for the frontlines and asked her when she would return, to which she “turned on the charm like a mother comforting a child” and replied, “I’ll be right back.”

By February of 1954, the Korean War, which had lasted for three years, had already been brought to an end under the pretext of a ceasefire, but tens of thousands of American soldiers were still stationed in South Korea. Monroe gave dozens of performances, visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals, and posed on top of tanks. In archival photos, the soldiers’ excitement as they greet her is palpable. In colorless, dirt-covered barracks, Monroe alone stands out in color, as if someone had come along later and Photoshopped her into the pictures. Before thousands of soldiers seated on a low hill devoid of even a single tree, she spreads her arms wide and sings in time with a piano. The images look like they could have come from a 1960s rock festival. Read the rest of the essay »

From his latest book, Black Flower

With his head thrust into the swamp filled with swaying weeds, many things swarmed before Ijeong’s eyes. All were pieces of the scenery of Jemulpo that he thought he had long ago forgotten. Nothing had disappeared: the flute-playing eunuch, the fugitive priest, the spirit-possessed shaman with the turned-in teeth, the girl who smelled of roe deer blood, the poor members of the royal family, the starving discharged soldiers, even the revolutionary’s barber — they all waited for Ijeong with smiling faces in front of the Japanese-style building on the hill in Jemulpo.

How could all of these things be so vivid with closed eyes? Ijeong was mystified. He opened his eyes and everything disappeared. A booted foot pushed on the nape of his neck, shoving his head deep into the bottom of the swamp. Foul water and plankton rushed into his lungs. Read more »

Ice Cream (excerpted from the Asia Literary Review)

“Can you smell the petrol?” Mina asked him. Eugene tilted his end.

“I’m not sure, but something’s off.”

“C’mon, we’ve been eating these bars for ages.”

“This one doesn’t taste right. I’m telling you, it stinks of petrol.” She was already washing her mouth out. Eugene put the remainder of the ice-cream bar in his mouth. “Are you nuts?!” she cried. He ignored her, swirling it around with his tongue, trying to detect the smell. He then spat out the mouthful.

“You’re right. It does smell like petrol.”

It all began when the International Monetary Fund seized control of South Korea like an occupying army. The football team were hopeless, the economy desperate and the entire nation felt as if it were on its last legs. Read the rest of the story »

The Man Who Sold His Shadow (excerpted from Words without Borders)

Here’s a question we all ask ourselves at least once when we’re young: Where does that starlight come from? It’s been there before I was born, and before my grandmother, and her grandmother were born. So just how far is that star from Earth? The curiosity of children is insatiable. They’ll grab a flashlight and aim it at the stars and think, “This light will get there someday, won’t it? When I’m dead, and my grandchildren are gone, and their grandchildren as well.” Whimsical thoughts, of course. Not a chance that light so faint will still be sparkling thousands of light-years from now. That’s our universe: a place where light much stronger than this vanishes without a trace.

And another childish question: Does a bird in mid-flight have a shadow? How can such a small, light thing be burdened by something as clumsy as a shadow? But birds certainly do have a shadow. Sometimes, just sometimes, when I watch a flock fly by I have a feeling that something dark and black is flitting past. It’s subtle enough that you’ll miss it if you’re not fully concentrating on it. When the moon covers the sun, we have a solar eclipse. What do you call it when birds do that? Read the rest of the story »

Honor Killing (a story on a napkin in Esquire)

She was twenty-one, with fair, beautiful skin. Even when bare, her face glowed, always radiant and dewy. This was precisely why the dermatologist’s office hired her as the receptionist. Her job was simple. All she had to do was write down the patients’ names, tell them in a friendly voice, “please take a seat until we call your name,” find their charts, and hand them over to the nurses. Her glowing, translucent skin created high expectations, encouraging the patients to pour their trust in the office, which bustled with a sudden increase in patients. Read the second paragraph of this very short story »

Charles Limb: Your brain on improv

With such creativity represented on the stage, it made us think: “What goes on in the mind of a musician?” Here, a talk from music lover and surgeon Charles Limb, where he reveals what he found from putting jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI as they improvised »

It was one of the original six talks posted on TED.com and it has, over the years, become our most-watched video with 13.5 million views. Sir Ken Robinson’s talk from TED2006, “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity,” is truly a juggernaut.

But the real genius is Matt. He has so much creative intelligence, that we’re going to do some serious banking. Right, Matt?

This is the talk examined in today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post, exploring the idea of Creative IQ. Below, some of the TED Weekends essays that riff on this paradigm-shifting talk.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I’ve spoken twice at TED. The first time was in 2006. TED was a very different event then. It was a private conference for about 1,200 people. After the event, the talks were packaged in a box set of DVDs and sent just to the attendees. I gave a talk called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” A few months later, Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, called to say they were planning to put a few talks on their website as an experiment and asked if they could include mine. The timing was perfect. Social media was beginning to take shape and the insatiable appetite for YouTube and short videos was about to emerge. The experiment was an instant success and has turned TED into a global cultural phenomenon. There are now several hundred talks on the website and the number of downloads has passed one billion.

I’m surprised and delighted to say that my first talk remains the most viewed of all TEDTalks so far. It’s been downloaded well over 20 million times from all platforms in over 150 countries and continues to be downloaded about 10,000 times a day from the TED site alone. Admittedly that doesn’t compare with “Gangnam Style” with its 800 million downloads but it’s still a lot for a 20 minute talk on education …

In the past six years, I’ve had countless emails and tweets from young people who’ve shown it to their parents and teachers; from teachers, who’ve shown it to their students and their principals; from parents who’ve shared it with their kids, and from leaders who’ve shown it to their whole organizations. Why is this talk so popular and what’s the significance of its popularity?

Read the full essay >>

John Seed: Art Making in the Age of Mouse-Clicking

There is so much to like about Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk that I hardly know where to start. That said, here is a single sentence from his talk that deserves affirmation and discussion:

“We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically,” Sir Ken points out while discussing different types of intelligence.

I give a particularly high value to kinesthetic thinking. As I have come to understand after teaching studio art for over 25 years, the connections between our minds, our senses and our physical bodies need to be constantly tested, developed and refreshed to help us reach our intellectual and creative potential.

As a painter and a painting teacher I am constantly impressed with the power of the kinesthetic learning that goes with art making. I also worry that this type of learning is being undermined by our increasing embrace of technology and electronic devices.

Read the full essay >>

Brian Rosenberg: Society Is Killing Schools’ Ability to Encourage Creativity

Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on “Schools Killing Creativity” is enormously entertaining and so rousing that one feels sheepish about questioning any of its parts. Of course, he begins with the dual advantage of being very funny and very British, a combination that audiences in America, at least, tend to find irresistible.

He also operates on a level of generality that brooks almost no opposition. Who, after all, is against creativity? (Well, perhaps certain members of the United States Congress, but we will leave that for another column.) Who does not wish to see our children flourish? Who can resist a good joke at the expense of college professors, who make such delicious targets? His line about faculty members treating their bodies as vehicles to carry their heads from meeting to meeting is one that I can assure you I will steal.

Read the full essay >>

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.