Oliver Hess uses art to challenge the way we think about public space and the built environment. Read this interview to see how giant squid tentacles, rooms brimming with origami and fish taco farms can help do just that.

You have several projects in the works. Can you give us an overview of what you’re doing now?

Our main art practice is called Didier Hess, which combines the last names of myself and my wife, Jenna Didier. We decided to create this umbrella organization for all the different projects we’re doing. We’re just calling things Didier Hess now.

Similarly, Jenna and I are co-directors of our non-profit Materials and Applications (M&A) — she actually founded it. Right now the Squid Capsule is on display in the M&A courtyard. It’s designed by Emily White and Lisa Little of Layer. It involves 50 inflatable tentacles that hang from a cable system and create these sort of different pockets. It’s meant to summon ideas about how space is mediated. It makes physical the sort of subtleties you wouldn’t otherwise recognize. They have mist systems and different kinds of atmospheric phenomena separated by these tentacles. They all look like they’re hanging in what’s meant to look like a physical breeze — a solidified breeze. And inside of that there are different textures and different kinds of experiences of the air itself.

ABOVE: "Squid Capsule" installation at Materials and Applications

It was Jenna’s idea to allow the front of the studio to become kind of a pocket park. It’s a semi-public area where we experiment with different ideas for building in public.  So they are experiments for public art, or for architecture or design. We work with people to help to bring their ideas into physical reality. And in many cases it involves us running a larger social organization around that to develop those things.

What’s cooking at Didier Hess?

Jenna and I do public art projects now.  I think it’s a genre that has been transforming a lot recently. It used to be the mosaics and giant sculptures and plazas and now it’s becoming more a matter of transforming public space. I’ve been heartened by how many people are interested in this same vision that we have where it’s transforming the actual experience of space, as opposed to just just decorating space.

In one project we’re working on we’re going to show a prototype made in paper at a gallery downtown. We’ll have laser-cut paper which is for a larger system that’s going to be brass, and it’ll be mounted on the outside of a fire station in South L.A. It has humidity and temperature sensors and an LED array inside of these origami brass vine networks. It’s a tension mechanism that’s attached to the brick façade of the building.

In the display, I think we’re going to show how we developed the origami.  I have these 19^th century kind of entomological sample trays — they’re like glass and wood cases and I’m going to put the origami inside of those and some of the brass flower prototypes and also a bunch of paper flowers-ivy network hanging from the roof.

That’s something Jenna and I really like to do. A lot of the work we do in our own studio we show in art galleries, and we like to show process instead of showing final products as much.

We’re also big fans of the EATLACMA project, which is curated by Fallen Fruit. We’re doing a thing called “Food Pyramid” which is a living system, a living machine that circulates water through nine IBC totes, which have been cut apart and filled with gravel and plants and made into a pyramid with a metal frame. It circulates water from the bottom, where there’s a pond with tilapia in it. The tilapia waste is pumped to the top and it circulates through all the totes and they’re all filled with plants that either are native plants that are good for filtering the water, or else they’re edible plants that will be part of a big fish taco party in November. So the tilapia and all the vegetables are growing, and it’s basically a fish taco farm.

ABOVE: "Food Pyramid" installation at L.A. County Museum of Art

What is Materials and Applications all about?

Materials and Applications is a non-profit outdoor exhibition space in front of the Didier Hess studio.  It’s pretty much a volunteer-run organization. We do it mostly to grow the community around these ideas. The projects are cool and they get a lot of attention, but for us, we do it mostly so that we meet people, people meet people. A lot of valuable relationships have come out of Materials and Applications. So we keep it running primarily for that experience.

We’ve built probably five projects this year with M&A. Basically everyday we’ve been working on stuff. On the weekdays we build stuff for our studio and on the weekends we build stuff for M&A. I think I’ve had 6 days off this year.  We build non-stop.

We wanted to start looking at building it in different communities — particularly in communities that could benefit from something that was beautiful, or something that was engaging, something that kind of changed people’s perspective about what the future of their communities could mean, and how easy it was to build things that are exciting, and maybe renew their opinions about a place. So it’s expanding beyond the courtyard.

You’ve said that the goals of M&A are to push new, underused ideas or materials for art, landscape, and architecture. Have those goals shifted to involve more of a community aspect?

The goal at the end is to build things. It’s really about breaking away from the computer, breaking away from the monotonous building process that is sort of traditional, where you have a lot more time spent on design and a lot less time spent on the actual physical experience of it.

When you actually build things and you actually have a set of parameters put upon you but very few limitations, it allows you to experiment with a much broader idea of what’s possible.

We keep everything up for six months, so there are pretty strict limitations on what’s possible. We want these things to be prototypes for people to go out and build them again. And ultimately, what we’d like also is for those prototypes — the building process of them — to work in a viral way where it inspires other people to build that way or to experiment with different ideas.  Different ideas of how to build, different ideas of the tools, the materials, the technologies, to expose those to as many people as possible and to inspire them to think differently about how to build.

And it’s mostly to increase the social value of what we build. In Southern California there are endless amounts of cinderblock buildings with stucco on them, and they sort of have no identity. They’ll have maybe a fluorescent sign in front that has some kind of message about what they sell, but there’s no attempt to do anything other than the minimal mercantilist investment in the space. And so you wind up with neighborhoods where there’s really no place for people. It’s just these shops and then parking lots. So it’s a matter of addressing how simple modifications to space could reward people with places where they could actually spend time together, places where they can grow some identity and some interest and some caring for the place.

Did you always know this was the kind of work you wanted to do?

Well, my dad was an electrical engineer. And my mom was kind of a punk. So I started out oscillating back and forth between doing pretty hard-core computer stuff and I guess anti-mainstream stuff, for lack of a better term. My whole youth was benefited by the fact that the computer was just coming into its popularity and accessibility.

The things that interested me when I was young were real-time graphics, and human-computer interface — the sort of stuff that would become virtual reality and then kind of burn out in the same genre and then probably get reawakended now by video games. Back then it was much more primitive, but it was really fun to try to make graphics back in the 80s and early 90s. All this stuff was getting developed that required a lot of computing power and that produced these very sophisticated results that allowed me to have a lot of freedom as I grew up. It really allowed me to escape from the normal trajectory of school.

I started working in visual effects when I was about 14, and I worked professionally for about 10 years doing stuff in movies and machine art for other people. And it was fun.

And then the Internet hit. The Internet totally took care of me. And then at a certain point, in the late 90s, it became clear that even that was a little too short of a road. So I stopped being interested in the Internet mostly because of pets.com type of stuff. It was a troubling thing. It was the late 90s — I’m sure most people have put it out of their minds.

So then I basically just started over doing all the things I’d done before, but better. I recognized that really what I wanted to do was something totally different, that I didn’t know existed. And then I found Jenna and she had basically come up with the perfect kind of situation already. So I started working with her, and that was Materials and Applications.

You’ve mentioned you’re really into video games. Which is your favorite?

Rez. It’s basically a music sequencer. It’s kind of a hallucinogenic graphic arts explosion and everything you do plays sounds. And then all the sounds are composed to go together.  So you kind of make techno music by flying around. It’s an unbelievable game. It’s beautiful, it’s simple to play, but it’s incredibly rewarding at the same time. It’s got it’s own cult following.

It’s got such an enchanting beauty to it. It’s a great thing to put in the background of like a party or something. It’s an amazing game. In Japan they released it with a vibrator so you can have sex with it and that thing is like really, really popular.

You obviously love your work, but what are the frustrating parts of what you do?

Building codes in general are beyond belief how complex they are. More time and energy goes into meeting the needs of the bureaucracy than goes into satisfying the needs of society itself.

That’s something we see everywhere. That’s the kind of disease that we’re fighting against. It’s this sort of malaise of everything being concrete and everything having to be smooth and everything having to have very specific guidelines about how high the fence has to be, how dense the openings in the fence have to be … it just creates a situation where everything looks the same. There’s no real personality.

Technology can make places more relevant to a community, because it allows you to build things that have much more sophisticated structures and interactivity. It can help you implement different sensor systems and different lighting systems and create these beautiful organic experiences.

We’ve got one we’re doing right now in downtown L.A. It’s got a bunch of seismometers that’s measuring vibration both in the earth — particularly induced by the different directions or flow of traffic. It’s on bridges so it has a naturally amplified or attenuated experience to begin with. So turning those into lighting systems is a project we’re really excited about.

ABOVE: "Wilmington Wave" concept image

You have an incredible array of really unusual projects!

You know, the interesting thing is, there’s a complete explosion in almost every field I’m interested in. All the things that we do in our studio, there are cultures coming out of the ground. These people, I suppose, were the same as us and were really just waiting for the tools to become accessible and the support of society to exist for these types of work to flourish.

You know the machine art scene is really taking off — inexpensive microcontrollers are becoming easier to program, there are a lot more vendors of obscure sensors and actuators — the playing field has changed dramatically because the D.I.Y. movement has made this stuff so popular. I imagine there are whole communities of people who are in the suburbs messing around with these things in their basement, as well as people in the city who are doing it right on the street corner.

These days it’s so easy to explore technology that now the challenge is figuring how to apply that technology so that it has the maximum impact both from a scientific standpoint — that’s beneficial — but then also from a cultural standpoint: how it inspires people, how it excites people, how it adds to their lives.

Siddharth Kara fights bonded labor, forced labor, and human trafficking with what he says are the most effective weapons against them: rigorous scientific research and analysis. Read his interview below to learn why dispassionate study may be the antidote to this inherently emotional issue, and why Siddharth is optimistic about the direction of the anti-slavery movement. Click here to follow his updates on CNN.com as he travels South Asia investigating labor exploitation.

Tell us about your research.

I’ve been researching modern slavery of all kinds for about ten years. I’ve now covered six continents and 18 countries, and I’m writing a series of three books on the subject. I’m putting forth what I think is the first real, strategic, comprehensive, global analysis of the phenomenon. This means not just anecdotes and a superficial or sensationalistic look at slavery, but really trying to dig in to understanding how this is all working in the global economic context, in the global legal context, and what are the various business models of labor exploitation? Are there weak or vulnerable points in those models that may be susceptible to the right kind of tactical policy or legal intervention?

There are three categories of slavery I’ve broadly identified: bonded labor, forced labor, and human trafficking. I’m covering these three subjects somewhat in the three books. The first book [Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery] actually focused on a subset of human trafficking, which is forced prostitution. That came out last year. My next book will focus very much on the bonded labor category. And the third book will kind of cover the rest.

What approach do you take when writing your books?

All three books tend to be based on analysis and reliable data and research. You see, slavery and labor exploitation are inherently sensational to begin with. When you hear stories of men, women, and children being coerced against their will to perform some labor or service, certainly the most extreme cases of that kind of exploitation are already sensational. They’re already shocking to us. And unfortunately, in the ten years that I’ve been doing this research, there’s really been a limited amount of progress in both knowledge and efficacy to fight the phenomenon.

This is primarily a result of the focus on the sensational. People, whether knowingly or unknowingly, leverage that quality of the issue for their own good — be it fundraising for their NGO, selling books and stories, making movies. Whatever taps a human nerve can also be very marketable.

You see a lot of data and information being thrown around — numbers and statistics. But if you ask those people, “Where did that come from?” they can almost never explain it to you. And efforts to galvanize a grassroots global movement of every day citizens to combat the issue have tended to fragment and falter because after that initial wave of agitation and worry learning about slavery creates, without a comprehensive and specific plan driven by good analysis, people lose their interest.

So what I’m trying to do is very much shift the paradigm to focus specifically on starting with the analysis and then saying “What does this tell us? What recommendations can we make that are based on analysis?” It’s fortuitous for me that my background is in economics and law because I think these are the two most important disciplines when it comes to understanding labor and labor exploitation.

Slavery has always been an economic crime. Of course it’s an abhorrent human rights violation. But it’s fundamentally an economic crime: it seeks to maximize profit by minimizing or eliminating the cost of labor. That’s been the formula for millennia. It hasn’t changed from 2,000 – 3,000 years ago or more to today. Now, the modes and means and sophistication and complexity and profitability of that formula have certainly changed. But the formula has remained the same.

You mentioned trying to find and target vulnerabilities in the business models of slavery. Can you talk about what those might be?

Well, it depends very much on which form of slavery you’re talking about, because the business model of various forms of labor exploitation are very different. So, let’s look at the example of sex trafficking. The key thesis that emerged from my analysis is that the enormity and pervasiveness of the global sex trafficking industry and its rapid growth across the last 20 years is driven by its ability to generate immense profit at almost no real risk.

The business opportunity that is presented to the criminal is the following: you can generate tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per slave, per year, through the exploitation of a trafficked sex slave. The average price it will cost you to purchase or acquire and transport that slave is around $2,000. That’s the immense profit side of that key thesis I articulate.

Then there’s the no real risk side of the thesis. What are the penalties? Slavery is not legal anywhere in the world. But, depending on where you are in the world, the penalty ranges from little to none. There are many countries in which there’s no economic penalty stipulated in the law, or only a very small one. There are countries where there’s a very large economic penalty, but these crimes are almost never prosecuted and convicted. So the real penalty is still basically zip.  There are always provisions for incarceration, but if — and these are big “if’s” — if you get prosecuted, and if you get convicted, jail times are relatively short.

Well, criminals, like the rest of us, are what an economist would call “rational economic agents.” And this is a very compelling economic opportunity. So as long as that reality prevails, individuals — rational economic agents — who lack any moral sensibility will flock to the opportunity of exploiting an individual as a slave in forced prostitution, in this case.

So, now we know how the business works. What’s the actual business model? Well, people are acquired from a certain area through various means — deceit, fraud, coercion and whatnot. They are moved a distance near or far, and then coerced and forced — through violence, threat of violence, torture, starvation, humiliation, and rape — to engage in commercial sexual activity. That’s where the money center is.

Are there vulnerable points in this business model that I very briefly described? Can we intervene at the point of acquisition, movement, or exploitation?

Well, it’s too inexpensive to move people, it’s too easy, they’re almost always using legitimate documents now, so it’s very difficult to identify them, and if you try to cut off one route, well, they’re very practiced at redirecting somewhere else. Borders between countries tend to be porous and unguardable. Movement, I argue, is not the vulnerable section.

What about acquisition? Well, there are 2.5 billion people in poverty, there are 30 million people who are displaced due to war or environmental disaster, there are hundreds of millions of people living in economies that are corroding or societies that are unsafe, corrupt, lawless, etc. Can we solve all those problems and intervene at acquisition? All those problems should be solved, but I don’t think we’re going to solve those in the near future. But this is where NGOs tend to focus. This is what makes obvious sense to anyone. All right, let’s solve poverty. Let’s deal with gender bias. Let’s deal with refugee status and all that, because that’s the low-hanging fruit intellectually.

It’s much harder to analyze the business model of what I’ll get to next, which is the exploitation side. I argue yes, we need to deal with the acquisition, the supply-side forces, but this isn’t going to happen in the near term. Let’s be realists. We’re not going to solve poverty and bias against women tomorrow. Or even 10 years from now. Or even 50 years from now. What does that leave us with? It leaves us with the point of exploitation. Where the actual business is happening. And fortunately, there are vulnerabilities here.

You’ve got brothels, hotels, parlors, street corners, apartments, clubs — these are the typical venues where individuals are exploited in commercial sex. Consumers come to these places in broad daylight — if I can track them down, anyone can — and make the purchases multiple times a day — globally, millions of times a day.

There are vulnerabilities here that can be exploited, in that it’s occurring in relative daylight. It happens millions of times a day. The locations in which it happens are relatively fixed, and you can’t go too far underground because consumers aren’t going to follow you there. And other reasons why this is the vulnerable point, where if you intervene intelligently and carefully, you can not only liberate the slave, which means you also cut off all future cash flows, but you can gather the requisite evidence and information required to successfully prosecute and convict, which elevates the real risk.

So there you are attacking profits and elevating risk, which is inverting that compelling formula we talked about. So this is the argument I make, based on understanding how it works, of what should be done, to more effectively respond.

Now, other forms of slavery will be different: debt bondage in the brick kiln industry, forced labor in child soldiers, etc. Different business models, different economics, and different vulnerable points. Looking at each of them will yield the right response.

You’ve proposed a think tank on labor exploitation. Why is creating a think tank for this issue important?

Because each type of slavery requires a different answer, and because it’s a complex phenomenon that resides at the center of a whole host of issues relating to human rights, to global economics, to law, etc., I’ve argued and suggested that the best way to continue advancing knowledge and effective research and ultimately response to the phenomenon is to create a multidisciplinary think tank of individuals — economists, lawyers, sociologists, law enforcement, human rights, NGOs, etc. — who can bring their respective areas of expertise to this phenomenon to analyze it, and then to create a fully comprehensive suite of research and recommendations on how to respond effectively to each type of slavery in each region around the world.

My suggestion was taken quite seriously by folks at Harvard and the Kennedy School of Government, and we’re setting the think tank up presently. The idea is to set up a multidisciplinary, world-class, Harvard-caliber research program on this issue.

How has TED Fellowship impacted you and your cause?

The TED Conference has helped in that for a couple of conferences in a row, they’ve had someone who’s talked about this issue or known about this issue. If I could offer a subtle critique of the TED Conference, I’d say that they’ve probably focused a bit on the sensational, but that’s important in terms of raising awareness, and that’s what TED talks can do.

But at TED you also have a very invested and captive audience of very intelligent people. Really successful, intelligent people, who I think would certainly appreciate and benefit from more strategic or rigorous analysis and suggestions of what to do.

I had conversations offline with a lot of people at TEDIndia who said, “Boy, we really wish we would have heard from you, because that’s real analysis. That’s a real argument. I know what to do now.” Long before me, though, Ruchira Gupta up in Delhi, who won the Clinton Global Citizen award last year for her work with slave trafficking in India, should be a TED speaker. She’s a remarkable, remarkable woman — brilliant and passionate and intelligent and analytical.

Some of my other Fellows, people who had done very innovative things, created new products, responded to a problem in a new and innovative way. That’s exactly what TED is brilliant at. But they haven’t quite got it right with the human rights side, at least with slavery so far.

How did you get involved with this issue?

I worked at a refugee camp in Yugoslavia as an undergrad. The conditions in the camp were miserable.  I lost 18 pounds and heard countless tales of heartbreaking atrocities, some of which involved Serb soldiers who raided Bosnian villages, executed the men, rounded up the women and female children, and trafficked them to brothels across the region. It took me a few years to process these experiences. I was an investment banker in New York at Merrill Lynch, and then I set that work aside because I had this idea that, “Gosh, this is terrible, all these things are happening but I see very little real, good analysis” — and this was back in 2000, so you can only imagine back then there was really not much going on — “Maybe there’s a way for me to apply my background in a form that would be more useful to someone besides me and myself and my paycheck at Merrill Lynch.”

So I started the campaign of self-funded research around the world. Very tentatively at first just trying to understand what’s going on, and the more I learned, the more people I met at NGOs of which there are obviously many extraordinary ones and people doing tremendous work, and they proved invaluable to me: their knowledge and access to the areas where I just couldn’t have gone otherwise.  The more I learned, the more I realized, “You know, I might be on to something here.”

As I did more and more research and started to speak about what my kind of approach was, it caught the interest of people and politicians and lawmakers and whatnot. I was asked to testify in front of Congress in 2005, so five years after I started. Then I got the offer from Columbia Press for the three books, was asked to sit on a few boards, and really started picking things up in terms of my research and writing. Still of course doing other work on the side because this isn’t my career, but it’s something I’m passionate about.

Besides speaking with police, lawyers, and judges, and confronting traffickers and slave owners, you’ve also interviewed more than 500 slaves. How do you go about doing this?

I’ve never pretended to be interested in buying a slave. In terms of researching sex trafficking I’ve gone into venues and certainly pretended to the proprietor to be interested in a certain type of purchase, but then once speaking to someone, I said, “Look, this is who I am, I’m a researcher, I’d be interested to speak to you, but if you don’t feel comfortable that’s fine, I’ll turn around and walk out.” And nine times out of 10 that’s how it happens. One time out of 10 I have a short conversation, and sometimes a slightly longer one. Most of the long interviews are of course in shelters. And again that’s where NGOs are so invaluable to the kind of work that I and other researchers like Kevin Bales do. You can’t get the kind of information that is needed without those NGOs. But what I’ve really then focused on is understanding the business model and the economics. Because I think that’s where the answer is.

Siddharth Kara interviewing bonded laborers in northern India

But with other types of slavery it’s very different. When you’re researching child labor at carpet looms you’re going into clandestine looms and trying to get information as quickly as you can before the slave owner gets back. You know, people get killed. People have been killed. People I know have been killed doing that kind of work. Or severely injured.

This is such a difficult issue to be immersed in all the time. How do you deal with coming face to face with these horrors?

In the beginning when I started my research, Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves was a real mentor to me, and he’s certainly encountered a lot of slavery in his time as well. And he’s the first one who pointed out after some of my research trips, he said, “You know, you may be suffering from PTSD. I certainly did after some of my research.”

I find that working helps. Like, sitting down and running my numbers. Or writing. Editing, running some numbers in a spreadsheet. Kind of diving into that minutia helps, believe it or not. Using that other side of your brain that doesn’t store all these dark memories and encounters. Other things, simple stuff like going to the movies, I really enjoy SCUBA, so I do that now and then, all the time I can get with my wife. That’s always rejuvenating.

Are there reasons to be optimistic about this issue?

I hope I didn’t sound too critical a note on the current state of the movement and the people involved in it. I do get a little frustrated at times at what appears to be, to me, the focus on sensationalism and careerism and kind of self-perpetuation. But in general there are certainly several exceedingly dedicated, wonderful people who have taught me a lot.

In terms of my own impressions of where this movement is going, it can be sometimes intimidating and a little overwhelming to face these powerful forces of human cruelty, and it’s easy to understand how people who work on this every day get very passionate and angry. And they need that to fuel the work they do and to fight back against these powerful forces.

But I am optimistic that a growing population of informed and dedicated and intelligent activists and thinkers at higher and higher scholarly levels can catalyze a social movement that will make a major dent in this issue. I do sincerely see that starting to happen and have reason for an intense amount of optimism as a result.

Learn more about the TED Fellows program in the FAQs, and meet some of the extraordinary TEDGlobal Fellows and Senior Fellows.

What are the most important projects you’re involved with?

I am creating two companies. My first company is Impact Investment Exchange, which is a trading platform. It’s a stock exchange for social enterprises, a platform to allow companies in Asia with a social mission — for-profit or not-for-profit — to expand their impact through raising capital on the platform.

This will be very much a liquid and transparent market, which will bring social enterprises that need capital into contact with the impact investors. These are investors who are actually interested in double or triple bottom lines: more than just financial return, but social return and also environmental return. So that’s sort of the biggest thing in my life right now. It has gotten a lot of momentum on the national and international level.

As I started putting the pieces together for IIX — that’s what they call Impact Investment Exchange — I found out that as there are many entities in Asia that are ready to go to market, there are also many more which are not. I felt there was a need to literally hand-hold them to get them market-ready. So this is where the birth of the second company came. This is actually a not-for-profit, and it’s called Impact Investment Shujog. Shujog is a Bengali word for “opportunity,” and we actually call it just “Shujog.”

ABOVE: Shujog helps prepare social enterprises for the market

Shujog is really focused on fostering growth, maturity, innovation and market-readiness for the social enterprises. So these enterprises that are not ready tomorrow will be ready a few years down the road, to raise capital. In effect what we’re doing is putting the structures in place for better growth and governance, etc. So these are the two companies that are my two new babies and I would say they’re growing up a little too fast.

These are two very big projects. What’s given you the confidence to take them on?

This is the second time around that I’m an entrepreneur. I had my first company, OneNest, 10 years ago. It was a social-purpose business, a for-profit social enterprise, very focused on getting ethical and handmade goods to the market. We worked with all these cooperatives, market finance groups, and artisans from around the world. That’s on one side. But on the other side, I actually did it in a very traditional way in the sense that I wrote a business plan, did the angel round of investment, raised funds there, had some traction and went down and did my equity round — pounded the pavement.

But this time it’s very different. Perhaps because I’m 10 years older, have a few more gray hairs, maybe I know how to do this better. But I think it is because I’m creating something with such a defined goal of poverty alleviation and something so broad — it is really something where I’m creating a platform which is changing and questioning the whole notion of capital markets. I’m creating a stock exchange for social justice. So here you actually will, as an investor, be able to keep on reinvesting your money and getting something out of it, but at the same time, guess what? You’re changing the world. So that’s something that resonates with a lot of people.

Also on the social enterprise side we’re saying, “Hey, this is not a giveaway. You actually are treated at equal parity with any other company. So this is a fantastic way for you to be evaluated for the work that you’re doing on the social side, but also on the financial side. Because you’re a responsible company, and have financial prudence.”

And it was really remarkable how something just struck a chord with people. I always say it was a situation where I had a guardian angel, because even before I wrote a single line of the business plan, I basically had funding lined up. The Rockefeller Foundation read the stuff I was writing on my blog, and they invited me to a four day event, where we talked about capital markets and how to bring the whole social angle into it. At the end of the four days, the director overseeing the discussions came over and said to me, “If you want to do something, we’ll support you.” And it was almost like that’s all I needed to hear.

So whatever it is, the governments got very involved, and by the time I wrote the business plan, I had the Rockefeller Foundation, Asian Development Bank, Singapore government and Bangladesh government all behind me. So maybe the stars are aligned or something.

“Social impact” is very difficult to quantify. How will it actually be measured on the IIX?

We are using various kinds of social impact measurements which are out there already. For example the Impact Reporting Investment Standards, or IRIS. It’s similar to the way you gather numbers for accounting, but this is on the social side. We’re using IRIS, making it a little more Asia-friendly, and from there using a couple of impact measurements to see where the company is. And that’s also showing us where the gaps are with these companies. So, for example, should they be working more with women, are they actually having better repayment rate if they are microfinance, are they not doing enough with the environment? You know, whatever it is.

At the Exchange we are putting the criteria in place, so if they don’t meet certain criteria they will not be able to list. What we are keeping away from is turning all the impact measurement on the social side into a number. The way we look at it is, the investors themselves will base their trading decisions on the impact results. If some entity is not having enough good impact, or maybe they listed and after awhile their impact starts going down, just as in a financial setting, they would basically penalize the company by selling their shares. In this case they can do the same, because again, these investors are concerned not only with the financial return but also the social and environmental.

It is quantifiable, but not the full way. It’s more an activity related to the results. These entities can get a three-star, four-star rating, maybe a single number, but we’ll keep it at that and not turn it into a dollar figure.

What inspired you to do the work you do?

As I have entered my 40s I feel like a lot of things in my life started making sense and coming together. Being from Bangladesh, I’m very influenced by the philosophy of fate and karma or whatever you call it. In my old age, I’m starting to embrace that as I’m seeing my life come together.

I come from a middle-class family and was fortunate my parents really focused on the importance of education. But what I took away most from my childhood was that although we didn’t have a lot, it was never an issue. The issue was always how we can give back to the society. It wasn’t these exact words, but it was very much a part of our life.

I grew up in a Muslim household and on Fridays, our holy day, all of us kids in the house had assigned gate duty. This was when the beggars would come to the gate, and we gave them rice. It was a spectacular way, now that I think about it, that my mom really instilled in us the concept of giving back.

But of course they’d also added, whatever you do, you  have to be the best at it. That’s the typical Asian parent for you [laughs]. You know, get the Nobel Prize, marry the right guy, make perfect curries.

So anyway, I felt that whatever I do, I had to somehow incorporate the world.

I went to Smith for college, then after some time at Morgan Stanley, I went back to Bangladesh with the thought, “Now I’ve worked for a couple years on Wall Street, so let me see how I can use this.” I interviewed at a few places and ended up at this place called Grameen Bank. It was very different from Morgan Stanley, as you can imagine. No one really knew much about Grameen then; it was fairly small back in 1991.

ABOVE: Durreen with women borrowers at the microfiance institution Bullock-Cart Workers Development Association

After that, I felt that one sector I wanted to go and make my mark in was media, the second major force in my life.  I felt that it was another great way to do public service from the private sector, so I worked at Hearst.

There were so few minorities working at Hearst when I was there, that I took it on as my challenge to bring minorities on the covers, to actually have stories on global issues, stories on alternate ways of living, looking at life from other ways, things like that. It was actually a fantastic time.

What my time at Hearst really taught me was this incredible skill set, which was the art of selling.

I think it all came together when I started OneNest. I was like 30 years old, I had everything going for me and I just woke up one morning and said, “You know what? Time for me to start my own company.” I really felt that calling. And after I sold OneNest and did publishing again I really felt a calling to do what I’m doing now.

So this is my journey. As I was saying, as I look back, I think a lot of things were sort of meant to happen.

You’ve said art is one of your passions. How is art part of your life?

In Bangladesh we are sort of known in the Indian subcontinent as the most artistic people. For example, Tagore, who received a Nobel Prize for literature, was Bengali, and Ravi Shankar, the great sitarist, is, too. I think it’s inculcated in us, from a very early age — not only in my family, but it seems like in every Bengali family.

For me, I had my singing and dancing lesson and so on. I remember when I went off to college my mom said, “Make sure you have some art in your life. That’s the food for your soul.” And I was just like “Yeah, OK, whatever.” But I realized when I went off to college how much I missed that. So I would take time just to go and walk around the museum.

I did Indian classical dance and my mom was really intense about it. At the age of 14 I had my formal coming out and did these performances. I entered the national competition and I actually got the gold medal. I remember when I came down from the stage, I walked to my mom, gave her the medal, and I said, “This is for you. This is the medal you wanted. Don’t ever ask me to dance again.” There was a bit of contention there about my dance.

So when I was in New York and I took up some other forms of dance, this time I did it because I wanted to do it. And I also took up sitar playing in New York. And now after moving back to Asia I do quite a bit of Chinese brush painting. I just feel like it helps me get in touch with a side that sometimes doesn’t get much attention. It’s an outlet and I really, really enjoy that.

I also feel it’s very personal. It defines me, it just makes me into a whole person. It’s a part of my life.

What has your TED Fellowship meant to you?

Frankly, when I went in, I didn’t know what to expect. I was one of the older ones there so I was like, OK, how’s this going to work? How am I going to bond with these people? But each one of us is really good at one thing — not in the traditional sense “the best” but in a creative sense “the best.” It’s like taking whatever they’re doing, the traditional way, but putting this incredibly interesting twist on it. It was interesting to see, talking with each person, the fact that each one had that commonality. To some extent, I think every single person was very artistic in their own way.

I think that’s where the creativity comes in — they really brought that uniqueness into what they were doing. Some of them were outright artists, painters, sculptors or whatever. But I think in some ways I found the people who were not the artists more interesting. Because what they’re doing is creating some sort of fusion without even realizing it. I think if I were going to describe a TED Fellow, “fusion” is the word I’d use. They’re great masters of fusion. Really blending in different disciplines in a very artistic way.

There was information at the conference that probably will not be really important for me in day-to-day life, but it was really this incredible hunger that it took care of — I felt like it was food for the soul.

Seth Raphael believes in blending technology and magic. That’s right, magic. As a magician and tech-guru, he combines his passions to help people realize the impossible. In this interview, learn about Seth’s unique approach to fostering wonder, his results-oriented workshops, and his love of libraries.

Your work is rather unusual, even for TED. Can you explain what you do?

I do a number of different things — for companies, generally. I’m a high-tech magician, which means I do magic with technology. There’s both the literal and the figurative way to take that. I perform magic tricks with technology, and then I also help people do impossible things — things they didn’t think were possible — using technology that is new, or using existing technology in new ways. And also just helping them think about magic as a metaphor of how you amuse your audiences. How do you provide them with things that they wish they could do, but didn’t know they could do. And using that to help create new technologies.

There’s that which is the workshop aspect of my work, and then there is also a performance aspect. A company will have me provide a presentation for an hour or however long just to perform and inspire people to think differently about whatever technology they are using. So those are the two aspects of what I do.

I’ll be speaking at the Grid conference, put on by Bonnier, in Stockholm, in a couple months. I’m working on some new interactive effects to do there. The iPad has created some new opportunities for high-tech magic; I have some new iPhone magic which I’ve been working on. And I am working on a top-secret method for predicting the stock market, and hopefully I will have an opportunity to demonstrate my ability to predict the stock market by predicting the actual end of the recession.

You have studied the subject of “wonder” quite seriously. What do we need to know about wonder?

If you go to magicseth.com and click on the bunny in the lower left-hand corner of the page, that leads you to slides that talk about the chain of wonder, where wonder comes from.

ABOVE: The Chain of Wonder.

Magic as well as other things start with expectation violation — when something happens that you weren’t expecting. But expectation violation doesn’t always lead to wonder. If a bear jumps out and surprises you, you are not going to experience wonder, right? So there’s this kind of range of reactions you can have to something unexpected. If something appears out of thin air and you’re interested or excited — if it’s a gold coin or something like that — you can have a more wonder-filled reaction.

Read more of this interview with Seth Raphael after the jump >>

(Continued)

Once you have an initial gut response, you move on to the next stage. And how relevant that thing is to you impacts what your next action is. So if a particle physicist sees me add some salt to a glass of water and the pH changes in a totally unexpected way, to you that may have no impact, but to somebody who studies chemistry, maybe they become obsessed, because it’s more relevant to them. So that’s the extreme reaction. And the other extreme is complete apathy: you don’t care what the salinity of this liquid is. That in turn impacts the amount of effort you’re willing to put in to resolve this expectation violation. So if you then make it your life’s effort to understand what was going on when I added the salt, you could end up with some sort of huge paradigm shift in the way science thinks about things.

So as a magician I have a particular path to this chain of wonder that I’m trying to elicit. I want to create wonder first of all. If I create apathy I probably failed as a magician. But I don’t want people to become obsessed — I don’t want them to focus on the “how.” I want them to put little-to-no effort and just sort of end up in this space where they’ve opened up their mind to new possibilities.

What do you teach in your workshops?

We started a company to help companies think about technology in different ways. So it’s me and several other colleagues from the MIT Media Lab, and we have designed a curriculum — it’s called the xPollinate ["cross-pollinate"] curriculum. It’s an interdisciplinary method of getting ideas from different people in different parts of the organization, cross-pollinating with different ideas that we have as technology innovators.

So it’s usually a three-day workshop where we come in and work with a team of people from an organization — it could be a non-profit, a school, or a corporation — we take them and we go through different stages. One stage is us giving them our seeds of knowledge. We teach them the technological tools that we have: programming languages that we’ve developed, media labs, hardware tools, prototyping, designing new technologies. Then we also give them some other tools: laughter meditation, yoga, musical improvisation, and I teach people how to perform magic.

ABOVE: Workshop participants in a laughter meditation session.

These are things that we have found that help us maintain whatever we call it: our sense of wonder, our sense of levity, our ability to think outside the box — and each of these exercises is designed to get people thinking differently about what it means to produce, what it means to consume, what it means to work in a particular work environment. So as we’re doing this they’re getting technical skills, but they’re also getting non-technical skills that will hopefully help them be more creative and achieve the things they want to do.

Some of the best responses that we get are from people months after the workshop, writing us thanking us for helping them get things done, not just at work but at home. They found that they can complete projects because they realized that anything is possible, that they don’t have to wait for anything. We empower them.

So the first two days of the workshop are us giving them the tools. And the third day is about them executing the ideas. They create real projects that they are driven to complete, and we conclude by having a showcase for the rest of the company to see their projects. So the rest of the company gets to come and see what they created and say “Wait, you created this in 3 days?” And everybody else inevitably says, “Can you teach us how?” and we have to say, “Look, these people who were in our workshop are the new seeds, they’re the new germinators, the cross-pollinators, they’re the experts in thinking differently and being creative.” So we try and transfer that and empower them to become the next facilitators for running workshops or just answering questions.

What’s the “craziest” thing you think is possible?

Well, you’d be hard-pressed to have me say something is impossible. I would say it is possible for us to clean up that icky oil spill, but it is going to take some serious magic from a lot of people. And I hope that we have it in us to do it.

What do you do to relax?

When I’m putting magic aside completely, I really enjoy finding things to do in the community. Things like dancing. My wife and I went to a free contra dance lesson in the park recently (contra is a cross between old English dancing, where everyone is sort of going around in circles, and country line dancing).

I’m a big fan of libraries — getting books from the library, getting movies from the library, just hanging out at the library. We don’t have Internet at home, so when we want Internet, we go to the library.

How has the TED Fellowship impacted you?

In a bunch of different ways. There’s the physical act of the TED Fellowship which was going to TEDGlobal and getting to meet those wonderful people, and networking and just having a wonderful mind-opening experience.

Everybody sees TED online and you get a good feeling for what the talks are like, but you have no clue what the actual experience at TED is like. And I think it is a tremendous opportunity.

Even just for doing performances and organizing performances that involve a three-day workshop, the amount of information that TED imparts over three days is a nice model to keep in mind when doing workshops for companies. So that’s the part of having been to TED.

The other part is the awe it inspires when people find out that you’re a TED Fellow. They don’t quite know what it means, generally, because it is not the most publicized of TED’s endeavors. But when they find out you have been to TED and that TED values you, it’s kind of like the MIT-bomb. Where if you’re talking to someone and it comes out that you went to MIT, they’re like, “you must be a brain surgeon, or you must be just incredible” — they sort of freeze up a little bit. It’s sort of the same when they find out you’re a TED fellow. When I want to contact someone I haven’t ever met, it’s not just coming out and saying “Hi, I’m a TED fellow” but putting it in there, it adds a bit of credibility and a little bit of context to the work I do.

What is your proudest achievement?

Continuing to do the things I love to do, and not letting other people tell me to be practical.

Do you have a role model?

There was a magician in my town named John Swomley who I looked up to tremendously. But my dad is definitely my biggest role model. I find myself more and more like him every day. It’s sort of inevitable that I will end up something like him. And I’m quite pleased about that. He was my life role model, he lived well.

Anything else?

It’s really fascinating being in my position, which is getting to witness technological advancement, and be a part of it, and also trying to think about where it’s going to go next. I design magic for the iPhone and I have a lot of really amazing tricks that I can do with an iPhone and I perform them regularly. Magic is at a place where usually once you’ve performed stuff for awhile, you sell your effects and teach other people how to do them.

In my case it’s a little different. In one part because the things I’m doing are not kosher in the terms of Apple, who owns the iPhone and the iPhone platform. So for me to distribute my magic tricks and secrets I would have to get their permission, and they have rejected me for being a little too creative with their software.

That’s one aspect of it. That actually has put me in a position to be a consultant for people. I’m actually the official iPhone magician for a company called Bump Technologies. And they design software for your cell phones that is very much like magic, it allows you to just bump your phone into someone else’s and share contact information or photos or. So I’m in a position to help them think about what the next generation of interactions are like, how to make their technology and software work more like magic.

ABOVE: Seth Raphael, the Bump Magician, courtesy of Bump Technologies

And I don’t really know quite what’s next. I hopefully will continue to perform and to do workshops with people, and help technology become more magical, and help people find the magic around them.

Above, TED Senior Fellow Jon Gosier talks about SwiftRiver, a new piece of software that helps makes sense of data during a crisis. Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson

The Sunday before TEDGlobal, the TED Fellows held an extraordinary workshop with five Senior Fellows — young thinkers and doers who’ve been asked to continue with the TED Fellows program for three additional years beyond their original fellowship. It’s an amazing group — passionate, connected, interesting. TED Fellows director Tom Rielly invited the TED Blog to attend an experimental new mini-conference, where five Senior Fellows talked about their work across a range of disciplines and cultures. It’s an amazing look at what’s coming next.

Paradoxically, V.K. Madhavan opened the session by defending a traditional approach. Madhavan works with chirag.org, a rural development project in the Himalayas of India. His group takes on projects all around Kumaun region of Uttarakhand, from running preschools to recharging dry springs. And this kind of multi-disciplinary approach, he says, has somewhat fallen out of fashion in this decade, compared to specialized, results-oriented projects that focus on one topic (education, farming, roads) and have one measureable result or end product. Another Senior Fellow, Frederick Balagade, asked him, “What is the end product of your work?” Madhavan replied: “There is no end product; we’re working with people. Our work sometimes doesn’t show until the second or third generation of families.” It’s a large-scope approach that has a complicated relationship with the local government that, in a healthier society, would do chirag.org‘s work. As he says: “We mirror the state. We exist because the state has failed.”

Julianna Rotich of Ushahidi.com is spreading the new meme of African technology: self-sustaining. “In Africa, we are about customizing things and making things our own,” she said. The explosion of mobile communication means that “Mobile phones have become the medium of information in Africa.” And she made a brilliant point: “When it comes to mobile money, the third world is first.” The key to mobile development, she said, is local tech development that empowers mobile users. “We have mobile developers in Africa focused on solutions for regular people, to let people can access information not only online but on their mobile phones.” To that end, she’s building Mobisko, an in-development website where mobile developers can upload their app, distribute it and get ratings, and optimize for different carriers. In the Q&A, Senior Fellow Jon Gossier makes a good point: “What we’re seeing in Africa now is a new awareness for a low-end smartphone. Because once you’ve got a browser, you can do anything.”

Rotich also points us to an amazing new website: AfricaKnows.com, which aggregates great photography and writing from all over the continent. Definitely worth a browse.

Peter Haas of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) gave a searing look at post-earthquake Haiti. He said: “We’ve heard about how many lives were lost in the Haiti earthquake. But we haven’t heard enough about why all those lives were lost. It was the buildings, not the earthquake, that killed people.” After the quake, AIDG inspected over 1,500 buildings — schools, residences, govt buildings, hospitals. And what they found shocked him: “Haiti was not a natural disaster. It was a disaster of engineering.” All the buildings failed in the same ways: walls and slabs not tied properly into columns; asymmetric structures not built to withstand shaking; poor building materials, poorly mixed concrete, rebar that was smooth. Now, AIDG is working with Architecture for Humanity and other groups to work one-on-one with masons and builders to bring proper masonry training into Haiti. “To make sure these buildings are safe, it’s not just going to take policy changes — it’s reaching out to the masons on the ground to help them learn the proper techniques.” Watch Peter Haas’s TEDTalk >>

Artist and activist Naomi Natale talked about her new project, One Million Bones — a cry against ongoing genocides happening now, around the world, under our watch: “I want to pile one million bones on the National Mall in Washington DC.” The bones will be made one by one, by artists, educators and schoolchildren. Bones can be made of clay, wood, paper, glass; some bones are even made of biodegradbeable materials with seeds inside — at the end of the project they’ll be distributed and planted. “Most of us will never view a mass grave,” she said. “One Million Bones will represent those graves that are being filled today in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma … I want us to make noise about it. Our government can intervene in these international disasters, but we must demand it.” She made a chilling point: “At some point we are going to have to look back and realize, our generation allowed and permitted genocide. ‘Never again’ became ‘again, and again, and again.’” During the Q&A, Senior Fellow Colleen Flanagan asked, “Who’s been your most responsive audience to the project so far?” Natale said: “You may be surprised but, ex-military. I’ve talked to many ex-military guys and they get this, they’re gung-ho about it.”

Coder and “hacktivist” Jon Gosier of AppAfrica.org is part of the team that wrote Ushahidi.com — a prime example of Julianna Rotich’s African tech explosion. The site allows people to report information in crisis on the ground. But it developed a problem during the Haiti crisis, in the first four days after the quake — when some 100,000 reports came in, and all had to be verified by humans. There had to be a better way. Gosier started working on SwiftRiver, an open-source tool that gets rid of junk, spam, duplicates and extraneous data in any data feed. It judges the content of any SMS or tweet, who it’s from and where they are, who they know — using sophisticated entity extraction and natural-language processing to zap retweets and hunt down inaccurate info. Why is this important? Gosier talked about the riots in Kampala, where he lives. “It was 48 hours before it hit the mainstream news. I first heard about it on Twitter, and for the first four hours, I could get information strictly on Twitter. By the end of the day, it had made the local news, and the following day, CNN. Getting news from Twitter is key, but retweets and inaccurate info were a big problem. Swiftriver helps process this data.” Swiftriver launches at the end of August, but Ushahidi has been using it and demo-ing it. Another key partner is PubHealth.net, which is using SwiftRiver to sort through mountains of public health data.

It was a fascinating 90 minutes of passionate ideas in action, from people who represent the next generation of TEDsters.

Jane Chen has helped develop and market a low-cost device that could save millions of premature babies in the developing world. Read this TED interview to discover Jane’s inspirations, love of music and penchant for making pies. (Watch her talk from TEDIndia 2009.)

Tell us about your work.

I am the co-founder of a non-profit organization called Embrace. We are developing a low-cost infant incubator for use in developing countries. About 20 million low-birth-weight and premature babies are born every year around the world. Four million die annually, and one of the biggest problems these babies face is staying warm, because they don’t have enough fat on their bodies to regulate their body temperature. As a result, many babies die or grow up with severe lifelong health problems.

Temperature regulation is the primary function of a traditional incubator, but incubators can cost up to $20,000. They require a constant supply of electricity, they’re difficult to operate and you’re not going to find them in rural areas where many of these babies are dying.

So as a solution to this problem, my co-founders (Naganand Murty, Linus Liang and Rahul Panicker) and I have been working with an amazing team over the last two years to develop the Embrace Infant Warmer. It incorporates a phase change material — a wax-like substance — into a sleeping bag design. You heat this pouch of phase change material, and then once it’s melted, it’s able to maintain a constant temperature over the next 4 to 6 hours without the use of electricity. You place the pouch of phase change material in the sleeping bag, and it creates a warm microenvironment for the baby. We’ve gotten the cost down to less than one percent of the cost of a traditional incubator, and we’re currently in the process of testing the device. The whole team moved out to Bangalore about a year ago — to India, where I am now.

ABOVE: Baby in an Embrace Infant Warmer

We’re testing at a number of hospitals here, and the first version of the product will be released this fall, in November. This version is intended for small clinics that don’t have any equipment available to take care of babies. It has an electric heater and is suitable for clinics that have intermittent access to electricity.

There’s also a big need for the product as a transport incubator. In India, babies are often born in tiny little clinics and if they have any complications they’re referred to bigger hospitals, and that transport period is the most critical time in the baby’s life — the first few hours after it’s born.

We also have a second version of the product that we’re developing for rural areas — places that don’t have access to electricity at all. That version will be used in the home by a mother, midwife or community healthcare worker.

Read more of this interview with Jane Chen after the jump >>

(Continued)

With such great need in rural areas, why start in clinics?

As we were doing our research, we’d go into villages to talk to mothers and midwives and we would ask, “What would influence you to use this product?” And they would say, “Well, if the village doctor recommended it.” So we’d go to the village doctor and he would say, “If the city doctor recommended it.” So it became clear that there’s a line of influence and that you have to gain traction in the medical community first.

ABOVE: Embrace employees Rahul Panicker and Rajan Patel holding Embrace Infant Warmers

You left your consulting career in Hong Kong to volunteer with children in China orphaned by HIV/AIDS. What started you on your current path?

I think it all goes back to that experience doing HIV/AIDS work in China. That started when I was working as a consultant at Monitor Group in Hong Kong. I started reading a series of articles in the New York Times about the AIDS epidemic in China. In the ’90s, all these poor farmers in China contracted HIV
selling their blood. There was a big, government-run campaign, and they would go to very poor villages, pool people’s blood together, separate the plasma — which is what they needed — and then re-inject every donor with the remaining blood cells, believing that this would allow them to donate again more quickly. So people were donating five or ten times a day, and getting paid five dollars per bag of blood. As a result, in the villages worked in, 60 to 80 percent of the adult population was HIV-positive. That was creating millions of orphans and most of these children did not have HIV, because the parents contracted the disease after they were born.

Reading these stories was shocking and horrifying, and something just clicked. You know, I realized how lucky I am to have been born into the life I’ve been born into. As Warren Buffett always says, we won the genetic lottery. But, I could have easily been born into another life. These people were just trying to make an extra dollar for their families and contracted this horrible disease, they were receiving no help and were left to die in the most horrible way possible. I couldn’t go on without doing something about this. I started volunteering for an organization that was helping to support the children orphaned by AIDS. When I found that I could have an impact and because I was so passionate about what I was doing, I packed up my bags, left my consulting job, and went to work for this organization full time.

In the time that I was there we went from helping 200 to over 3,000 students, and by the end of my time at this organization, the Chinese government, partially as a result of our visibility efforts, stepped up to the plate and agreed to provide free education for all of these orphans.

That experience was my first in the social sector and really opened my eyes to a number of things. First of all, it opened my eyes to the suffering of the world — to the fact that there are huge healthcare disparities between developed and developing countries. In the US, anyone who needs antiretroviral medication can access it, but in the places I was working with in China — and then I later went on to do HIV/AIDS work in Africa — it was impossible to get this medicine. Impossible to access even the most basic medication! So, it became a personal passion of mine to try to bridge that disparity in healthcare and Embrace is a way for me to do that.

That led me to graduate school, and it was at Stanford that I first started Embrace. It was through a class called “Design for Extreme Affordability,” which is half MBAs and half engineers, working together on developing technologies for people living at the bottom of pyramid markets.

The challenge posed to my team at that time was to make a baby incubator that costs less than one percent of the cost of a traditional incubator, which is $20,000. We began doing research first in Nepal, then in India, and realized what was needed was not just a lower-cost version of what exists today, but an entire paradigm shift in the way we’re thinking about this problem. You needed something that could work without electricity, that’s portable and really easy and intuitive to use so that a mother, midwife or really low-trained healthcare worker can operate it. It was based on these factors that we developed Embrace.

We moved to India because it has the largest number of premature babies in the world. Of the 20 million that I mentioned, 40 percent of those babies are born in India alone.

You discovered your passion a bit by chance, reading those newspaper articles. Do you have recommendations for people looking to discover their passion?

It certainly was chance, but one of my favorite quotes is by Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I think that at that point in my life, I liked what I was doing — it was very intellectually challenging — but I knew it was something that I wasn’t passionate about. And I was looking for that thing that would make me wake up every morning really excited to go to my job. Having that in the back of my mind as I read these articles, I knew that that was the path I was going to take.

Another of my favorite quotes is, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

What were you like as a kid?

I was born in Taiwan and moved to the US when I was four. Since I was about seven, I’ve loved cooking. I’d wake up at five in the morning and make cinnamon rolls and all these different things.

My dad, coming from a very traditional family, always wanted me to be a doctor. So he would always ask me, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” And I’d have to say “Dr. Chen.” As I took an interest in cooking, he was so scared that I would want to be a chef, that he banned me from the kitchen [laughs]. He wouldn’t allow me in the kitchen at all.

So you can only imagine my parents’ shock when I told them years later when I decided to quit my cushy consulting job and go do non-profit HIV/AIDS work in China.

What are some of your favorite things to cook?

I love making pies. Apple-lemon pie — that’s my specialty.

I love trying different cuisines all the time. I love baking … I wish I had more time to cook these days. I’m trying to pick up some Indian cooking. But if I had to choose one cuisine to eat every day it would probably be Japanese food.

What else do you do for fun?

I love classical music, and have been playing violin since I was seven. Music helps me to express feelings in a way words often cannot. I love Benjamin Zander’s TEDTalk on classical music.

I’m a big foodie, I do a lot of yoga — I love yoga — I love running … I just enjoy being really active, and traveling.

What social problems are you going to tackle next?

I’m still really passionate about HIV/AIDS and so I’m really interested to do something that can help in this field. I think there are ways to leverage our current technology to help. For example, rapid diagnostic tests need to be kept at certain temperatures. So, is there a way to re-engineer our device so that it can be used to cool rather than warm? I think that would be interesting to look at.

I was recently visiting a hospital in South Africa where 80 percent of the patients are HIV-positive. And of those, 40 percent are co-infected with tuberculosis. Now, tuberculosis is airborne, and because masks are so expensive, there are all these people walking in the tuberculosis ward with no masks on, which is absolutely frightening. So that’s another thing I’m interested in: Can we make a lower-cost or more effective mask that can help with tuberculosis?

There are so many problems out there and as you start doing this work you see more and more things. You want to help everyone. But as I said, we want to stay really focused and make the Infant Warmer a success.

How has the TED Fellowship impacted you?

Work-wise, ever since my TEDTalk was posted, we receive requests all the time from people all over the world wanting to help us in some capacity, whether that be in giving us money or something else.

One guy who saw my TEDTalk pitched the story to National Geographic. Now they’re interested in doing a documentary on Embrace, and he’s actually coming out to India this weekend to start filming. So we’re super excited.

We have polymer experts who want to help us with product design … people all over the world who have offered their help, so that’s been super, super exciting.

On the personal front, TED blew my mind. It was the most amazing conference I’ve ever been to. I was so inspired. I don’t consider myself an emotional person — I must have cried three times the first day [laughs].

Hearing about the different types of work people are doing, I was even further inspired to do what I’m doing now. And I consider it brain candy. I feel like I was really educated and inspired.

Anything else before we finish up?

Everything we do at Embrace is possible because of our amazing board members, volunteers, donors, interns and advisors — particularly the company D2M, which has been so generous in their support in developing innovative technologies as well as sourcing materials.

ABOVE: Happy mom holding her baby in an Infant Warmer

The reason I love working on this effort is not only because we’re providing a simple, low-cost solution to this huge need out there, but beyond that we’re also empowering women to save their children. That really motivates me to do the work day after day, because I meet women in villages all the time who have gone through the suffering of losing their child. And that is the most awful feeling in the world — not being able to save your own baby.

So, I think part of what Embrace is doing is alleviating the pain a family has to go through when it loses a child. That’s something that every parent can relate to, and it’s also empowering mothers to care for their babies.