Photos: Ryan Lash

Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of MIT Technology Review, wants us to think about why we can’t (or think we can’t) solve big problems anymore — what is our generation’s moon landing? Some people blame the culture of Silicon Valley, or VCs unwilling to invest in big problems, but Pontin doesn’t buy this excuse. The real problems are that humanity’s big challenges are hard, our political systems are unwilling, and too often we don’t really understand the real issue. Landing on the moon, it turns out, was relatively easy. “The solutions of our future will be harder won,” he says. A sobering start to the morning.

In a hilarious talk, David Pogue shares some basic tricks for using our technology — tricks that you might think everyone knows, but they don’t. For example, hit control (or command) and “+” to make the text in a web browser bigger. When writing, double-click a word to highlight just that word. (We’re asking him for the list.)

2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant, the president and CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, is here to tell us the good news about pandemics. Hurray! This is important; as he and his team helped to lay out in the movie Contagion, which they advised on, pandemic viruses are a huge, insidious threat to humanity. But with social media, participatory surveillance, better policy and better regional cooperation, global pandemics might become a thing of the past. “I think we can end pandemics in our lifetimes,” he says.

Ghislaine Maxwell gives a stirring call to care about the oceans — a resource that is held by law to be for the benefit of all, but in reality is being exploited by the few. She proposes six things we can do to help: 1) Enforce the Public Trust Doctrine; 2) Demand more marine public areas; 3) Adopt models that produce more revenue without as much waste; 4) Ban wasteful fishing practices; 5) Fish sustainably; and 6) Come together as a community around the seas. We are all citizens of the oceans, after all.

“Look to the person to your left; look to the person to your right,” instructs Scott Noggle, director of the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory. ”One of you will get Alzheimer’s by the time you are 80.” This is not a cheery thought. “This is a catastrophe,” confirms Noggle. Yup. He’s here to tell us about his work, which involves taking living cells from cadavers of those who died from Alzheimer’s. He and his team have figured out how to re-create stem cell lines, and therefore brain tissue, to try and figure out how the disease starts and develops–with the end goal of creating more effective therapies to treat the disease. Astonishing.

Dan Miller, Managing Director of the Roda Group, is concerned with the growing food crisis facing the world — and is looking for solutions. He’s found one possibility: hydrogels, chemicals that can hold 100 times their weight in water. These can be put into the soil at the same time as seeds and fertilizer. Because of the way the gels retain water near the plants, this could increase yield while reducing water use. Some convincing tests on broccoli make his point.

Jessica Green is here to talk about the microbes that both define who we are and that exist in their own ecosystems on everything we touch. She’s been working with architects and biologists to take samples from rooms at the University of Oregon to get a deeper understanding of the microbial community within space. “Bathrooms are like a tropical rainforest,” she says. “Offices are like temperate grassland.” The implications for designers of this genre she calls “bio-informed design,” particularly for those thinking about designing air systems or working in health care, are huge.

Tony Tjan studies entrepreneurs, and tries to work out what makes them successful. He has found four attributes that each can contribute: Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck. He says there is no one way to success, but a key is the self-awareness to understand which part is their own primary driver.

Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America, is here to talk about how politics is changing, and in particular about what will be important in 2016. On his list: micro-targeting; micro-listening; micro-media buying. We’re going to get a lot more focused, in other words. Other challenges: voter suppression; voter contact; and potential cyberattack, Reed’s biggest fear. Did you know this: The presidential campaigns of both John McCain and Mitt Romney were hacked by a foreign entity. “We were safe, because we invested in security,” he says, but he doesn’t think it’ll be so easy next time around. The solution? Trust the experts. Get the right people in the right place, and let them do their jobs to the best of their ability.

TED Fellow Julie Freeman is an artist who thinks about how to represent data in art. She was asked to curate a set of artworks based on data for the Open Data Institute, and she found some remarkable examples, such as a vending machine that only dispenses snacks when there is news of an economic downturn.

David Peterson creates languages for a living, including the language Dothraki, which he developed for the television series Game of Thrones. He’s here to give us an insight into how he does it, and to take us on a whistlestop tour through the evolution of language. Why go to all the trouble? Fans, of course. Every single detail of a hit show like GoT is analyzed in depth; results are shared instantaneously, and they’ll realize quickly if a fake language is systematic or just gibberish. This respect for viewers might be the difference between a hit and a multimillion-dollar flop. That’s why it matters.

And finally, David Pogue, who turns out to be a former Broadway conductor as well as technology writer for the New York Times, returns to sing his new composition, ”The Twitter Song.” a show tune take on living in the 140-character age.

The exhibit Public Interest Design gets set up at TED2013. Here, a look at Embrace Nest, an affordable alternative to an incubator, aimed to provide the 20 million low birth-weight and premature babies born each year with critical warmth. It was created by students at Stanford. Photo: Michael Brands

By Courtney E. Martin and John Cary

Editor’s note: designer John Cary and journalist Courtney E. Martin are the curatorial brains behind the show, “Public Interest Design: Places, Products, & Processes,” which opened at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco last October. The entire exhibit has been reinstalled at TED in Long Beach, and we invited the duo to give us a sense of the thinking behind the installation.

Momentum is building at the intersection of design and social justice, or what is called “public interest design”—akin to public interest law and public health. In recent years, there has been a real proliferation of high-profile exhibitions, books, and events. Back in 2007, for instance, museum goers began flocking to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition series; in 2010, “Small Scale, Big Change” was installed at the MoMA, also in New York. Meanwhile, books like Design Like You Give a Damn and its recent sequel, by 2006 TED Prize winners Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr of Architecture for Humanity, as well as events such as the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting on “Designing for Impact,” led by 2007 TED Prize winner Bill Clinton, underline the growing interest in this important topic. Next month even sees the first-ever Public Interest Design Week.

We joined the curating fray last October, working with the Autodesk Gallery team to assemble an exhibition focused on covering the most provocative and interesting areas in the space. In doing so, we aimed to be very intentional about filling in some of the gaps in earlier attempts at displaying and explaining this burgeoning field. We tried to break new ground in a few key ways.

Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves livesFirst and foremost, we wanted to put people at the center of the show, focusing on stories of those who were impacted by design as opposed to the stories of the designers themselves. The design itself, after all, is ultimately a means to an end. We wanted to be clear and transparent about the effect and influence of this work.

For example, among the products on display, is the Embrace Nest infant warmer, pioneered by TED Senior Fellow Jane Chen. Many families in India wait to name their babies until nine months after they are born. The reason? High infant mortality rates, caused in part by the inability of low-birth-weight babies to regulate their own body temperature. One mother, Shivamadamma, from a farming family in rural India, gave birth to a premature baby boy weighing only 3.5 pounds. Keeping her baby in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was impossibly expensive. Fortunately, doctors were able to provide thermal support to Shivamadamma’s baby with the Embrace Nest infant warmer. Now nine months old and feeding well, the baby is ready for his naming ceremony.

The Butaro Hospital is a 150-bed, 60,000 hospital built in the Burera District of Rwanda by MASS Design Group in association with and operated by Partners in Health. Photo: Iwan Baan.

Also included is the Butaro Hospital by MASS Design Group and Partners in Health in rural Rwanda, which sets a new standard for healthcare design, not just in the global south, but beyond. Opened in January 2011, it is a 150-bed, 60,000-square-foot world-class hospital, bringing health care to a district of 400,000 people who previously had to travel long distances to access even the most basic of health services. The building, created from local materials with local laborers—employing 4,000 people over the course of its construction—became something of a symbol of the renaissance of health care in Rwanda. As Neal Emery, writing last week at Atlantic.com, explained it, “Amidst the barrage of stories about failing states and civil wars that characterize the dour American media coverage of the developing world, the reinvention of Rwanda offers hope. Since the genocide with which its name is still synonymous in the United States, Rwanda has doubled its life expectancy and now offers a replicable model for delivery of high quality health care with limited resources.”

The exhibit also deliberately includes products, places, and processes. To be honest, this last category was the hardest to curate. It’s challenging to explain the critical nature of systems in our lives and the lives of the most vulnerable citizens—both domestically and abroad. In some ways, this is the invisible category of design. We hold and touch products. We work, live, and learn in buildings. Both are physical and tangible. Systems, on the other hand, affect our quality of lives in profound ways, but are often difficult to conceptualize, and most certainly, to display.

Home for Good, a multi-organization initiative to end chronic homelessness among veterans in the Los Angeles area, redesigned and streamlined the process of the number of days and steps it takes to get people off the streets and into housing. Graphic by Megan Jett, courtesy of Autodesk.

We drew inspiration from projects like Annie Leonard’s Stories of Stuff and Purpose’s unPAC, which increase systemic literacy with crystal clear, highly visual communication. That’s not always easy to come by, we understood, after trying to figure out a way to demonstrate the efficacy of Community Solutions and Home for Good for the exhibition. These organizations have collaborated to develop a process to get homeless Los Angelenos off the street. Before, it took an average of 47 steps and 168 days for a homeless veteran to get into permanent housing. Since their intervention, the average has dropped to 21 steps and 93 days, with an ultimate goal of 10 steps in 10 days. Our Santiago-based designer Megan Jett worked through at least a dozen iterations before we were convinced that our graphic installation really showed the innovation at the heart of the process.

Ultimately, our aim was to communicate something not about design, per se, but about dignity. Environmental psychology tells us that the moment we are born, the world around us—the rooms we sleep in, the classrooms we study in, the outdoor spaces we have access to, the bureaucracies we see our parents wrestle with—signals something about our own identity, our own worth, what we can expect from life. In this way, we are a reflection of the design we experience in our lives. Which leads us to the critical question: how do we make a world that is more hospitable and healthy for all of us, that signals back to us that we belong, that we deserve beauty and functionality and dignity? And in instances where design, be that of products, places, or processes, is less than ideal, what changes can be made quickly, simply, easily, or painlessly?

Courtney E. Martin is the author multiple books, including Do It Anyway. John Cary is an architect, author, and the founding editor of PublicInterestDesign.org. They are also members of the TED Prize team and co-leads ofThe City 2.0, the 2012 TED Prize focused on the future of cities.