Hailing from the Talent Search salon in Bangalore, Ajit Narayanan is here to tell us about his work helping autistic children to communicate. One of the challenges that faces those working in this field: People with autism can sometimes find it difficult to understand abstraction or symbolism–and therefore they struggle with language. Much contemporary therapy involves the use […]
Saki Mafundikwa founded the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts, ZIVA, a Bauhaus-style school focused on African heritage. (“Vigital” denotes visual arts taught using digital tools.) It’s the first graphic design and new media college in the nation, and he wanted his students to understand the power of design–and in particular to understand “the long tradition of writing” […]
Communication in 2013 looks so different from what it ever has before. Will technology be the ruin of all that is good and true in language? We don’t think so. The speakers in this session explore how the future will bring even greater shifts in how we communicate — and it may well be for […]
Fever Picture is a collective of scribes and graphic facilitators who translate the words said in conferences into comic form. With this graphic method of note-taking, they’ve illustrated several talks given so far at TED2013, highlighting main points through speech bubbles and quotes. Here, we’ve gathered some of these illustrations from their Facebook page. And stay tuned to […]
Julian Treasure watches out for the ears. In the four TED Talks he’s given so far, he’s offered up “5 ways to listen better” and “Sound health in 8 steps.” At TED2013, we asked him: What speakers have given you the best auditory experience so far? It was nice to hear Jinsop Lee today talking […]
Last spring, Robyn Grobler shared a fascinating theory at TED@Johannesburg, one of the 14 stops on our worldwide talent search to find untold stories for TED2013. Her idea: that if she smiled, her patients felt less pain. She brought a PowerPoint presentation, but Grobler also tried illustrating her talk using Prezi, the cloud-based presentation software. (TED’s […]
Yesterday, during the session “Create!,” 15-year-old Dong Woo Jang delighted us with his tale of bow-making. I caught up with him after to discuss. Why did you choose bows? I just stumbled upon it. When I was a boy, I wasn’t allowed to play computer games, so I just went around looking for something to […]
Kibwe Tavares combines his training as an architect with his love of storytelling and animation to create futuristic 3D animated/live action films with social and political depth, creating incredibly detailed, vivid, and kinetic visual environments to entice audiences. His short film, Robots of Brixton, distributed on the internet, won a special jury prize at Sundance. And his […]
Where does education go from here? On Tuesday, Sugata Mitra accepted the 2013 TED Prize and offered a bold wish for the world: that we encourage children to explore questions about our world in self-organized learning environments. He proposed the founding of a School in the Cloud based in India, and encouraged TED community members, […]
The growing desert Allan Savory has dedicated his life to studying management of grasslands. And if that doesn’t sound exciting, just wait, because it touches on the deepest roots of climate change and the future of the planet. “The most massive, tsunami, perfect storm is bearing down on us,” is the grim beginning to Savory’s talk. […]
Architect Michael Green presents an interesting riddle: why are buildings made of wood only a few stories high when trees found in nature are remarkable for their height? Speaking in session 7 of TED2013, Green shares his deep love of wood — which he first discovered from his grandfather, a woodworker who taught him to […]
Pedrito Martinez is back onstage at TED, and this time he’s brought his band, including the dynamite Ariacne Trujillo on keys. “They have almost a psychic communication,” says TED music advisor, Bill Bragin, a longtime fan who describes taking guests who visit New York City to go see Martinez play at the local Cuban restaurant […]
Have you checked your email today? Your finances? What about your energy use? Alex Laskey thinks that with just a shift in attitude toward our energy use, we can all save a lot. Laskey introduces an experiment he ran with his team at Opower. People received one of three different messages on their doors about […]
Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao were the winners in British Columbia of the 2012 Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada. After a visit to a Vancouver waste station, Wang and Yao were blown away by the enormous amount of waste in plastic. Plastic is very hard to sort for recycling — all types have a similar density. Says Wang, “Plastics are useful, but […]
We all know sustainability is essential to our future, in vague terms. But what does that mean for the choices we make every day? In other words: paper or plastic? For one thing, design consultant Leyla Acaroglu wants you to think beyond choosing a material for your grocery tote. Instead, she encourages us to think […]
It sounds like music that could be pumping from the sound system of a packed nightclub. But these electronic-tinged sounds actually come from the mouth of one man, Wang Li, a master mouth harp musician, as he plays the kouxiang. In session 7 of TED2013, Li gives the audience a taste of his sonic stylings. Raised in […]