Photo: James Duncan Davidson Joshua Foer challenges the audience to close their eyes, and then he tells a very strange story. In summary: “Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. Notice the color of the door, the material it’s made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. They are […]
Photo: Ryan Lash Jared Ficklin‘s passions are music, technology, and making things. And he brings them together to visualize sound — with fire. Real fire on stage. He’s built a Ruben Tube, a long copper pipe with a hundred holes on it, attached to a tank of propane. He turns on a tune at 550 Hertz, […]
Session 10: The Campfire is about storytelling, connecting, and the power of gathering around a shared light. We start with Jared Ficklin, a winner of the 2011 Full Spectrum Auditions. And he brings us fire! Next up is Joshua Foer, a writer and the one-time US Memory Champion. How did he manage to remember enough […]
Initial sketch above: Click to pop this image to FULL SIZE! And see the final image below or here. Nat Al-Tahhan is a graphic designer and illustrator based in the UK, with a wide background in creative endeavors, including the design of video games, podcast illustration, and live drawing, among other things. We were lucky […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Journalist and commentator John Hockenberry takes the stage to share an incredibly personal insight into thinking smartly about design. For one thing, he says, we should think about it in terms of music. Cover versions that don’t add anything to the original are creepy; cover versions that make a tune into […]
Design, says session host Chee Pearlman, can be confusing, the words often jargony and opaque. Fortunately, John Hodgman is here. John Hodgman is a expert. That’s it, expert. There is nothing that follows the word, expert. And at TED2012 he takes a moment (well, three) to explain the design of three objects. He is qualified to […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Dancers from the American Ballet Theatre are now on stage delighting the crowd with their delicate elegance and dramatic expression. Blaine Hoven and Stella Abrera are dancing Known by Heart, a duet choreographed by Twyla Tharp in 1998. The piece is performed to a strangely catchy taped score by Donald Knaack, in which metal is […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, starts his TEDTalk by telling a story of the first time he took an art course. It was taught by Pietro, an “irrascible Italian, who drank and swore much too much.” At one point he projected a very graphic […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson David Kelley starts off his story in third grade, at Oakdale School in Ohio. His friend Brian was making a horse out of clay. One of the girls sitting at his table looked over and said, “that’s terrible! That’s not what a horse looks like.” Brian’s shoulders sank, he wadded up the […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Liz Diller notes that we divide space into private and public realms: “We know the legal distinctions well, and have become experts in protecting our private space, but we’re less in tune with the public.” Diller is a designer, one of the first to win a MacArthur “genius” grant in the […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson In Reid Hoffman, we’ve already welcomed the start-up whisperer. Now here’s the “book whisperer”, or, as Chip Kidd describes himself, he’s a “book designer, page turner, dog eared place holder, notes in the margins taker, ink sniffer.” And with a wiggle of his hips, Kidd’s off to tell us about devoting 25 years of […]
Now we move to the world of design, with a session co-curated by Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell featuring leading practitioners from architecture, graphic design, the art world and even that less well known discipline of “expertry.” Illustrations by Maira Kalman are projected onto the stage set to reflect some of the themes the speakers will […]
[youtube=http://youtu.be/IzSfKP8wcgo] At TED2012, attendees got to play a fun game with genes: Swab your cheek, submit it to the techs at Genentech, and get back a “genetic symphony” based on some very interesting genetic markers. Watch and see how it happens. You can hear the whole smphony at gene.com/TED. Video: Rachel Tobias
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Bryan Stevenson spends most of his time in jails and prisons and on death row. He’s a lawyer, and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. So he’s found it very energizing at TED, and wanted to start by pointing out that there is a distinct identity here. Things said here have a […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson A ‘scheduling snafu’ led to two speakers being booked for the same slot, but Chris Anderson felt he had to honor the comittment to both, so Andrea Kates and Thomas Stat both took the stage and delivered a TEDTalk, at the same time. Kates and Stat begin tossing out phrases, backed by slides, […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Taylor Wilson is a 17-year old nuclear physicist. No, really. He charms the audience from the get-go, making the case that “you know, as a scientist, the glass is always 100% full, with water and air.” But he’s really here to make two cases: that nuclear fusion will be the energy […]