TEDTalks: Philippe Starck (2007)

3 Types of Designer:

• The cynical designer - designs as a product for marketing
• The narcissistic design - who only designs for other fantastic designers
• Another kind of designer - tries to make the object for the result, and for the human being who'll use it.

"The big challenge" - lack of production out of "the big image."
Describes as "the supermonkey" and the result of 4.5 billion years of evolution, and that we're at the half-point of this path. "That is our story. That is our beautiful poetry. We are a mutant."
"If we don't integrate the fact that we are a mutant, we completely miss the story. Every generation thinks that we're the final one. We mutate for 4 billion years before, but now, because it's me, we stop!"

The duty of vision: to be in the territory of intelligence. As our angle of vision changes toward our people, the more important you will be important in civilization, and for the story of our mutation.

"God is the answer when we don't know the answer." We see our line of evolution. From far it looks very smooth, but if you take a lens, the [line is very rough]. We have different duties in different parts of the cycle. There are periods of light and shadow, ie. during times of peace a certain type of person can flourish and be acceptable. When barbarians are back forget about [design and art]. You must go back to fight/to battle.

Starck claims that he's ashamed of being a designer during a period of darkness/war.
However, claims that we must finish the story. In perhaps, 50 years, we can leave our children the possibility of creating a new story, a new poetry. He claims that this is why he continues to work, even if it's for a toilet brush.

How Wikipedia's Collaborative Systems Work

TEDTalks: Jimmy Wales, Oxford, July 2005


The goal of Wikipedia/Wikimedia is to get a free encyclopedia to everyone on the planet. At the time of Wales's presentation, Wikipedia amounted to over 2 million articles in a variety of languages. Only around 1/3 of traffic to the site is directed at the English section of the encyclopedia. The foundation only has one paid employee, the lead software developer, and the rest of the work is done by volunteers. The main cost is around $5000/month in bandwidth.


"Why isn't it all rubbish?" (ie. given a completely chaotic model).
"Most people understand the need for neutrality."
"How do we manage the quality control?"
Wales states that social policies and elements of the software contribute to this.

It's a social concept of co-operation... anytime there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia should not take a stand on it, we should merely report what reputable parties have said about it.

Neutral Point of View policy:
* NPOV - Neutral Point of View
* NPOV is a social concept of co-operation, avoids some philosophical issues
* Diverse political, religious, cultural backgrounds
* Kept together by our "NPOV" policy

Real-time peer review: every time a change is made, the changes are fed into IRC and RSS feeds that peers have on their personal 'watch lists.' Therefore, someone will notice the change very quickly, and if it doesn't conform to policy then the page will be reverted.

Edits by anonymous users only account for approximately 18% of the edits on the website. The vast majority of the edits on the website are made by a fairly dedicated, close-knit community of around 600-1000 people who are in constant communication.

The software tools support close monitoring of encyclopedia entries, such as 'page history,' which highlights page modifications in red. A social method that grew up in the community is the "Votes for Deletion" page, which creates a forum for the community to dialogue on issues for clarification.

The wikipedia governance model is a very confusing but workable mix of consensus... we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral; some amount of democracy - all of the administrations - these are the people who have the ability to delete pages - that doesn't mean they have the right to delete pages - they still have to follow all of the rules - but they're elected by the community. Sometimes random trolls on the Internet accuse me of hand-picking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia. I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually. There's a certain amount of aristocracy... Rick Cave's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know. And then there's monarchy, and that's my role in the community... I don't like the term 'benevolent dictator'... it isn't appropriate, but there's a need still for a certain amount of monarchy. Sometimes we need to make a decision quick and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision making processes... we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content. So as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me. Because of the free licencing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave - I can't tell anyone what to do.

So the final point here is to understand that we are not fanatical web anarchists. We're very flexible about the social methodology, because ultimately the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.

During a subsequent Q&A it was suggested to Wales that a lot of biased textbooks are being used in schools, and he was asked whether or not Wikipedia is being employed by teachers and schools.

There's a media storyline about Wikipedia which I think is false. It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers, and the storyline is that there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it, and that turns out to not be true... I think there's going to be huge impacts, and we actually have a project...the Wikibooks projects, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages... part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet... I think that we're really going to see... freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

Smarter fuels for developing nations

TEDTalks: Amy Smith, Feb 2006

The number one killer of children under the age of 5 is the inhalation from indoor cooking fires. A lot of effort has been put into looking for alternatives to charcoal as cooking fuels. The use of wood charcoal not only creates health risks due to inhalation of heavy smoke, but also leads to environmental degradation, in terms of destabilisation of hillsides due to the heavy use of wood. Smith works through examples of MIT studies in Haiti. Bagas, a waste resource from sugar cane is processed and combined with a sticky paste derived from casava to create brickettes for cooking.

In India the most commonly used cooking fuel is cow dung, which creates very smoky fires (ie. heavy impact on health). The locally available sources of biomass were wheat and rice straw, with small amounts of cow manure as a binder. After studying optimal pressures for compression of the brickettes, a low cost press was developed for use in Haiti.

Thus, the use of agricultural waste as cooking fuels, as opposed to wood, can be not only healthier, but also environmentally sustainable. Another example was the use of corn cobs, which form ready-made charcoal briquettes.

This is also one of the incredibly rare situations where you also have economic benefits. People can make their own cooking fuel from waste products. They can generate income from this. They can save the money they were going to spend on charcoal, and they can produce excess and sell it in the market to people who aren't making their own. It's extremely rare that you don't have trade-offs between health and economics, or environment and economics.

She suggests that people below the poverty line need to be able to make new, genuine 'value' products, and that we need to work with them to give them resources and tools so that they can solve their own problems.

TEDTalks: Ross Lovegrove - Organic, "fat-free" design

I think instead of quoting anything directly from Lovegrove's talk I'll just embed this one, because the visual support material is so important. Lovegrove was already an inspirational figure - from the Walkman to the iMac (Frog Design), but this presentation genuinely grabbed me. Despite a somewhat nervous, awkward style, he discusses stripping back designs to what's timeless and essential - sentiments that sound like they're coming directly out of the mouth of Jonathan Ive, but Lovegrove seems to bring a more organic approach to his design philosophy.

All hail "Captain Organic!" - what an inspiration for design that's ecologically/environmentally/socially responsible.

TEDTalks: Helen Fisher (2006) Biochemical foundations of Love and Lust

2 biggest social trends in the next century?

1. Women moving back into the job market
2. The aging population

fMRI scanning of people in various states of love (or being out of love)

Main characteristics of romatic love: craving, motivation and obsession.

She claims that romantic love is not an emotion but a drive, ie, motivation or craving. "I think it's more powerful than the sex drive."

3 basic brain systems that have developed as a result of evolutionary/reproductive cycles: sex drive; romantic love; attachment (sense of calm and security).

These 3 systems translate as Lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner.

As woman are moving back into the job market in many cultures, they're acquiring the status that that had in earlier human societies.

Differences between male/female brains - woman have greater verbal ability (people skills, long term planning, putting ideas into more complex patterns, holistic thinking); men tend to get rid of what they consider as extraneous so they can focus.

Moving towards a collaborative society where the talents of both sexes are valued and employed together.

Return to an ancient form of marriage equality. "The symmetrical marriage"; "The peer marriage" whereby partners are equal.

SECOND TREND: The aging population. Trend - the older you get, the less likely you are to get divorced.

The 3 brain systems aren't always connected to each other, eg. you may feel deep attachment to someone while you feel sexual attraction to someone else.

"I don't think honestly we're an animal that was built to be happy - we were built to reproduce."

Fisher is worried about antidepressants (eg. serotonin enhancing). Serotonin enhancing drugs supress dopamine, therefore suppressing sex drive. Therefore, if you tamper with one system you tamper with other systems.

TEDTalks: Ken Robinson (2006) - Creativity in Education

It's funny - I've seen this before, but I decided to watch it again and take some notes.

Robinson begins by claiming one of ideas we need to grapple with is that we don't know what future holds or what it's going to look like, so how do we educate today's children?

"Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."
"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

He comments that by the time we're adults we stigmatize mistakes, "We're educating people out of their creative capacities."

"We don't grow into creativity - we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it."

Robinson is hilarious, and makes some great jokes imagining Shakespeare as a 7 year old in an English class.

"Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects... At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts: art and music are usually given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance ever day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important."

"As children grow older we start to progressively educate them from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads - and slightly to one side."

Robinson claims that the people who come out at the top of this kind of system are the people who wind up as university professors, but typically those are the kinds of people who are disembodied and live in their heads. "They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads." (ha!)

"The education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability, and there's a reason... There were no public systems of education before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is based on two ideas: (1) The most useful subjects for work are at the top, so you were probably steered benignly away from things when you were a kid - things you liked - on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that...
Benign advice - now profoundly mistaken. The whole world's engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is: (2) Academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole systsem of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not.
Because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized."

"In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people will be graduating through public education than since the beginning of history....
Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything." (ie. now you may need an MA to get a job - "the process of academic inflation."
"We know three things about intelligence:
(1) It's diverse. We think about the world in all of the ways that we experience it - we think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically; we think in abstract terms; we think in movement.
(2) Intelligence is dynamic. If you look at all of the interactions of the brain...intelligence is wonderfully interactive."
Creativity = the process of having original ideas that have value
Creativity, more often than not, comes from different disciplines and ways of seeing things.
(3) Intelligence is distinct.

"I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology. One in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we stripmine the Earth for a particular commodity, and for the future it won't service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles upon which we're educating our children."

"Our task is to educate their whole being."

TEDTalks: Richard Branson (2007)

When asked a question about how he manages to start up and manage so many companies, he responds that if you can run one company then you can run many
- running companies is about finding good people and then bringing out their best.
- previews the interior design of the Virgin Galactic craft.
- discusses the fact that he's dyslexic and left school at the age of 15.
- "capitalist philanthropy" - alludes to the fact that in a capitalist system extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people, and that responsibility goes with that wealth, and that it's important for those individuals to use that money to create jobs or to tackle issues, eg. global warming/alternative fuels; social problems in Africa (including AIDS)

TEDTalks: "Uncertainty" Peter Donnelly (2005)

Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics

Discusses probability theory in relation to genetics (ie. the patterning of G/A/T/C).
Human Genome Project - attempting to understand how differences make people susceptible to diseases.

Currently studying thousands of individuals with different diseases to look for genetic correlations.

Discusses the idea that if a person is tested as 'positive' with a disease then not only the accuracy of the test is in question, but also the frequency/proportion of the population with the disease. As a result, false positives can be frequent.

"We are not good at reasoning with uncertainty."
Errors are very frequently made in terms of grappling with statistics and arguments of (false) logic. In the early days of DNA profiling evidence was misrepresented, (ie. "the chance that this guy is innocent is one in 73,000,000" - was frequently incorrect).

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/67