THINK WEIRD GO BIG
This workshop was organized for TED Fellows by TED Fellows Jessica Green and Eric Berlow at the Swall Institute. The goal was to facilitate collective brainstorming and dialogue that encourages participants to take their creative visions and turn them into big realities. To enable diverse ideas and problem solving, the workshop blended focused round-table discussions with kinetic thinking from outdoor ‘walk and talk’ sessions and informal dialogue over shared meals. The TWGB workshops are designed to facilitate the TED Fellows program mission to help “trailblazers spread world-changing ideas.” Below is a summary of this group’s diverse visions for the future:
2010 Attendees
What’s Your Idea?
I want to revolutionize data-driven approaches to corporate environmental sustainability by maximizing production efficiency from raw materials to final product. Corporate supply chains are complex systems that can be better understood with data visualization tools borrowed from decades of research on energy flow through complex food webs in natural ecosystems. This ‘eco-mimetic’ modeling of energy consumption through interconnected supply chains can pinpoint where small changes in operations result in large system-wide reductions in energy use and carbon emissions to increase both efficiency and profits.
Why Now?
There is increasing pressure for companies to demonstrate environmental sustainability by cleaning up internal operations. At the same time, businesses recognize that increasing production efficiency can increase profits. Thus, there has been a rapid increase in data on energy consumption and carbon emissions within supply chains that feed a company. However, these data show that supply ‘chains’ are highly interconnected, and this complexity can overwhelm decision-makers who seek to reduce corporate costs and environmental impacts. Now is the time to tackle this complexity and identify simple points of leverage for savvy sustainability decisions.
About Eric
Eric Berlow is an Ecologist with 15 years of expertise in network theory and an international reputation for untangling complex ecological systems. He and his collaborators have developed innovative data visualization and analysis tools for mapping energy flow through networks, and their work has been published in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Eric’s background makes him uniquely positioned to bring novel, quantitative approaches to sustainability decisions in corporate ecoystems.
What’s Your Idea?
I envision a future with genomic-driven approaches to architectural design that promote sustainability, human health and well-being. I will model buildings as complex ecosystems that house trillions of diverse microorganisms interacting with each other, with humans, and with their environment. This framework uses next-generation sequencing technology to characterize the “built environment microbiome” and offers site-specific design solutions to minimize the spread of infectious disease and maximize building energy efficiency.
Why Now?
It is possible to tackle urgent climate change and global health issues, in tandem, by advancing sustainable design practices with an emphasis on health care facilities. Health care is the second most energy-intensive industry in the U.S, and hospitals can serve as hubs for the transmission of infectious disease. New advances in rapid sequencing and analysis of genomic data allow, for the first time, reliable and predictive information about the relationship between sustainable design, the built environment microbiome, and human health.
About Jessica
Jessica has extensive interdisciplinary training as both an engineer (civil, environmental, and nuclear) and an ecologist. For more than a decade, she has researched biological complexity and microbial systems. As a professor at both the University of Oregon and the Santa Fe Institute, she is the founding director of an innovative new Center for Biology and the Built Environment that bridges biology and architecture. She is uniquely poised to synthesize ideas from engineering and microbiology to develop a predictive science of the built environment microbiome.
What’s Your Idea?
Rather than viewing substance as a mere vehicle for expressing ideas, I find the material world a rich source of ideas—and of no little wonderment. One of the most powerful ideas I’ve encountered engaging with nanomaterials is the power of self-assembly to give rise to exquisitely complex structures. Scientists have only just begun to harness these elegant methods of fabrication that have the potential to transform many fields. Right now, I’m working to create flexible, transparent substrates for my silver nanoparticle paintings using bacteria that produce nanoscale cellulose. While pursuing a promising career in art, this bacterially derived cellulose moonlights as artificial skin and as a popular dessert in South Asia.
Why Now?
Contemporary nanoscience has ushered in a revolution across the sciences. What’s more, it has inspired an unprecedented degree of cross-disciplinary inquiries. Fittingly, nano-craftsmanship emerged in cultures in which there were flexible boundaries between fields. Tracing the histories of nanotechnology and art, both paths converge in the medieval period at the base of stained glass windows. Many of these window's yellow hues were wrought with silver nanoparticles not unlike the kind I make. In the 15th century, Jan Van Eyck harnessed the optical secrets of stained glass to develop new ways of making and applying paint. In doing so, he revolutionized painting. We are now poised for another such transformation, and I am honored to play a part in it.
About Kate
As an artist, Kate engages in sustained material investigations focused on the ways in which humans—and other organisms—manipulate light. Her work is futuristic and medieval, empirical and intuitive, novel and mundane. Kate’s circuitous, highly tactile education has shaped her approach to art-making. She has had the privilege of studying Northern Renaissance painting and paint-making as a painter's apprentice, and of studying nanoparticle synthesis with some of the leading scientists in the field at the Alivisatos Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is artist in residence. Thus, even as Kate plumbs plasmonic nanoparticles and biomineralized photonic crystals for their visual potential, her feet are planted in the traditions of painting and photography.
What’s Your Idea?
A two-week peace pilgrimage through a sacred and historically important route in the rugged, mountainous desert of the Middle East. The women on this journey will come together across traditional enemy lines—Israeli and Palestinian, Indian and Pakistani, Iranian and Iraqi, Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish. Global female political leaders will be invited to join the nightly campfire of this expedition, during which time each traveler will give a TED talk reflecting her work as an author, filmmaker, social activist, or community leader. To share this journey with the world, it will be documented in film and print, and these campfire TED talks will be released online as part of TEDxMidEastPeace.
Why Now?
The Middle East continues to be a region of strife within its own borders and in relation to the rest of the world. The 21st century has finally witnessed and acknowledged women's roles in peacemaking and citizen diplomacy. More than ever before, we need empathic, visionary, bridge-builders who are well versed in communicating their ideas. The tenth year after the September 11th terrorist events is a poignant anniversary to embark on such a historic, expansive, and love-filled expedition.
About Nassim
Nassim is obsessed with facilitating reconciliation and overcoming hate—from cellular to global levels—and these themes are evident in her work as a physician, novelist, and Iranian-American peace activist. As a well-connected, grant writer, event organizer, and salonista, Nassim can mobilize the influential women who will make this expedition historic and powerful. From her experiences of curating TEDxRainier and spending time at communal artist residencies, she knows how to bring busy people together, inspire them to connect deeply, and effectively distill their messages.
What’s Your Idea?
The “PAX AMERICANA” is a quintet of symphonic instruments robotically played by real-time seismic data. Ground-motion from Iraq, Iran, Israel, Afghanistan, and the United States generated by all forms of seismic activity, ranging from bombs to latent geologic movement, will be used to compose the musical score. The goal is to install the instruments in public venues including the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. and the United Nations in New York City.
Why Now?
The United States is approaching a decade of military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The “PAX AMERICANA” is being made to prompt meditation on the complexity of global relationships and violence, and place the signals of human conflict within the context of the earth’s natural processes. Regardless of personal bias or political affiliations, it is vitally important that citizens reflect on military action and the ramifications of this action on personal, national, judicial, and ethical planes.
About David
David is a multimedia installation artist with a rich history of using real-time data feeds to bring those who live in “safe zones” into closer contact with “conflict zones”, where events occur that we hear about in the mass media but rarely witness. His work has included installations where gunshots and explosions recorded by American Marines in Iraq trigger light waves to ripple across a wall, and where bells toll in concert with seismic data from nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert. He works with experts in seismology, engineering, music, computer science and software development. David locates the common language that allows the team to creatively inspire each other and in turn evolve the work to more effectively raise consciousness.
What’s Your Idea?
An aquatic sculpture showing the inextricable linkage of all life, The Climate Change Conch--a Caracol for Coral, is simultaneously a work of art while accreting into a Biorock reef (www.globalcoral.org). Once I learned about this form of resuscitating damaged coral reefs, I began envisioning a movement whereby artists actively heal the environment with multi-functional creations. I hope to fabricate and install the large steel Conch later this year in the ocean. Snails have survived climate swings and mass extinction events; juxtaposed with the extreme climate sensitivity of corals, the immersed steel sea snail symbolizes perseverance, human dependence on a healthy ocean, and the will to renew endangered ecosystems.
Why Now?
2010 is the Year of Biodiversity. Coral reefs are the most genetically diverse ecosystems on Earth. Large reefs destroyed by human activities and climate change may never recover naturally in my lifetime. Biorock® reefs complement hands-off marine protected areas by taking hands-on action where it is dire to island communities. Rebuilding and tending coral reefs is part of the progression to conserve and sustain balance between consuming and replenishing resources. Artistic and functional, Biorock® reefs inspire hope. They are a vital, concrete expression of the synergy possible between science, innovative technology, ocean organisms and artistry to recharge our ailing seas.
About Colleen
Raised on the Monterey Peninsula in California, Colleen took the ocean tide, its ever-changing hues of greens, greys and blues for granted. In 2003, she discovered that she could use her design and metalsmithing skills to make living art that cultivated coral. She went to Bali for certification in Biorock® Mineral Accretion with the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Returning to the US, her socio-ecological alter egos, Miss Snail Pail and Amphitrite, emerged to give her immediate access to engage with people face to face about personal solutions to environmental problems. Biorock® coral restoration is a hub for Colleen's many spokes of interest, artistic expertise, and life philosophy.
What’s Your Idea?
Large-scale, mass-production creates consumer products which are low cost, but does a poor job of meeting individual functional needs, and creates economic instability through export/import imbalances. I have developed a framework for designing complex products which separates functional components into an aesthetic Skin, structural Skeleton, and electronic or mechanical Guts. This SSG framework allows open descriptions of products to be shared in a global cloud of possible modules. By remixing collections of modules from this global network, Cloud Manufacturing enables small-scale, small infrastructure, and small startup capital manufacturers to create highly functional objects. By responding to constraints of local user needs and available raw materials SSG allows these Cloud Manufacturers to balance local specificity of material and function with global innovation.
Why Now?
Manufacturing is broken. Manufacturing is supposed to give users the functions they need, at costs (environmental, social, and economical) that they can afford, while improving the stability of their regional economies. These promises have not been fulfilled. We can right this wrong by leveraging a more locally appropriate, user-centered, approach to manufacturing. Only this transition to Humblefacture can change the way we make things from the engine of cultural destruction that it has become into the engine of prosperity that it can be.
About Dominic
Dominic is a mechanical engineer and industrial designer, who understands the current state of manufacturing and its deficiencies. His knowledge in natural material production, alternative fabrication techniques, modular system design, and technology development mean that he can balance the complex factors needed to create a competitive alternative to current globalized manufacturing. He is well connected in both the digital fabrication world, and the open hardware community. Manufacturing should be humble to users, not the other way around. In order to make this happen, we need people who can see the global implications of design decisions, and understand how those designs can be applied to local solutions. Dominic is one of these people.
Posted by David Gurman
