Author: Karen Eng

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 film studio Factory Fifteen will soon release Jonah, about a giant jumping fish in Zanzibar (trailer shown, bottom).

Tell us about Robots of Brixton. 

It’s an event that happened at the start of my childhood. This event helped give the black community a voice, and helped put me in the position as the young black academic that I was when I made it. I thought it was an important story to retell, but I used tools I’d been working with, like character animation and visualization, to retell it in a more accessible way so that it wouldn’t be such a stereotypically black project and more accessible to wider audiences.

How do you integrate architecture into your films? 

Normally the city – or whatever the environment the setting is in – becomes very important, because everything happens somewhere. The city almost becomes a secondary character, which I’ll build up or design or exaggerate through my storytelling. The city and the design of the project is really as important as the story for me – almost as much as the story.

Did the spark of inspiration come from the set design or the story idea?

It was the story to start with, and then it was how I would execute that using my skill set. But the style is intrinsic to the story: it’s the stamp that I put on it.

You clearly have a real science-fiction aesthetic.

I’ve got the aesthetic, and I used to be well into manga. As an architect, you’re always thinking about the future, too. You build in narratives that are in the future, because you’re always thinking, “When I design a building, I’m designing it for what happens 10, 15 years into the future.” And when you start looking at the future, it’s hard not to have that kind of science-fiction element.

Monday on the TED Fellows stage, Tom Reilly did something unprecedented in the history of the Fellows — he singled out one for recognition. Presenting the newly minted TED Fellows Hero award to Iranian-British filmmaker Taghi Amirani, he said, “This person has gone above and beyond in writing, participating, a certain amount of kvetching, mentoring younger fellows, convening Fellows retreats, offering their apartment, and taking them out for the best Persian food. They offer the yarn that helps knit the community together.”

Amirani, a Senior Fellow who is currently working on mounting his first feature film, Coup 53 — the true story of the CIA coup staged in Iran in 1953 — was shocked into uncharacteristic speechlessness. He managed only to croak, “This is a mind f***!” We caught up with him shortly after the session to see whether he’d recovered.

Any words yet?

I am so embarrassed that I didn’t express my gratitude or the depth of my appreciation, or even express my surprise in an eloquent way, for someone who apparently talks a hell of a lot. I don’t even know what Tom said or I said. I was sitting there thinking, “What the hell? It was the craziest kept secret ever.” I’m still shaking, and this probably happened 45 minutes ago. My knees are still wobbly.

The totally unexpected honor Tom and the TED Fellows bestowed on me and the love they so generously showered me with deserves a more eloquent and thoughtful response than the clumsy tongue-tied gibberish I blurted out. So let me say this:

Tom has been a real friend, mentor and even a father figure, a creative and emotional inspiration right from day one. It’s just one of those moments when you meet a group of people, I think it was February 2009, that I just acquired this unbelievable extended family of friends. Ultimately, the most important thing for me is the people — friendships that I know will last beyond any TED conference. As a filmmaker, my source of inspiration, the raw material of my craft, if you will, is people — their stories, hearts and minds. It’s the human relationships that I find incredibly enriching amongst the Fellows, people who have given me more than they can ever imagine. If they have seen any spark in me it’s because they have been the catalyst.

At the risk of this sounding like one of those excruciatingly cheesy and awkward acceptance speeches, let me express my deep debt of gratitude to the TED Fellowship team: the big-hearted Tom Reilly, the beautiful and super-smart Logan McClure, the lovely Sam Kelly and Corey Mohr, the calm and stylish Emeka Okafor, and the soon to be totally amazing friends Shoham Arad and Patrick Darcy. And of course to Karen Eng for editing our words to make sense.

One last word: becoming a TED Fellow made me think big and reach beyond myself. Even though I’ve made some 40 documentaries, making my first feature is like starting from scratch. A daunting prospect. When the super challenging Iranian coup movie project finally gets the backing and support and makes it onto the screens, it will be almost entirely because of the doors the TED Fellowship is beginning to open.

Fellow Fellows chimed in on the roast. Here’s what they had to say:

“If only everyone brought as much exuberance, intensity and joy to life as Taghi does, we’d live in a different world.” — Erik Hersman.

“Taghi is like a cross between Picasso and a Jewish grandmother–his films are ambitious and brave, taking on hugely important political subjects, and he is the consummate host–who will nag you to try everything on your plate while throwing in a witty, eye-rolling joke or two.” — Nassim Aseffi

“Taghi has made my world a better place with his revealing and affectionate films, his whip-smart quick wit, his sexy photos of breakfast, and his under-rated dance moves. There’s a reason why he always looks like he’s got something up his sleeve.” — Candy Chang

“Few people have the guts to say what they want and what they mean without worrying if you’ll agree with them. Even fewer can make beautiful and brave films with that approach. Only one person has all these qualities and a shaved head so perfect it stands as a monument to cranial architecture. That person is Bruce Willis … And when he’s not available, that person is Taghi Amirani.” — Saeed Taji Farouky

“Taghi emanates everything delightful and delicious about the energy of the TED Fellows program, but he also listens. Though serious about his work, he also can take the piss out of it. He’s contemplative but still playful. He’s engaged, generous, humble, and OK with not knowing.” — Jessica Green.

Packed house, check. Excited buzz, check. It’s time for TED2013 Fellows talks!

Session 1
Tunde Jegede, composer
Nigerian-British composer and musician Tunde Jegede opens the session with his kora, the West African 21-string bridge harp. Sitting curled around the instrument, his fingers deftly pluck the strings, making a sound like rain dancing on water.

Ryan Holladay, musical artist
Ryan Holladay uses technology to dream up new ways to interact with and experience music in everyday life. Using location-aware mobile apps, he and his brother Hays augment landscapes with music, creating compositions that unfold as listeners move around in space. In a piece created for the National Mall in Washington, DC, people traverse the park with headphones on as a musical score unfolds, creating a journey of sound based on their own chosen trajectory — a choose-our-own-adventure aural experience that includes the sounds of instruments warming up, violins and a choir, an array of distinct melodies that fit together. The landscape and architecture are intrinsic to the listening experience, says Ryan; you have to be there. Next project: a musical project for the entire length of Highway 1 in California.

Louisa Preston, astrobiologist
Lousia Preston looks for aliens on Earth, hoping someday to find life on Mars. Earth is a lush, watery oasis compared to Mars, a dry, cold, high-UV and oxygen-free planet. Only extremophiles – life forms that thrive on such harsh conditions – could live there. But Mars once had water, too, presenting the possibility of past and present life. Louisa looks for analogues on Earth for Martian environments. Surprisingly, there are hundreds. Some iron-rich riverbeds, such as the Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain, provide habitat for both living and fossil acidophiles. Earth’s volcanoes – perfect analogues to Martian ones – harbor living thermophiles and fossil tubules. Impact craters from asteroids provide a habitat for such microbes as cyanobacteria. But the most Mars-like place on Earth is Antarctica, home to such creatures as tardigrades and cryptoendotiths. What are the chances we’ll find life on Mars, she asks? It’s predicted there are 17 billion Earthlike planets in the Milky Way alone, so they’re pretty good. Mars is simply the first step.

Video:
Short animated films by Safwat Saleem from his new project, Pardon Me, but WTF?, wherein stories or observations that can best be described as BS submitted by others are animated or illustrated by Safwat. 

David Lang, maker + writer
A few years ago, David Lang’s desire to pursue lost treasure in an underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras inspired him and a friend to develop an affordable remote-controlled underwater robot. Using the internet as a resource, he published his vision on a website to share his intentions and plans, and slowly began to attract feedback from makers, hobbyists and ocean engineers. With the help and contributions of an enthusiastic online community, he developed an open-source, underwater ROV that anyone can build with mostly off-the-shelf parts, opening up the possibility of underwater exploration for all. “We never found gold,” he says, “but the long-term potential is the network of DIY ocean explorers. What might we find with thousands of these devices at the bottom of the sea?”

Eddie Huang, writer, host + chef 
Striding out onto the stage to Kanye’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin,” Taiwanese-American Eddie Huang declares, “I’ve never had a home. I went to Taiwan and they considered me Chinese, and in China they consider me Taiwanese. In America, where I live, they consider me Korean.” Cue a photo of Kim Jong Il. His journey has been one of learning how to be himself, noticing early on that the exotic food packed for his school lunches marked him out as “other.” Recounting his first encounter with racism via a bully at school, his response was to fight back – and in the process close himself off completely to the dominant culture. Then, on a trip to Taiwan, he saw thousands of Taiwanese people “in cubicles, rollerblades, hot springs, Uggs” – and realized that living reactively only served to cut him off to a whole world of experience. Huang ultimately found cultural cohesion through food. He is the founder and head chef of Baohaus, a joint on New York’s Lower East Side which serves up Taiwanese-style street food, as well as the author of memoir Fresh Off the Boat and host of a food show of the same name on VICE.

Kibwe Tavares, architect + animator
Kibwe started drawing and animating robots and jetpacks at 15 – and went on to study architecture, using 3D animation to design and model spaces. While attending the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, he revisited his early love for telling stories, learning techniques and skills over the internet, and finding a community of like-minded people online who gave him the tools he needed. His short film Robots of Brixton, a retelling of the 1981 London Brixton riots, is visually startling, with futuristic figures moving through highly detailed, disintegrating urban landscapes. The film went viral on the internet and won a special jury prize at Sundance, leading to a commission by Film4 and the British Film Institute, Jonah, which combines more live action and 3D animated effects.

Baile Zhang, electrical engineer
There are two ways to see an object, says Baile Zhang. One is by reflection, and another way is by the shadow it casts. So can we make an object invisible by removing its shadow? True invisibility cannot be achieved unless we can recover the shadow as though the object were not there. How? Bend the light around the object like a stream around stone. Zhang has used the light-bending qualities of calcite, a cheap and abundant mineral, a form of calcium carbonate, to create the world’s first macroscopic invisibility cloak. He demonstrates onstage placing a piece of calcite over a rolled-up Post-it note submerged in oil, making the pink tube appear to disappear. The research has many possible applications, including imaging, communication and defense.

Renée Hlozek, cosmologist
Cosmologist Renée Hlozek works to understand what the universe is made of, what its initial conditions were, and how it’s changing with time. Using data gathered from the Atacama Cosmology telescope in Chile, which measures the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation with unprecedented accuracy, she examines tiny fluctuations in temperature in the universe to map the journey of photons, tracing the incredible journey they have taken to get to us. Mapping the temperature fluctuations of the CMB radiation onto an imaginary sphere outside of the Earth, we can see what the early universe was like: places that were a little bit more dense act like a sink for radiation and appear a bit cooler; places that are less dense appear a little bit hotter. These tiny fluctuations eventually grew to be all the stars and galaxies we see today.

Mohammad Herzallah, neuroscientist
The situation in Palestine is extremely complex, but almost everyone focuses entirely on politics, ignoring the region’s most precious resource – its people. And they are at risk: Palestine has an extremely high prevalence of clinical depression. A staggering 40 percent of the population of the West Bank — about 1,060,000 Palestinians — suffer from depression, 65 percent of them under the age of 24. What stands in the way of treatment? Social stigma, few doctors, little biomedical research and, ironically, brain drain. But there’s an upside: Palestine has a young, genetically uniform unmedicated population – a boon for biomedical research. Mohammad’s Palestinian Neuroscience Institute at Al-Quds University is building infrastructure for such research that also integrates training, patient education and care, promoting brain health and brain power in Palestine. The PNI has already led to globally significant research and discoveries – such as the effects of antidepressants on memory.

TED Fellows Hero – Taghi Amirani
In the midst of the proceedings, Tom Reilly announces that for the first time, the Fellows program would honor a Fellow – recognizing service to the wider TED Fellows community. “This person has gone above and beyond in writing, participating, a certain amount of kvetching, convening Fellows retreats, offering their apartment and taking them out for the best Persian food in the world,” said Tom. “They offer the yarn that knits the community together.” Watch for an interview with Taghi Amirani, filmmaker and provocateur, later on this morning.

Christine Sun Kim, sound artist + composer
Deaf from birth, Christine Sun Kim grew accustomed to ignoring the politics and etiquette of sound because she didn’t have access to it herself. For years, she struggled to find her own voice as an artist, and ironically,  found it in sound. Using todays’ advanced technology, she investigates and rationalises her relationship with sound and spoken languages on her own terms. Her experiments have including making seismic calligraphy – speakers she controls knock loaded paintbrushes off the surface onto paper. She’s also “listened” to feedback for hours with her body, which resulted in extreme physical reactions – anxiety, insomnia, physical dementia – which she translated into a graphic score titled Feedback Aftermath. As to silence, she asks, “With no access to sound, what can I equate to silence? Maybe it doesn’t exist in my book.”

Jane Chen, infant health entrepreneur
When Jane Chen started out on her path developing affordable infant incubators, she was sometimes asked whether high infant mortality rates in developing nations – a phenomenon so common that it is often used as an indicator – meant that mothers simply accepted it as a part of life. What she found, of course, was that each loss is no less a profound tragedy. Three million babies around the world die a year – six infants every minute – partly due to lack of affordable life-saving technology. Her low-cost, reusable Embrace warmers, a simple pouch with a waxlike substance that melts to a constant temperature for up to 8 hours, are now being distributed to medical personnel as well as mothers to help save the lives of thousands of premature infants. But it’s the mothers, she notes – the ones who are most deeply invested – who use them the most effectively.

Negin Farsad, comedian + filmmaker
Negin Farsad wants to make white people laugh. It’s the best way to deal with the problem of racism, she says. But why white people? Only because they control government, politics, outer space – and TED talks. She offers three guidelines to making white people laugh: #1: Change the stereotype. If you’re from Belgium, you’re associated with waffles, if you’re from Brazil, with big-breasted women wearing and selling fruit. If you’re from Iran, you’re associated with … uranium. So she wrote a show called Bootleg Islam that conflates Iran with eggplants. Because everyone knows Iranians love eggplants. #2: Don’t be afraid to talk about politics. Her PG-13 rated animation, “Israeli Palestinian conflict: A romantic comedy,” depicts Israel and Palestine hooking up in a one-night stand. #3: Get up in people’s faces, but in a delightful way, and #4: Get some nonthreatening allies – i.e., white people. “As long as we keep white people happy they’re less likely to start wars,” she says.

Video:
A brief animation from artist and TED Senior Fellow Colleen Flanigan depicts sea creatures suddenly drawn to a Greek temple-shaped structure as it’s plugged in. Colleen designs coral habitats with Biorock technology, which uses metal and electricity to draw hard minerals to form a coral-friendly substrate.

Asha de Vos, blue whale researcher
Asha researches an unusual population of blue whales who stay in the warm waters of Sri Lanka to feed, rather than migrating as blue whales normally do. Why do they do it? Is there really enough food? She set out to answer these questions, and offers the results for the first time today. It turns out the south coast of Sri Lanka is teeming with krill, which is the blue whales’ exclusive diet. Unfortunately, this fertile strip also happens to be a busy shipping lane, and whales are often injured or killed. The next phase of her research will be to reduce whale death by ship strike: she plans to use science to measure where the overlap is, work with shipping companies to move the lanes, and launch a public campaign to mobilize public support, so that humanity can marvel at whales in their own natural habitat. Asha recently completed a TED-Ed lesson, which she unveiled from the Fellows stage. And was gifted with an adorable puppet of herself.

Alicia Eggert, interdisciplinary artist
Alica Eggert is preoccupied with time. Her sculptures of clocks and neon lights often call our attention to what’s happening now, while incorporating words as objects and physical forms. Signs installed on the sides of buildings that say “now” and “then” physically divide time and space, delineating past from present or present from future, depending how one approaches. But now isn’t static, she says. It’s dynamic. One kinetic sculpture shapes the word NOW over again, but, like the present moment, never comes to a complete stop. One moment is continuously being replaced by another. In “Eternity,” clocks wired to hands materialize the word out of the chaotic movement of lines once every 12 hours. “Wonder,” a kinetic wall-mounted piece that at first appears like a constellation in the night sky, responds to viewers’ movements in front of it by sometimes moving to spell out the word itself. Wonder is both a noun and a verb: Alicia’s work encourages people to play and discover the unexpected about themselves or the world around them.

Meklit Hadero, singer + songwriter
In session two, audience was greeted by a sensual and elegant performance by TED Fellow Meklit Hadero and bassist Miles Jay. The Ethiopian-American songwriter, musician and cultural instigator uses music as a platform for bridging cultural boundaries and borders. Today, she performs “Outside of Time.”

Jinha Lee, inventor + interaction researcher
Throughout the history of computers, we’ve shortened the gap between us and digital information. At the moment, we have the digital at our fingertips. But what if there were no boundary at all? Jinha Lee’s experiments with digital interaction started by creating a tool that penetrates into digital space, translating pressure into pixels so that designers could draw directly in 3D. Next, he explored how to manipulate digital information using the dexterity of our hands. Using advanced technologies such as transparent displays and objects digitized in space to record and transmit movement, he devises ways to let us reach out and manipulate pixels with our bare hands. As we increase physical contact with the digital world, he predicts that soon, we’ll be able to enter the digital realm and start acting upon our own physical world — until the only boundary left is our imagination.

Miriah Meyer, science visualization designer
Miraih Meyer’s thoughtful visualisations help scientists untangle complex concepts – like comparing the human genome with that of a lizard. She works in partnership with scientists to create visualisation tools that could make clear the relationships between datasets, building intuition out of the information contained in it. But it’s not just about making pretty infographics. In one collaboration with genomic researcher Manfred Grabherr, her visualisation allowed him to see how noisy his data was – a problem that had been obscured by previous, off-the-shelf visualisation methods. He revised his theory entirely. Designing visuals for scientists is about getting a deep understanding of their problems, questions and mental models, says Miriah. When treated as a deep investigation into sense-making, visualisations can move beyond helping scientists to influencing them.

Video:
A short film featuring Le Chal, shoes that are guided by GPS and Googlemaps via Bluetooth, being developed for use by the visually impaired by TED Senior Fellow Anthony Vipin Das. 

Alanna Shaikh, global development expert
Alanna Shaikh pulls the veil off a few things we don’t know – or choose not to look at – around international development. Fact 1: We don’t know what it is. The number of definitions out there for international development are huge and varied, from reduction of poverty and achieving Millennium Development Goals to the ’60s, idealistic vision of liberating people based on structural transformation. Fact 2: It’s about more than aid. Reforming protectionism trade policies in the wealthy world, allowing more immigration into wealthy countries, and slowing climate change would all benefit poor people. Fact 3: The developing world is subsiding to the developed world: corrupt officials hide their money in international banks, and money is paid out of the developing world to the developed world for massive infrastructure, such as a mosque built in Turkmenistan by a French contracting company. International developing is surprisingly personal, says Alana, and you have to define for yourself what it means. For her, it’s about a fairer future for all our children, no matter where in the world they are growing up.

Paul Wicks, medical architect
Medicine is pretty good at measuring the physical parameters of some diseases: heart disease, HIV. But how do you take the measure of autism, depression, ALS, and Parkinson’s? Diseases like MS skirt the boundary: it can be seen via scanner in the human body, but this doesn’t always match what the patient experiences from day to day. His startup, PatientsLikeMe, is a free platform that gives patients the tools to track their own diseases. They can also share with a community of fellow patients, contributing to their own care while generating valuable data – from frequency of symptoms to responses to medication. These tools can help measure the disease and even predict its progress over time. Paul announces that in 2013, PLM will be building the world’s first open-source  platform for the development of patient-centered health outcome measures, supported by funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Every tool developed using this platform will be made free to everyone – a step towards consigning diseases to the history books.

Antonio Torres, architect + naturalist
Waterbed gardens with grass rippling underfoot, ice fortresses that look like melted popsicles, pavilions made of giant balloons. Antonio Torres challenges what it means to build, experimenting with membranes filled with living biological matter, gases and liquids as architectural building blocks. Textured, colourful, playful and fantastical, his work invites full-bodied contact with the outdoors. Grounded treehouse pods invite you to crawl in and lie down in the softness. Giant sausages stuffed with wood chips create outdoor seating, and later sprout mushrooms. Pressurised membrane structures respond to temperature, environment, and touch. Above all, this architecture is designed to be played with. What next? For the future, he envisions gelatinous floating ecological reefs, allowing marine habitats to drift freely through water.

Ben Burke, writer, performer + designer
Puppeteer, junkyard tinkerer, showman and poet Bed Burke makes a life and an art out of winging it. He’s made kinetic sculpture from junk: magical, mechanized and resembling fantastical Victorian inventions. He’s sprouted a theatre company from a gathering of friends reading poetry – an assembly of performers cobbled together with characters developed from real-life personalities. “Too busy to memorize lines? You get to play a mute.” He’s sculpted trash into boats, which serve both as floating art and as a stage for performance, and motored them up the Hudson River, or across the Adriatic to Venice. His point? “We spend a lot of time trying to get things we think we want, then throw them away for something else – a terrible story. Working with what we’ve got is a path to something you’ll love and keep, and that at least gives you a better story. And a story is all we ever get in the end.”

Eric Berlow & Sean Gourley, ecological networks scientist, military physicist
Eric and Sean together explored the TEDx ecosystem, scraping 24,000 talks, their transcripts and associated data off YouTube to analyze the ways the key concepts connect and relate to each other – a complex representation of a vibrant global conversation. Working with this data, they generated 3D visualisations showing an architecture of networks which can be manipulated and examined from many angles, from the complexity of interconnectivity within themes, sub themes, and disciplines to the all-time most-watched topics – gratitude, nutrition and, of course, porn – and how the topics fare over time. The network structure can also be used to find talks that may otherwise be overlooked, like those that creatively bridge disparate fields. It works well with TEDx talks, but demonstrates that networks are the cartography that allow us to navigate the landscape of ideas.

Shivani Siroya, mobile finance entrepreneur
Many of us take our credit score – and the purchasing power it gives us – entirely for granted, but there are 4.5 billion people in the world who lack a financial identity. Shivani Siroya created a solution, InSight, a mobile-phone based technology allowing unbanked consumers to build a credit score out of the details of daily life and their spending habits. Using voice and SMS technology on a simple cell phone, users can input food, transport, medicine and inventory expenses to be run through an algorithm that generates an accurate score, acceptable by participating commercial banks. Small-business owners who could only previously operate in cash can buy in bulk inventory, keep track of income and expenses, and reinvest in and grow their own businesses. InSight has backtested scores against real repayment data and is 98% accurate. With something as simple as a credit score, InSight gives people access to formal markets, and has the potential to empower billions.

Tunde Jegede, composer
Born to a Nigerian father and Irish mother, Tunde Jegede had to learn to balance cultures and carve out an identity from an early age. Music was his refuge. Leaving England as a child, Tunde traveled to Africa to train with master of kora Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, whose family has held the ancient griot tradition since the 13th century. Here, Tunde found a sense of home and belonging, a place “where my inner and outer voice began to merge.” He was shown that music is a way of life, an integral part of society. In parallel to studying kora, Tunde also studied cello in the Western classical tradition, but played these instruments in isolation from each other. Only later, after a quest for a universal truth in music that took him through improvisational jazz and musical collaboration, did he finally find the space that allowed him to weave together all his musical threads. He says, “Living between worlds allowed me to form my identity, embrace my path of a nomad.”

Cyrus Kabiru, found object artist
Cyrus Kabiru sees the world through glasses fashioned from what others discard. The self-taught painter and sculptor makes pieces from found objects and trash collected from the streets of Nairobi – his life-size sculptures of street musicians are made from 20,000 to 60,000 bottle caps each. His spectacles – C-Stunners – are surreal, whimsical, wearable sculpture crafted from scrap metal, wire, stone and other found objects. “Elephant” made of stone and metal, calls attention to the problem of poaching, while the Dictator series includes “Mugabe” – a pair of spectacles that resemble bullet holes through glass.

Safwat Saleem, graphic designer and satirist
Safwat has always struggled with his ability to deal with bullshit – it’s everywhere. Outraged by rampant Islamophobia and Arizona’s SB1070 anti-illegal immigration law, he began making satirical art in order to stay sane. His series of posters, A Bunch of Crock, call out absurd biases and injustice in a colourfully retro, deeply irreverent and cathartic way. When his work began to take off on the internet, he realised that it resonated with people because they, too, clearly needed this form of catharsis. In response, he’s taking his work a step further, soliciting submissions from the around the world at pardonmebutwtf.com to make work from what other people think is bullshit. He has already received some sobering stories, teaching him that “Life can be difficult, full of challenges. But a little bit of creativity and humour can help us get through.” The end slide: a poster that says “If you don’t like this talk, you’re racist.”

Myshkin Ingawale, medical device innovator
At TED2012, Myshkin Ingawale’s TouchB noninvasive anemia detector made waves. His latest idea takes his goal of democratising medicine even further – a smartphone app for urinalysis. “We all have two things,” he quips. “Cell phones, and urine. There must be something going on here.” In fact, he says, urine can tell a lot about health, but gets second-grade treatment to blood. Taking advantage of urinalysis dipsticks, which have been around for decades, are inexpensive and readily available, Myshkin developed Uchek, a smartphone app that uses a color mat to accurately read and analyse them. Onstage, he demonstrates, using a bottle of urine donated from an unnamed audience member. The phone app takes a photo of the strip against the mat, producing a readout. The app includes reference information to help users understand the results. The Uchek can be used for early detection of kidney, liver, glucose level and bladder problems, and so on – putting a clearer picture of our own health into our own hands.

Blue whale researcher and TED Senior Fellow Asha de Vos unveiled her TED-Ed lesson today on the TED Fellows stage. The video — “Why are blue whales so enormous?” — stars a puppet version of de Vos, which she had been coveting for weeks. So Fellows & Community Director Tom Rielly presented her with it, hand-carried from London by TED Senior Fellow Taghi Amirani. We asked her how she felt to be gifted with her own plush doppelgänger.

“It was such an amazing surprise! When I saw the first cut of the video, I was roaring with laughter. I hadn’t known they were going to make a puppet of me. So I had actually been pestering Tom and all the TED staff for the last few days about how I could get my hands on it. Tom was very convincing when he said it was in the middle of nowhere and it would be impossible to get it,” says de Vos. “I realize now in hindsight that they’ve been avoiding me a little bit for the last two days. It was a well-kept secret. I’m looking forward to using it when I talk to kids about the ocean, which I usually do wearing a mask and fins! Now she [the puppet] can do it.”

Photo: Karen Eng

At TED2012, DIY neuroscientist and TED Senior Fellow Greg Gage shocked the TED audience when he cut the leg off a live cockroach onstage to demonstrate his Spiker Box – a device that allows anyone to see and hear spikes in the neural activity of insects.

A year later, his company Backyard Brains is coming up with new science education products — like the MicroManipulator, which allows you to place electrodes on tiny things. These products are affordable enough to allow students of all ages to learn about and experiment with electrophysiology, an experience previously only accessible in professional labs.

Here at TED2013, he demonstrates the BYB SmartScope – affectionately known as the RoachScope. This sturdy, portable microscope, currently in beta, uses smartphones to view, snap and share magnified objects over Facebook, Twitter and email, and costs $80 – putting cutting-edge experimentation into the hands of students, teachers and the just plain curious.

A cosmologist from South Africa. A found-object artist from Kenya. A neuroscientist from Palestine. A crowd fitting this description (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg) can only mean one thing: TED Fellows. The new class of TED2013 Fellows, as well as 2012 and 2013 Senior Fellows, converged in Long Beach on Friday to start their own pre-TED conference. This video gives a glimpse of the first get-to-know-you gathering and introduces a few new faces. To discover more about this year’s Fellows and what they do, download the gorgeous Fellows program guide. And stay tuned for our coverage of the TED Fellows speaker sessions, happening on Monday, February 25.

TED Fellow Lars Jan, the director of the multi-disciplinary art lab Early Morning Opera, is seeking everyday personal rituals from collaborators — perhaps, you? — for a work-in-progress called HOLOSCENES. This public-performance installation — inspired by humanity’s relationship with climate change and flooding — will be made up of three aquariums, each enclosing a performer enacting a looped, choreographed ritual as water rises and falls driven by environmental data drawn from the internet.

Would you like to contribute? Read on.

Can you give us an example of the kinds of rituals you’re collecting?

We had a collaborator on the border of Myanmar who met a family and documented a daily face-painting ritual. It’s for beautification, but it also acts as a sunblock. It involves a kind of wood called thanaka, which is ground on a particular kind of stone with a little bit of water to form a paste, which is applied on the face. This ritual is mostly done by women, who also apply it to their children, often in beautiful patterns. This particular woman used a toothbrush to apply it every morning. That’s the thing that’s important — the ritual might be something that happens in hundreds of thousands of households, but the point of the project is not to recreate the ritual in a generic fashion. We’re making contact with very specific individuals who perform their own ritual in a very specific way. I make coffee in the morning like a lot of people, but I also have my own idiosyncrasies — a personal pattern to this daily ritual that is all my own.

Will the rituals you’re collecting form the basis of the performances inside the aquariums?

Yes. The choreography and design of the physical behaviors inside the aquariums are all sourced from people we make contact with who live near any one of the 52 coordinates that we generated randomly across the globe. Our performers simulate these rituals inside the aquariums based on documentation collected by collaborators. Sometimes the people we’re contacting are far away – I’m communicating with people who are, say, in Uganda, having been handed from one interested person to another to another to reach people who are close to a coordinate and want to collaborate with us. What I wanted to do was to create a semi-open source network, dependent on an unpredictable cascade of online and in-person encounters.

Will the contributors get to participate in performances?

Yes, by providing the source material for the choreography and design at the heart of the project.
The entire collection process is actually referencing 500 years of what could be called a colonialist collection process, starting with imperial menageries, cabinets of wonder or curiosity, down to zoos and world’s fairs and aquariums. And we want to depriortize catastrophe as a lens through which to look at the world.

The project is inspired by flooding. In the last decade, I’ve found myself looking at a lot of places I had never seen before, and the reason I was looking at them, by way of beautiful photographs online and in newspapers, was because they were devastated. I wanted to find a more democratic way to look at the planet and the people on it. Rather than highlight people at the extremes, at their lowest, I wanted to cultivate and collect the mundane — and sacred — everyday behaviors of people across the planet.

How do the rituals then relate to climate change and flooding?

That’s partly where the conceptual and aesthetic leap is. Ultimately, the project is putting the rhythms of daily behaviors and human-scale patterns in conversation with longer-term patterns, such as those driving climate change. That’s a question at the heart of the project: What’s the future of long-term thinking? Are we, as individuals, communities, and a global society, capable of evolution in terms of recognizing complex, long-term patterns and then adapting our everyday behaviors based on that rational understanding?

The aquariums flood and drain with water at varying speeds. What drives the hydraulic system to make water going up and down in the tanks is environmental data scraped from the internet and other sources. Sometimes it floods incredibly slowly, sometimes very quickly. It’s a material data visualization: the water level goes up and down, but rather than seeing it from a remove, the data driving the water movement flooding and draining is dramatically affecting the ritual being performed, and dramatically changing the environment of the person in the tank. I’m curious to see the visceral empathic response viewers will have seeing the water flooding and draining, flooding and draining while a person — a performer — copes with the very mythic yet increasingly present-tense condition of deluge.

This visceral, visual metaphor — a person fighting through flood in an aquariam — is partly about our collective myopia in the face of these changes and our persistence and adaptive capacities in response to our changing environment — a multi pronged, complex visual metaphor that radiates out and connects with all kinds research and thinking, from behavioral science, climate science and palaeontology to questions like “What’s the neurology of long-term thinking? What’s the evolutionary future of empathy in an increasingly mediated world?” All those things are woven together in the project.

Where will HOLOSCENES be performed?

The full public, three-aquarium iteration of HOLOSCENES will premiere at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco in 2015, and likely premiere in a one-aquarium iteration sometime in 2014. Ultimately, it is meant to be a public performance intervention in an urban environment, running 24-hours a day for 7 days. The intention is to become a pivot for a public discourse and awareness outside of an exclusively artistic context. My collaborators and I are interested in reaching a far broader audience.

To find out more and contribute a ritual to be considered for HOLOSCENES, visit the website »

Fashion designer and BioCouture founder Suzanne Lee harnesses the labor of microorganisms to grow clothing. Computational architect Skylar Tibbits — who’s setting up a lab at MIT focused on self-assembly technologies and programmable materials — examines biological systems to develop his methods. We asked them to discuss the directions they’re exploring, and the trends and challenges inherent in working with natural processes to meet humanity’s needs.

Your work seems to reflect a real trend in using technologies inspired by nature — not only in the design, which has happened on and off for centuries, but in the way you produce and fabricate the things you make.

Skylar Tibbits: From my perspective, it is not about inspiration from Nature, and in many cases, we probably shouldn’t take inspiration from nature. Rather, nature is a good example of the systems we are exploring — but there are many non-natural systems that demonstrate similar principles.

My work really started from the architecture side, then got pulled towards computer science when I was at MIT. I took lessons from self-replicating systems, self-regulating, digital information/majority voting, redundancy and some of the fundamental ideas introduced by Turing/Von Neumann, and so on. The link to nature — proteins, cellular replication/DNA — really only came after the fact, when I realized that the systems I was producing were incredibly close to those found in nature.

There is obviously a huge trend at the moment for bio-inspired design and biomimicry, but I believe many of these proposals have fundamentals flaws. Natural systems evolved for very specific reasons, over millions of years, with very specific parameters, scale-lengths, forces, and so on, and the process of translating these phenomena to other scales, function and human desires does not come naturally or directly. We should not simply assume that systems working at nanoscales can easily be translated to large scales. And if we do, why not change the parameters — why would the translation have to be entirely direct?

The second flaw is the tendency to use nature as a source for aesthetic inspiration — the assumption that if it looks like nature then it is or works like nature. Finally, I see our tendency to look past the facts of evolution and why systems have specifically evolved in a particular direction. Many — maybe all — natural systems took some path of evolution where each mutation was built upon the last, and decisions along this journey were arbitrary and extremely specific to its time, place, climate and scale. So natural systems work very well for some things, and in other cases don’t work at all for what we are looking for.

That said, I think there are a number of very interesting developments in science, engineering and design that are not only taking inspiration from nature — they are literally using nature — such as DNA origami (or self-assembly of DNA strands to build 2D and 3D shapes at the nano-scale). Biological processes are far more complex, efficient, precise, adaptive then nearly any manmade process or machine we have today, so it makes perfect sense to use biological processes for what they are good at, or manipulate specific variables within them to achieve something they could never have arrived at themselves. This points to Suzanne’s incredible work with cellulose. The cellulose doesn’t naturally want to build clothing per say, but we can harness its natural abilities with our own knowledge of the process to achieve something higher.

Suzanne Lee: Skylar’s quite right — bacteria aren’t desperate to generate dresses! The emergent field of synthetic biology enables us to have the best of both worlds. We can harness the best bits of biological systems to design and build entirely new organisms that better fit our needs. This is not without complex ethical issues, however, and hopefully an internationally agreed and robust ethical code will develop simultaneously with the potential engineering advances.

My work isn’t really inspired by nature. It IS nature. I’m interested in exploiting living organisms to create biodegradable products. In my opinion, the design trend towards biomimicry is about putting the designer ego to one side and accepting that nature has already come up with so many inspirational design solutions. This doesn’t necessarily lead to design looking or feeling “naturalistic” though.

I do agree about the flaws inherent in directly translating from nature and how there can be issues relating to scale — I see this as both limitation AND opportunity. Understanding scale in a biological sense is still a challenge to me as a non-scientist! I find scientists are very happy jumping from discussion of proteins, to bacteria, to fibres to materials – daunting conceptual jumps from the nano to the macro scale.

How do your approaches differ?

Skylar: Our work comes from from different starting points and it’s applied at different scales. I am not working directly with natural processes, although I have started a few collaborations with molecular designers recently, working on DNA origami, that may prove to be fruitful in the coming months. I mainly look toward the natural processes as a resource manual, comparatively looking at how those processes work and how my designed/engineered processes function. How does DNA store discrete information, how is it so good at self-regulating and error correction, how do proteins store their assembly information? None of this is meant to be translated 1:1. Rather, it becomes another model or example where it happens and we can learn from it.

I have a lot of experience working with physical/building-scale materials (plastics, wood, metal, casting, “bricks” etc) — and these inherently become the material palette I work with. However, I try to focus on these “dead” materials and embed information directly into them to offer more “active” characteristics (usually without motors or electronics). I’m trying to discover how much information can they store, how can they replicate inherently, how can they move and assemble themselves, and so on. None of these properties are necessarily found within the materials themselves. Rather, it’s a different way of looking at the materials and at the way we build things.

Suzanne’s work came from a completely different direction and uses far different “materials” and applications, thus leading to the different aesthetic output.

Suzanne: I’ve personally come full circle from loving techno/sci-fi aesthetics and being excited by material innovations that build “smart” complexity into systems and surfaces to embracing nature’s “smart.” I’m now driven by the entire product life-cycle using renewable resources or ideally local waste streams to create biodegradable materials. By harnessing a living organism to manufacture for you the resulting material or product needn’t look “biological” or “organic.” But it does offer opportunities to build in biological functionality.

What issues around working with natural systems do you discuss between yourselves? What do you have in common, and what else are you thinking about and investigating together?

Suzanne: We both struggle with new notions of manufacturing processes and time. We share an interest in being “hands off” — allowing structures to self-generate, Sky by designing this into architecture so that they are “compelled” to organize, and my own work with living organisms that simply require the presence of nutrient to create material forms.

With each approach, the time it takes for construction may be longer OR shorter than a “traditional” method, challenging existing limits and opportunities. I’m always asked how long it takes to grow a garment (answer: approximately three weeks) — as though this were the only barrier to mass adoption. But it makes little sense to contrast this with the supply chain lead times for a comparable “conventional” garment because that never factors in the time it takes to obtain the fibre in the first place — cotton plant to t-shirt? petroleum to nylon jacket? grazing animal to leather handbag? For example, in a fermented process, product can be simultaneously formed as fibre is spun and dyed — multiple production stages condensed into one. A more useful comparison would include factors such as resource consumption, carbon footprint, end of use, and so on.

Skylar: I think an interesting point to discuss would be the scale of the application and how far we can push biological/natural processes outside of their comfort zone. Suzanne and I have talked a lot about how far could you push a biological process to the scale of a building. For example, could you produce cellulose or other materials to grow to extremely large-scales? How long would it take, how do you build a scaffolding etc). And how can you “seed” it’s growth, working hand-in-hand, giving it constraints, waiting for the reaction, giving further constraints?

Suzanne: Firstly you can engineer an organism to produce the attributes you desire (when to biodegrade), then arrange these into a particular structure (fibre alignment) and finally engineer the overarching parameters to respond to external stimuli (water resistance).

Aesthetically and practically, I’m not sure either of us has arrived at something that we suggest is perfected or finished. To date I’ve embraced the natural aesthetics that emerge from the process as it helps to explain a narrative (this is in stark contrast to how we normally approach fashion: fashion relishes artifice). Ultimately it’s not what I’m striving for, but for now it serves an illustrative purpose.

Regarding scale, I would argue that we both come from backgrounds which use the human body as starting point for considering scale: Vitruvian, Corbusier’s Modulor, Fibonacci, golden section, and so on. That’s why I struggle with suddenly zooming into the nanoscale! For me the challenge is to understand how by mastering what is happening at the nanoscale we might design the ideal macro qualities.

What interests me about what Skylar is doing is how he might bring biological attributes to large-scale structures, this may be with steel, wood or plastics. But I’m also intrigued to know if (biologically) living systems could play a role. We have no idea what new hybrid materials/fabrication techniques will emerge in future — rampant mutant algae that turn to concrete? It’s exciting to think the solutions could be located somewhere within the space between our respective work. I think we are entering a dynamic new era for design where, with scientific collaboration, we can explore all manner of material and manufacturing innovations.

Skylar: I totally agree — biological attributes at large-scales is extremely interesting. There is certainly a lot of work going into gradient density materials and adaptable performance in materials or building systems. An opportunity might be to utilize natural processes for their ability to respond to passive sources of energy, their natural tendency to “adapt,” and for their internal ability to have “desire.” Man-made systems lack the ability to have “desire,” this gets into the theories of artificial intelligence — and how can a system make decisions internally without external programs or command. How can a system write its own code, or where does the initial genetic code come from?

Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms.

DNA origami is one of the only examples where we are forced to use a process of self-assembly simply because there is no other way to build at that scale. If we want to build structures at extremely small scale-lengths, then we need to work within their arena, on their terms. DNA is an amazing building material because it has rather “simple” units and interconnections, it has a language or interface for design, i.e., programmability, and it has a process where it can transform based on energy.

I think that we will soon see applications that are extremely similar to DNA origami but at very large scales. Instances where we currently cannot build what we want simply because we don’t have the right materials or machines/processes — these are perfect applications for new types of methods in assembly and new processes for design. This is where collaborations between designers and natural systems can have powerful applications/implications.

Why the drive to look to to nature to innovate manufacturing processes in the first place? Why now?

Skylar: There are two possibilities: Are we at a place where we’ve pushed the limits of material properties to extreme possibilities and dexterity, developed wonderfully innovative solutions for fabricating these new materials and even beginning to find automated processes for assembly — yet the ever changing demands of society, economies, climates, technology and scale (large or small) are requiring adaptability at such dramatic scales and paces that our current modes of production don’t cut it, forcing us to find infused processes of Frankenstein bio-adaptive and manmade processes? Or are we just looking for new modes of inspiration, toolsets and mediums, and the natural tendency is to look at our biological counterparts for dialogue?

Suzanne: I think there’s both push and pull taking place. If we look to the history of design, radical innovation mostly occurs where ground-breaking materials or manufacturing techniques are introduced. Human creativity is constantly pursuing the new. At the same time, we do indeed face so many environmental, economic and societal challenges that current resource inefficiency and wastage has become obscene, driving the need for change. In both our work we also seem to be proposing very limited human intervention. We haven’t really discussed what this means for the workforce. Our workers seem to be robots, autonomous structures and biological organisms, but that’s a whole other discussion!