February 9-13, 2010
February 9-13, 2010
Do you consider yourself an artist or scientist first?
I usually describe myself as an artist with a background in science, but I feel first and foremost an artist. Artist, biologist, space researcher, and TED Fellow — that’s how I describe myself now, but it changes.
It seems when people are confronted with a hybrid practice, they want to figure why. It’s not an easy question to answer. One thing crucial to everything I do is exploration. But then one might wonder, “Why don’t you just become and stay a scientist?” One thing that struck me when I was a scientist is the incredible degree of specialization needed to develop within the discipline. This is generally a good thing. But it started stifling my creativity. I felt I wasn’t using my full potential.
So I started studying photography while I was doing my PhD research in ecology. In the evenings I would be in the darkroom; in the daytime I did scientific research. During the course of that parallel practice, which lasted for quite a few years, I discovered an enormous sense of freedom that I felt was missing in my science practice. I got absorbed by arts, all arts — much more than just photography. One exhibition that really hit me in the face was the contemporary arts exhibit Documenta X, in Germany. There was a lot of documentary work, a lot of video and photography, not National Geographic style, but more radical experimental stuff. For me, this was a huge eye-opener. This was also a form of exploration: making documentary photography, using documentary video. At the same time, it involved strong artistic expression. And it didn’t have to fit into a specific, narrow framework.
After finishing my PhD I decided to dedicate myself full-time to the arts. Then, within the arts I began to incorporate biology — which finally led me to work with biological, technological, as well as social systems. Bear in mind this was all part of one organic process that is still developing.
![Biomodd [LBA2]](http://tedconfblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/av_090908_012_croppedx1.jpg "AV_090908_012_croppedx")
Is this where Biomodd, your longest-running project, comes in?
Yes. I started Biomodd in 2007. The core idea of the project is to intricately interconnect a biological living system with a recycled computer system. The main reason to do this is, first of all, to show people a different relationship between computer electronics and biology. Not one of opposition – because many people think of computers in opposition to nature – but of making them work together. On the other hand, the work is very much inspired by popular culture and science-fiction themes in which living biological cells merge with electronic components.
Biomodd brings this idea into physicality as an artwork. It’s an ongoing series of computer networks assembled out of recycled components in which a living ecosystem is installed. The ecosystem uses the waste heat of the electronics to grow and develop. This was the basic, core idea. So Biomodd incorporates energy recycling, computer recycling and ecological growth. There is also a social dynamic involved: I’m not building the projects in my studio and then shipping them to a museum for exhibition. I’m going to a location, putting the idea on the table, and inviting people to work with me to find its shape. Depending on the culture we’re working in — because I’ve been doing this in many different places around the world — each Biomodd project takes its own particular shape. Sometimes, people from former Biomodd versions come over and join the new team, so you get these interesting exchanges of experience and ideas around the project.
Biomodd usually gets disassembled afterwards, and the units that have been built by the participants usually get adopted, with some pieces getting incorporated into subsequent Biomodds. So Biomodd is essentially an ongoing iteration of an idea. It’s also an open-source project, so those who want to can build and own their own versions. Biomodd just pops up in different places.
In the beginning, there was a strong focus on just energy recycling. Now the concept is much more about how to make both the living biological system and the electronic system communicate. At first, the communication only went one way: heat exchange from the computer system to the biological system. But now we’re also working on robotics. We’re also working with sensors. We’re exploring multiple ways in which both systems can really come together and start exchanging different things like data, behavior and energy.
How do the plants communicate with the computer? I can see how the computer gives heat to the plants and helps them grow, but is there any feedback from the plants to the computer?
We’re currently working on that. We’re developing a large and complex version of Biomodd in New York City for an exhibition called ReGeneration at the New York Hall of Science. It’s NYSCI’s first contemporary art exhibit, so it’s quite exciting to be part of that. This new Biomodd explores the concept of mixed reality, which means that you have your ecosystem and your virtual world constantly acting on each other. The ecosystem, through sensors and data streams, is continuously adjusting the virtual world in real time. Imagine walking in a computer game, and the game environment is constantly morphing, driven by changes in the ecosystem — a beautiful connection between the real and the virtual. Mixed reality kicks in as soon as you allow the game and its players to change the ecosystem as well. So you allow the game, for example, to manipulate the ecosystem using robotics and artificial intelligence. You can build a whole battery of robotics that add nutrients, add water, change lighting, cut down plants, and so on. And so the game itself is also having a potential impact on the ecosystem. Both the ecosystem and the virtual world can continuously bounce off each other. When it becomes impossible to disentangle cause and effect, you create a new, mixed reality. This is something we’re working on in New York City in collaboration with Parsons The New School for Design. So this is, obviously, a huge challenge and a pretty complex thing.
What do Biomodd ecosystems usually consist of?
Usually they consist of plants, single-celled algae and fish. But I’m always open to broadening the concept. For the New York version, we have changed things a little bit. We’re shifting entirely to urban agriculture, and the plants won’t be grown in a single structure, but will be distributed throughout the museum building. There will be different components: a huge window farm at the entrance of the museum will be taken care of by the robotics I was just talking about. The robotics will controlled by a central plant-computer unit positioned in the central exhibition space of the museum, which is actually former bomb shelter architecture from the ’60s. And so it becomes this kind of sci-fi-referencing structure built around the idea of “survival.” Every single plant that will be grown in Biomodd will be edible. It’s food being generated by the artwork throughout the exhibit. We’ll be organizing food events, harvesting and sharing what we grow.
Why did you make that shift?
First of all because of the location of the exhibit. The museum was built as part of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in 1964. It was designed by Harrison and Abramovitz. The bomb shelter architecture that I talked about before was a demonstration of how the US could protect itself against nuclear fallout. It’s a completely concrete insulated environment; there’s no daylight. And I was invited to build Biomodd there. At first, I thought, “How will I develop Biomodd in a room without any daylight? This doesn’t make any sense.” However, when I heard that it’s actually fallout shelter architecture, it became very interesting! Suddenly Biomodd was about survival. We saw the opportunity to turn it into an experimental food production system where people can see how to grow food in difficult urban circumstances. And this is, of course, a huge challenge for the entire urbanized part of the world.
Secondly, the NYC Biomodd team decided that they wanted to actively reach out to the people living around the museum. These people are mostly immigrants, the majority from places other than Corona in Queens — mostly from Latin America, but also from Asia. We decided this would be an interesting way to connect with the local community, to invite people to grow foods and plants from their original region and incorporate that in Biomodd. Part of the Biomodd team has already started doing urban gardening experiments with the local community in collaboration with an arts organization called Immigrant Movement International, which is near the museum. You can already see a little experimental garden being grown there. The preparatory project even has its own name: Springmavera. The idea is to explore experimental urban gardening and slowly introduce elements of technology — basic sensors, maybe some simple robotics — and gradually grow towards the idea of Biomodd. In September, we’ll move the entire experiment through a parade through the streets of Corona up to the museum together with the local community. So that will be quite interesting.
So how did you go from projects like Biomodd to working on the possibilities for future space habitats?
My artwork attracted the attention of the European Space Agency — in particular a very specific research program called MELiSSA, short for Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative. MELiSSA is actually an ecosystem under development that should allow future space settlement. Based on the concept of an artificial ecosystem, it is the European model for a regenerative life support system for astronauts. It allows the production of oxygen, water and food, and the recycling of organic wastes and carbon dioxide. Such regenerative life support systems will enable future long-term manned space missions such as a lunar base or a mission to Mars by ensuring crew survival. The system is already test running in Barcelona, but it’s still too big to be launched. My art — hybrid, semi-enclosed systems of biology and technology — is almost like an illustration of some of these ideas.
The people working on this program found my work interesting and invited me to think with them about the future of their system: how could MELiSSA evolve into a true human habitat — not a laboratory, but a habitat with human qualities? This is a fantastic invitation, of course. But the problem is actually so complex and challenging that I decided to turn it into a second PhD. So right now, I’m enrolled as a PhD student at Delft University of Technology, researching the idea of future habitation in space with embedded ecosystems. So, not just rockets or traditional space stations, but really bringing biology in there. I’m approaching it not just from a design point of view but also from an artistic and ethical point of view. This is the unique approach that I created for my PhD — exploring the future of human habitation and survival using design, engineering, modeling, art and ethics. This brings me to the social aspect of my research. What kind of rules do you use in a system like this? What values do you embrace when you want to build a habitat that includes technological systems, biological systems and people?
What does your research focus on?
It basically embraces two things that, for some people in the space industry, are still considered taboo. Number one: introducing biological living systems to survive. For some space engineers, this is still very difficult to accept, because for them biology is a very unstable and unpredictable system, and they don’t want to rely on it. Number two: introducing participatory systems. I’m part of the research group at Delft called Participatory Systems Initiative, headed by Professor Frances Brazier. The goal of the initiative is to figure out how we can redefine cohabitation — working together, producing together, creating together from a networked point of view and not from a top-down point of view.
Currently there’s a military-style collaboration in space missions: ground control basically controls every single minute of the astronaut’s experience. Astronauts are operators. However, it would be interesting to rethink this tradition and create a system where astronauts have to figure things out on their own, and have to work together in a more horizontal structure. Consider energy production: traditionally this is a very top-down system. You have no idea what happens between production and consumption, and you have no say in any of this. In a participatory energy system, every house using solar and wind energy would be its own energy producer. The surplus energy would be fed back to the grid to be used where it’s needed.
I actually think this is the future of humanity: we would be much better off if we were to organize ourselves more in such systems. Within the context of space exploration, after a certain point, ground control can no longer control every minute of space inhabitants’ lives, for example, if people were residing on Mars. Participatory system design will then be inevitable. It’s also important to build a very resilient system. And that’s what I’m focusing on: building resilient systems from a social, technological and biological point of view — systems that can reconfigure and optimize themselves according to their needs.
How are you getting advisors in this program? What you’re doing is so new — are you designing your own course?
That’s a good question. I learn about participatory systems, and by extension social systems, from my advisors in Delft: Professor Frances Brazier and Dr Caroline Nevejan. For the design and technology side of it, I’m actually still looking for people to work with. I’m currently a Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart Design Fellow at Parsons in New York City. This is a wonderful opportunity because Michael Kalil was a space designer himself. He actually worked on space habitation from a very holistic point of view. So it just came to me at a perfect moment. And I’m also having many conversations about my PhD research with the urbanist Bill Morrish. He has very similar ideas about these networks and participatory structures. So I can learn a lot from him, too.
How has the TED Fellowship changed your way of thinking and working?
Well first of all, the effect of being introduced to fellow Fellows is really — there’s no way around it — very inspiring. Just to see everybody’s path, and even the nuts and bolts of just trying to make your dream come true — you learn a lot from that. And we’re all very open. That’s the nice thing about the TED Fellows community. People don’t have too many secrets; we ask something and we get something. I’m based in Belgium, so I’m not really constantly in contact with them, but when I’m in New York I try and meet up with the Fellows at the Metropolitan Exchange in Brooklyn. It’s one of those hotspots of creativity in New York right now. TED Fellows James Patten and Joachim Mitchell work there, for example. Another aspect that is really interesting is that I can ask specific questions of the TED Fellows coordinators. Sometimes it’s just practical advice, like, “Listen, I want to get a book translated and I want to publish it. How would I do that?” That’s the advantage of being able to tap into the network of TED.
But the thing that has made a really huge impact is the coaching I got through SupporTED. It’s a combination of life and career coaching. The interesting thing is that my coach Jay Perry manages to give me very simple advice — no complicated plans or strategies, just simple things that turn out to be quite powerful. Just to give you an example: one of the first pieces of advice I got from my coach was, “Try to not turn on your computer before noon and see what happens.” I felt that I spent too much time behind the computer and not enough time nurturing myself, or just simply creating stuff. And indeed, Jay’s suggestion was quite a revelation. I just sat down and started drawing and reading and all the old-school stuff. I try to do it still, but I don’t always manage. But it’s continuously in the back of my mind.
You’ve said that being a TED Fellow messed with your mind. Why?
Tóxico Cultura — the independent art lab and cultural salon I founded in 2007 — is very much about exploring the unmapped gray areas between artistic disciplines, creating experimental territories and temporal states of exception, since creativity and imagination have a way of becoming unbound in those types of spaces.
But since the TED Fellowship I have come to realize that I was defining “multidisciplinary” within the scope of arts and culture itself — art, design, film, literature, music, and so on. Now, because of TED, it’s become a bit more wild and untamed. Among the Fellows there are writing doctors and filmmaking scientists and space economists and space archeologists and do-it-yourself neurologists, and the list goes on and on — so many inspiring and madly creative people reinventing the edges of their own worlds.
So I’ve become fascinated by what it means to amplify and to make even more complex a multidisciplinary bridge-building platform, and what it could mean to take it further and to help generate a creative ethos in Mexico City that traverses many different territories.
So it’s blown open what art means to you.
Yes. Art at the edge of other things. And it’s blown open what it means to create multidisciplinary projects, and what it means to work in a multidisciplinary manner, what we could learn from each other if we learn to import thought structures from elsewhere, and learn to “speak” in different languages, if you will. As Wittgenstein once put it: the limits of our language are the limits of our world. And the question is how to sometimes untie those languages, limits and boundaries. There is a certain comfort in defining ourselves tightly and safely, but it also stops us from exploring what lies outside of the things we already know and who we already are.
My time with the TED Fellows has also made me become avidly curious about people and projects in Mexico focused on other areas of knowledge. I have started doing in-depth interviews and mapping different fields, and suddenly I’m seeing that there’s so much creative thought outside of arts and culture, and so many links to be made between different disciplines and people, both locally and internationally. So many things could be possible with a nudge here and there.
So that is what Tóxico will focus on: helping certain conversations catch fire by putting the right people in touch and creating meeting points, or building knowledge structures through talks, seminars or workshops around different subjects — human rights and censorship in journalism, to name one upcoming example, an urgent conversation in Mexico nowadays — all on intimate territory because I am a huge believer in the power of small encounters that lead to larger repercussions through chain reactions. I am reworking the way Tóxico functions as a catalyst, an intoxicating agent…
This all happened because of the TED Fellowship?
Oh, definitely. Before the TED Fellowship I was really happy with our projects. It’s already a large world in itself, right, working between the different disciplines that make up the arts, plus also doing my own personal projects, consulting and designing multidisciplinary art programs, guest editing international magazines, curating, writing and now directing film. But it has been so intensely inspiring to see what other Fellows are doing that I have become utterly captivated with what it means to help create an innovative and creative society across disciplines.
It has also made me ponder on the place of culture in the whole scheme of things. I still believe in art for art’s sake, of course, but I also find it really interesting to think both about how art can be provoked by other areas, as well as how other disciplines can benefit from incorporating artistic thought processes into their inner workings. What I find most alluring about the art world — the reason why I got into art in the first place, in fact — is that it manages to create territories composed of a mix between so-called fiction and so-called reality: inject life with imagination and create symbolic narratives that then have the possibility of creating worlds unto themselves. Art can become a blueprint for reality in that way, and a hypothetical playground for minds let loose.
I love your tagline that imagination is not a luxury.
I think many of us who are drawn to the arts are seduced by the notion of how reality gets constructed through imagination, narrative and symbolic structures — all these mysterious intangible things on the other side of reason. It’s humbling to think that most everything we see outside ourselves started at one point in a tiny corner of somebody’s mind: just a tiny electric jolt between one synapse and the next and then: voilá. This.
Take Fellini, for example. He often said that he felt most alive when constructing his big strange sets and picking the people that lived in those sets and imagining scenarios and this or that type of sensation: building an outlandish reality and spinning stories for all to live out together. In fact, he was often quoted saying that this life solely created by his imagination was the only reality that interested him. That might be taking things a bit too far, but I do find it fascinating that in so many ways one invents and sets up the rules of engagement in artistic projects: “I will now write as someone I have never been, or I will make a film that will be one magnificent excuse to get to know another side of life and ask all sorts of questions that would have been too intimate or impertinent in another context, or design an impossible city that maybe one day someone else will make real.” So many doors open up. It’s an exercise in creating adjacent possibilities; it’s a gym for the muscles of the mind and the imagination. And everything from the way we think of ourselves to the way communities engage are very much built upon certain social stories — the drawing of borders, the make-up of religion, politics, identity — we first invented and then collectively decided to be true. Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s tragic. Culture, in its widest definition, is the great a priori.
Someone once said that stories are tools for living. I agree. Narrative is such an important thing. Sometimes even a single word can do the trick: “Give me the right word and I will move the world”, Joseph Conrad wrote. So right now, I’m profoundly interested in deepening my understanding of how narrative plays out and creates a social imagination that then births that thing we call reality, and how to apply fiction to the everyday. Mexico is going through very tough sociopolitical times just now, but, simultaneously, so many interesting things are happening in so many fields, there is so much potential, so much hunger for things different. But what are the prevailing narratives we are focusing on, what could the counter-narratives be, and how do they get constructed and where? How to inspire individuals and back projects so that we engage with the more interesting and imaginative possible scenarios?
So how does Tóxico work?
Tóxico has a fluctuating, liquid structure. It becomes whatever I need it to be month by month. Even the structure itself is thought of as an artistic project, and its main drive is to further creative excellence in Mexico City, and spread the idea that imagination is not a luxury. I change spaces for each project, hosting events in super-sophisticated auditoriums, in a 17-story abandoned hotel in the city center, in state-of-the-art film studios, in a stunning colonial house, in universities, open plazas, in museums.
Besides the workshops and lectures, we have a local mentorship program and an international internship system for young artists, and also create our own content such as collective art, editorial and film projects, curate exhibitions, and so on. And Tóxico extra-officially also functions as an agency: we have connected hundreds of people both locally and internationally. We just got a nice national grant to create a digital platform concentrating and showcasing Mexican creativity to a worldwide audience, helping to build that narrative I mentioned, and helping us visualize and realize how electric our cultural scene is nowadays.
I think one of the biggest strengths of Tóxico — and the reason why a relatively small independent project has been able to have an exponential impact — has come from understanding the power of catalytic points: of finding those precise places that when touched or provoked slightly create a magnified effect, in the same way a tiny tap of the doctor’s triangular hammer on that strategic place of the knee makes the leg jump into the air.
We are continuously trying to identify new creative needs, and then invent ways to help fill the gaps. The workshops and lectures, for example, started as a way of creating concentrated mind-spaces, complementary or even in contrast to more institutionalized academic programs, as well as to create intimate international dialogues. The Días de documental festival and lecture series was born because in 2004 documentary film was greatly under-appreciated in Mexico. Our new mentorship program evolved when I saw that certain needs of young talented artists were not being met. In 2008 I created a multidisciplinary pilot program for the 12 best students of a private university, teaching them the possibility of socially aware creativity; the program was a huge success and continues to this day. Agnès Godard, one of the few women cinematographers to make it into the big leagues, was invited to give a week-long course when we found out about an exciting and growing community of Mexican women photographing in film.
Our relevance is in being a catalyst and a bridge and having a very flexible structure so we can quickly start necessary conversations with the right people at the right time, and move on when those specific conversations have caught a fire of their own. Our relevance then, paradoxically, is our desire to become irrelevant, one issue at a time.
You must have a lot of people around you in support.
That is the most beautiful thing of all. For some mysterious reason Tóxico has become a “strange attracter” for amazing people. I really do feel so fortunate because we’ve got these young, super-talented, energetic, hungry people that want to do things, that are just trying to figure out the world anew. And then on the other hand, I also have a really solid relationship with institutions, embassies, very established artists, designers, filmmakers, museum directors, international projects and so on. It’s exciting to be able to access the best of all worlds, remain independent and bypass bureaucracy.
Also, among the TED Fellows I have found new, grand accomplices and muses. Benji Zusman — scientist and filmmaker — was my most valuable advisor this past year while I was directing my first feature length documentary. Lope Gutierrez-Ruiz and I are in continuous contact to create a Latin American cultural network. Erik Hersman and the rest of the Ushahidis have been a huge inspiration in thinking about the possibilities of re-envisioning national narratives, helping build an innovative society in so-called developing countries, plus breaking international stereotypes. A long conversation I had with Perry Chen, co-founder of Kickstarter, while he was in Mexico made me revise some fundamental ideas and had very palpable repercussions. And the list goes on. TED has been amazing. I feel very fortunate to be part of this nomadic, polymath and slightly crazy community.
You were an inaugural TED Senior Fellow, and TEDGlobal 2012 will be your last TED as a Fellow. How are you feeling about this?
Very, very nostalgic. So what I’m doing now is setting up bridges for the future. Besides the ongoing Tóxico workshops and conferences series, I’ll soon be starting seminar-type programs, as well as a residency in Mexico City which will hopefully become a gathering place for Fellows; already we are planning the visit of several TED Fellows for the next year to start several conversations across borders and disciplines. During my six months at Yale as a World Fellow — which coincides beautifully with my last TED conference — I will be gathering ideas and putting everything into motion for my return. Mexico City is one of the most fascinating, complex and layered cities on Earth and I love the idea that it could become, through Tóxico, a meeting ground for bold, playful, imaginative thinkers: TED Fellows, Yale Fellows, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists and more, sinking their hands into the city, spreading their ideas throughout it, and conversing over tacos and tequilas galore.
Michael Sandel (who re-introduced TEDsters to the art of civilized debate in the talk above) makes a provocative argument in this month’s Atlantic:
Without quite realizing it — without ever deciding to do so — we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.
The difference is this: A market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
… [To] decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question — health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.
It’s a fascinating essay. Read the whole thing here >>
Reading TED Books just became even easier. All current titles are now available on Barnes and Noble’s e-reader, the Nook. Future titles will be, too. TED Books are readable on Amazon’s Kindle as well as any device that uses the Kindle app (Mac, Windows, Android and Blackberry, among them). They are also available at Apple’s iBookstore, and are $2.99 each.
In his talk at TEDGlobal 2010, Conrad Wolfram championed a radical new way of teaching mathematics: removing the notion that math is the same as calculating, and completely redesigning the curriculum around the new possibilities opened by computers. He’s now launched a website to collect ideas, and in November he will be hosting The Computer Based Math Education Summit to kick-start the project.
We caught up with him in his office near Oxford, England to talk about education reform and the importance of creativity in technical fields.
How did you get interested in reforming math education?
We’ve been building software for 20+ years, software to do computations. One place I’ve seen this applied, or really not applied, is in math teaching. I got increasingly frustrated. What is it that they’re teaching? Is it really the best thing that we can be teaching under the circumstances? And ten or fifteen years ago I was asking these questions, but realistically although a lot of the underlying technology was there, the interaction with it wasn’t, and it wasn’t ubiquitous. People didn’t have computers everywhere and it was hard to see how one could practically put that in. Now, it seems so obviously discrepant with what one needs to do. So, I can’t really point to an individual time, it’s been growing over a long period and observing what’s happened, and seeing these discrepancies build up between education what’s happened outside education.
You had no previous education background, right?
No, I’ve not gone and taught people. Now, that’s a mixed blessing. Obviously I don’t know some of the practicalities if you’re a teacher every day. On the other hand, it’s tricky to see what one would do differently if you’ve been teaching inside the curriculum that we currently force everyone to do.
The reaction to my talk has been very positive, perhaps more so than I expected. People have managed to come out of their boxes of what they’re doing, and say, “Yeah, I’ve been doing this for twenty years, but I can see there’s a problem.” I think that’s great, when we can encourage people to think outside like that, but not everyone can do that.
That seems to be one of the key questions, how do you get buy-in from the teachers and policy makers?
There are several steps. One is to build a community of people who are interested, and who can contribute ideas.
But the second major step, which we’re doing in parallel, is to build what I call a blue-skies curriculum: consider what you would do if you were starting with a blank sheet or a blank computer, cut all the baggage from the past with what’s been done with math, start again and start writing some modules. Try to work out, what would you do with the student, the teacher, and the computer to optimize the output one wants?
Now, these modules may not be immediately implementable in today’s schools. I’m trying to go to the far extreme, to go up into the stratosphere and figure out what you’d ideally do. I think that hasn’t been done very much. Most of what’s been done with math education reform, and I understand why this is, is people saying, “We’ve got computers now, what can we imagine doing next semester?” That’s also a valuable exercise, but it’s not what I want to do. I want to put up a beacon of what could be possible.
Once we’ve done that, the next step is to find a place where one can pilot that. I think there are countries, or states within countries, which are interested. In the end, I would love to see some of the major countries do this first. I expect that we’re going to see a smaller country really take this on-board fastest, because quicker decisions can be taken. But I’d love to be proved wrong on that, too.
There really isn’t anywhere in the world where math education looks like this.
That’s correct. We are starting from scratch. Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you’re teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable. In some places it’s, “I basically agree with you, but how are we ever going to get this implemented?” Other places it’s, “This has been an ancient thing, we need to go on teaching the ancient tradition.” They don’t put it in quite these words, but that’s the gist of it. Other places are saying, “This is interesting, let’s form an idea of what we can do here.” And we’re starting some of those discussions now.
One of the huge barriers is the question of standardized testing. It feels like this is something that, here in the USA at least, would take 20 or 30 years to get enough support.
I wouldn’t count on it, but neither would I claim this is anything other than a long, hard road, particularly in a developed and large country like the US. What’s the exact timeline? I wouldn’t like to predict. I think the world moves faster now than it did fifty years ago.
One of the key problems is that everyone teaching math today was brought up with the current system of math education. Now, people argue to me, “Don’t you have to wait for a whole new generation of teachers to make this change?” And I don’t think that’s true. There’s certainly an issue of helping teachers to move to a new way of thinking about things, but there are also new methodologies one can employ. You don’t have to have the teacher teaching the whole lesson. There are remote links, there are specialists, you can pull them in. There are things you couldn’t do twenty years ago that you can do now.
So, I wouldn’t want to put a time-frame on it, but I think we’re at a particular point now where there’s more will to change things than I’ve seen in my lifetime. People see the problem and they see the necessities and they see the rise of China, and they think, “Hang on, we’ve got a real problem we need to deal with here.”
Another problem is that there’s an integrated system assuming certain math education. Have you had a response from teachers at the university level?
Yeah, very much so. At the university level, computers have slowly been adopted more in everything outside the pure mathematics curriculum. So, although they wouldn’t have immediately suggested the theory in my TED talk, ways to improve mathematical understanding are very welcome.
One thing is for sure: most of the people admitting candidates to universities for technical subjects are pretty dissatisfied with the level of math education. Most countries would say the same thing.
In the cases I’ve talked to, we’ve had a very positive reception to the idea that: “Well, we’re going to be using computers with the folks when they get here. We’re trying to teach them engineering, or physics; we don’t need them to know the theory of proving this particular relationship. What we need them to do is be able to apply the mathematics.”
They can see that being able to do that, with or without a computer, is what really matters, and they can see that what I’m suggesting gets a lot further towards that than the traditional way has.
It’ll clearly be a driver of reform if those admitted to the best technical courses in universities studied computer-based math rather than traditional math. That will be a good way to build on initial successes and draw people through to doing computer-based math.
So getting the universities on board could lead the way.
Absolutely. Again, this sort of thing varies a lot between countries. The detailed system of how you get a new course established, who’s got the push and the pull in that, how involved is the government?
Another interconnected piece is obviously teachers and their training. On this topic, it’s an interesting idea that there are teachers in subjects outside math itself: other STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics) subjects, maybe even things like geography, social sciences, and so forth that might well be able to teach the kind of math I’m talking about and can’t teach the traditional sort as well. It’s not all in one direction– that we’re going to lose a group of teachers that aren’t able to teach this new kind of math, and we won’t pull them in from anywhere else. I think there are opportunities, just like there are with students. There are students who will be able to do computer-based math much more effectively than the current math, there are teachers who will be able to do that too.
What would be the consequences of not changing the curriculum, if we keep going with the status quo?
I think what will happen is that math at school will become more marginalized. I see it going a bit like latin, where it ended up becoming a very specialist, niche subject. Now, the funny thing with latin, and the reason I brought up greek rather than latin in my talk, is that the use of latin in the world outside education was declining. The case with math, which is so frustrating, is that the use of math is massively increasing. So, there is a subject that is very mainstream, which we should be teaching, and then there’s the subject we’re teaching which is becoming less and less mainstream.
If we go on along this path at some point people are going to say, “This math, that no one likes doing, that we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars teaching, and that universities and others don’t really want: you can’t justify doing that for everyone.”
It could become a niche subject that folks who go to fancy schools will study. Or alternatively—which is often happening now— it gets dumbed-down into purely a vocational subject : just teaches essential “math procedures” that are supposed to get you through life, but aren’t providing you deep understanding that you can really apply or use as a key skill. So, that’s the long-term danger.
It’s like everyone has started speaking Italian, and they’re still teaching Latin.
Yeah, that’s right, but the two are even more unrelated than that.
Just to emphasize, I’m sometimes accused of saying that we should stop anyone from learning current math, what I call the history of hand calculating. I’m not saying anything of the sort on an individual basis. If an individual student gets excited about the history of hand calculating (as I call much of our current math curriculum), that is a great thing for them to study. It’s a very interesting field. It just isn’t the mainstream field that the majority should be pushed to take
There’s been a trend of people learning to use abacuses recently.
If folks, and particularly kids, get excited about getting good at something, whether it’s learning their times tables, or playing with an abacus, or playing a didgeridoo, I think that’s great, I think they should be encouraged—just because it’s fun, it’s exciting. It doesn’t have to be “useful” per se. But it’s no good believing everyone should be force-fed this traditional kind of math in case a small number happen to find it fun.
I noticed you’re a photographer and a piano player, and I wonder if that’s influenced your approach to math education?
No, I’d put the whole thing the other way around. I’d say that, because I’m a mathematical kind of guy, the way I look at the world is a math/physics kind of way, and that definitely influences everything I do. So, when I look at a business problem, I’m running the scientific process on the whole business problem. That’s my way of thinking about it. If I’m looking at playing something on the piano, I like thinking about that in a fairly logical way “what’s it saying if I go louder of softer at this point” even if it’s an emotional thing I’m thinking about. So, I do feel math and feel science, and that’s the way I look at the world. And I think it’s quite a good way to look at the world, as long as you understand its limitation. It’s also probably led me to things that I think I can understand from that point of view. Photography is one of those: I can understand the theories of lighting. For example, if you put big lights next to a small object then you’re going to get a nice diffuse light. Things like that where I can understand how it fits together I find fun. Perhaps that helps me to be creative, perhaps not.
I would say there’s another interplay, which a lot of people since the talk have mentioned to me. They say that what you’re really talking about is not math, or even STEM subjects, it’s really creativity in education. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. Don’t teach people the processes of calculating, teach them the creativity of problem-solving in a math arena. In a sense that’s no different from teaching them creativity in the study of history, or any other subject.
It’s surprising for people, because we’ve been brought up to think that science and math are unemotional. The kinds of things you’re proposing here are about building a visceral connection to math as well.
There have been very noticeable scientists and mathematicians who show a lot of emotion. One that always comes to my mind is Richard Feynman.
But that’s different from the way it’s presented in schools.
Absolutely by most teachers. But part of the problem is, in testing, a calculation is often right or wrong, but that’s not true of wider questions of education. What’s the best way to represent this data? How does that communicate the idea of the data? or skew it one way or the other? To my mind those are math questions, but they’re not questions which have a definitive answer. So if you turn everything into a multiple-choice question, and you can do this with English as well, it becomes a kind of unemotional process. So, although I believe the world is in a sense a quantitative place, in practical terms with the data one has, the world’s a qualitative place, and one needs to make judgments and apply intuition one’s built-up without precise quantification.
Certainly also true that people have emotions to things that are built using math. I mean people now days have a lot of emotions about technology. But, for example some people are very emotional about their cars — now, are they emotional about how the spark plugs works in the engines? Well, you may find some geek who is, but it’s a much smaller fraction.
And so I think, if you zoom in to the mechanics of everything, that tends to limit the number of people who are emotionally attached to it.
It reminds me of diagramming sentences in English class. That’s the same mechanics, and where I was brought up we almost never did it. I don’t think I’ve suffered.
I had a strange thing with that, which is that the only English grammar I know is from learning latin. It’s slightly weird we were taught latin and it’s grammar in great detail, but never ever English. Now, I would have found English grammar somewhat useful. But in the end, you’re right, it’s a mechanism which is useful for the end, which is “how do I communicate in English?” One needs to get the goals clear from the mechanics. In my view that’s the biggest thing that got lost in Math. Computers affect other subjects too, but the effect in math and STEM subjects is so dramatic.
A vegetarian diet can markedly improve your health and fitness, but what if you still love munching into a juicy burger every now and again? Graham Hill has a powerful and simple solution: Become a weekday vegetarian. Don’t eat meat Monday through Friday. During the weekends, you’re back to being a carnivore.
Hill, who founded the eco-blog treehugger.com, has expanded the popular short talk he gave at TED2010 into a potentially life-changing digital book that explores the personal, economic and societal benefits of moving meat out of your diet. Don’t fear that vegetarian dishes all taste like sawdust. Hill includes 20 great-tasting veggie recipes to get you started.
Weekday Vegetarian is part of the TED Books series, which is available for the Kindle and all platforms that use Kindle Reader apps. Buy it on Amazon.com >>
Update: Now available on Apple’s iBooks platform too!
TED speaker Omar Ahmad died this morning of a heart attack in San Carlos, California, where he was the Mayor. A Mayor with a very open line to his constituents. In December 2009, when he pitched us what would become his short talk for TED University at TED2010, his suggested title was: “How to effectively lobby elected officials and move them on issues you care about.” Now, coming from an elected official, it could have been a quip, a wisecrack, a provocation — but it was in fact an invitation: an invitation to get involved, to learn about the political system and about raising issues properly, to “add weight to your views” in the eyes of politicians. In other words, Omar wanted everybody to contribute to a better polity.
Omar was close to completing a TED Book titled Citizen Advocate: How to Get Government to Move Mountains and Change the World just before his passing. We hope to release that work soon.
He will be badly missed.
In this reel, TED recaps an amazing year of talks from three conferences, a bunch of smaller TED events — and a powerful year of TEDx. Dive in, and then follow up with talks that intrigue you … You’ll see, in order of appearance: The LXD, Chris Anderson and Julian Assange, Bill Gates, Chip Conley, Naomi Klein, John Underkoffler, Marcel Dicke, Van Jones, Deborah Rhodes, Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman, Brian Cox, Diane Laufenberg, Clay Shirky, Hillary Clinton, Craig Venter, Laurie Santos, Raghava KK, Jamie Oliver, Hans Rosling, Miwa Matreyek, Rory Sutherland, John Kasaona, Sheena Iyengar, Michael Specter, Sir Ken Robinson, Barry Schwartz, Jacqueline Novogratz, Jody Williams, and Beverly and Dereck Joubert.
Philip Zimbardo (watch his other TEDTalks) introduces the Heroic Imagination Project at TED University 2010. Zimbardo, whose work has studied the depths of human evildoing and the heights of heroism, is passionate about inspiring people to take heroic action. Learn how to practice everyday heroism.
Learn more about the Heroic Imagination Project >>
Jane McGonigal is a game designer with an apparently simple idea: some of the billions of hours we spend playing games can be used to solve real world problems, and it can be done by playing games. Her new book, Reality Is Broken, explores the power of games to change people’s lives. It’s just out this week. The TED Blog caught up with her in the middle of the release to talk about games, saving the world, and the simple power of Angry Birds.
Since your TEDTalk, you’ve managed a full run of Evoke, you social entrepreneurship game.
It was really exciting! We were just formally announcing Evoke at TED. That was our first glimpse to see if people would be interested in it, excited about it. We were able to run the game a few months later, a ten-week crash course in changing the world. Our original goals were to try to enroll a thousand students in the game, and we wound up enrolling just under 20,000. We had them from over a 130 countries, all playing the same game and collaborating with each other, which was really amazing.
The most eye-opening outcomes were how many real-world businesses, real-world social enterprises were founded by players of the game over the course of the ten weeks, and then actually launched in the summer following the game. We have more than fifty social enterprises started by gamers. Companies that were designed to deal locally with issues like food security, clean water access, women’s education. That was pretty much a first; the idea that you could come play a game and ten weeks later wind up with a real social enterprise.
One example is this great project called Libraries Across Africa. The idea is basically, what if there were a McDonalds of libraries? What if you could have a franchise for libraries and that the people who would implement and start a library in a village, or anywhere, that it would be a money-making venture, a self-supporting venture, and that other enterprises could pop up around the act of lending books to people: selling them food, selling them phone service or internet access. What a super-creative, novel idea to try to franchise libraries. That came out of the game, and it’s actually in development now. They have their first library prototype in the field.
That’s fantastic. It sounds like you’ve gotten a great reception.
Yeah, when I talk to the media they really sink their teeth into these problem-solving games, but I want to say, the first half of the book is about the way that games integrate into our real life, to improve our health and happiness. What you would call ordinary video games. When I talk to readers that’s the part they’re interested about, but when I talk to media we almost never get to that.
The subtitle is “Why games make us better, and how they can change the world.” I’m really interested in not just these world-saving problem-solving games, but also in how games like Angry Birds, Farmville and World of Warcraft can actually make our lives better. So, the first half of the book is full of science, looking at things like the fact that people who play Rock Band and Guitar Hero are more likely to learn how to play a guitar. This is fascinating, to see that games, rather than distracting us from our real-life goals, seem to be a springboard to real-life goals. There’s science that shows that when we play cooperative games we’re more likely to help strangers, friends, family members in real life. Thirty minutes of playing a co-op game changes for an entire week how cooperative we are in real life. We’re more likely to see opportunities to help someone, and more likely to act on them.
Playing with avatars that are powerful in a game world, or avatars that we find attractive, makes us more confident and optimistic, so that we’re more likely to successfully flirt with strangers or negotiate in a workplace meeting. Just ninety seconds of playing with an avatar can change your odds for success in a real-world situation for 24 hours.
So, there’s all these ways we’re starting to see that the line between the games we play and the lives we lead is much more porous than we imagined. I think this is really great news. It shows that we don’t have to play fewer video games in order to lead the lives that we want to lead. There are all kinds of games that can actually support our real-life goals, strengthen our real-life relationships. That’s such a transformative way to look at games, to realize that they’re not distracting us from our lives. They’re filling our lives with more strength and better relationships. Even the tiniest game, like Angry Birds, can power us with optimism and resilience throughout the day. It’s really remarkable.
Why do you think the default assumption is the exact opposite?
I think it’s two things, one is very old and one is very new. There’s this old, old sense that there’s a divide between productivity and play, and that playing games is somehow not productive. In fact, my research shows that playing games literally produces some very good things. It produces positive emotion. It produces social bonds. It produces more ambitious goals. Yes, it doesn’t produce economic capital; it doesn’t produce consumer goods. But we should ask ourselves, why does “productive” mean producing economic or consumer things? Why isn’t productive producing things that really matter, like improving quality of life? But that’s an old thing, that goes back before video games — games were seen as not productive.
Then, for the last twenty years there’s the idea that the virtual is somehow removed from real life, that we have avatars that are “alternate identities,” and that’s not who we are really are, we get to be somebody else. Of course, we are the same person when we play games. It’s not like we dissociate and become somebody else; it is us. The games increasingly are real in physical ways. Like the X-Box 360 Connect, and how amazingly physical that is, and how real the dancing is. It’s not fake dancing, it’s real dancing. You look at how many people are playing games on Facebook with their real-life friends and families. I’m playing Cityville with people I know in real life, people I really like. it’s not like playing with “strangers on the internet.”
We have this misguided notion that somehow games are just totally virtual. At the very least, the feelings they produce in us are real. The science shows that it doesn’t matter where you get your positive emotions; if you feel a positive emotion it has the same impact on your health and happiness regardless of where it comes from. We need to stop thinking that just because something is digital that it doesn’t have a real impact on our minds and bodies and hearts.
You had a very personal experience with that, designing a game to help yourself recover from a severe concussion.
When I first decided to make this game, I had a very epic, important meeting with my doctor. It had been about a month, and I was having very slow recovery from the concussion, so they diagnosed post-concussion recovery syndrome. She said that if I was feeling stress and anxiety or depression or loneliness — that these emotions get in the way of the brain healing itself. They see in a lot of patients this vicious cycle. You get depressed because you’re not getting well, and then that depression slows you down even more. You have to break that cycle. If you miss the first month of recovery, then on average it’s three months, and if you miss that window then it’s six months, and if you miss that then it’s a year. I was looking forward to possibly a year of not being able to think straight, of not being able to be in public spaces. It made me so depressed and anxious and despairing that I thought there was no way I was going to break the cycle.
It just came to me, coming home from the doctor, I have to make this a game. If I don’t make this a game I will never get out of depression. I’d already written the first few chapters of the book, and those are largely about the idea that gameplay is the opposite of depression. Clinically speaking, depression is a pessimistic sense of your own capabilities, and despondent lack of energy. The opposite of that, an optimistic sense of your own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity, is the perfect textbook definition of gameplay.
So if I could just make this a game, I could do it. I couldn’t play regular video games because it was aggravating my concussion symptoms. So I was still in this mental fog, and there are these crazy videos of me from that day online on YouTube where I’m trying to design the game out loud, and you can see how much of a fog I’m in, and how much joy.
It was interesting even in that state to be able to reach into game design and design my way out, but it wasn’t until after I’d been playing for quite a while and was better that I was able to redesign it for other people to play. I started having friends test it for things like asthma, diabetes, knee surgery, chemotherapy. I started to get a lot of anecdotal and subjective feedback about how it was working.
The main point is to take the despair out of a diagnosis. You can use the strength of positive emotions and social connectivity to make the process of trying to get better, much, much better and faster.
I’m actually developing a personal version of this game that will be available to the public this summer. And we’re working right now on clinical trials to demonstrate the scientific medical validity of this game. That’s very exciting because there aren’t many games that have been through clinical trials.
There’s a lot of research now on the placebo effect, and how to harness it. It sounds like this is a way.
It’s interesting, somebody was asking me, “Isn’t it just a delusion? In games, to fly, or have an avatar with magic powers coming out their fingers? It’s just a fantasy, it’s an illusion of power.” But what the science shows is something very similar to the placebo effect, that having this imaginative capacity, that you somehow have this power, activates in us that we feel the positive. When the placebo effect is working, people are looking for positive outcomes, and that’s what they see. I think games — hopefully they have real impact — but even if we are just tapping into the power of people’s imaginations to imagine themselves better, that seems like a really good way to go.
Well, even if you are worried about the social transformation part, getting people used to using games to do things is a first step.
Exactly. The social transformation is a 10- to 25-year project. So, in the meantime we’re building these competencies and these skills.
Back to Evoke, with twenty thousand players, thousands interested in mentoring, it sounds like there’s been a good reception.
The reception was great. That’s the thing. When people ask me, “What’s different about the gamer generation?” I say it’s a sense of wanting to rise to the occasion, a sense of heroic purpose: If there’s a heroic mission and I could be the one who’s destined to fill it, I want to do that; I want to be that person. I want to be on a journey; I want to be on an adventure, or part of an adventure. And when we reach out to people, particularly in that gamer generation, and give somebody an opportunity to do something heroic — and it’s something authentically challenging. We weren’t asking people to donate five dollars. There’s nothing challenging about that other than if you don’t have five dollars — but actually to do something, they do rise to the occasion. That’s where a lot of my optimism comes from. We’re still in very early days of trying to harness what’s amazing about games and gamers, and so there’s a lot we really haven’t figured out yet.
The thing that evokes the most skepticism in the comments on the talk is, how do you translate solutions in the game to solutions in the real world?
That’s a great question. I should really take a lot of responsibility for this misconception. I didn’t really talk about my games in the TEDTalk very much.
The great thing about these games is that you don’t have to translate the solutions in the game to solutions in the real world. The game is all about doing things in the real world. So, in World Without Oil, you’re living your life as if there were an oil shortage. You are doing the things that would be the solution; you’re changing the way you eat and cook food, you’re changing the way you get to work. In Evoke you’re going out and you’re actually starting a community garden. You’re transforming how your laptop is powered from regular electricity to solar, or your iPod is getting powered by riding on your bike. You’re actually doing stuff, and it feeds back into the game.
I’m not a fan of simulations. Where, ‘Oh, we’ll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace’ and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that’s not the kind of games that I make. The games that we make, if it’s going to be a game about world peace, it’s going to be a game in which people go out and actually make friends with people that they’ve had disagreements with; they’re going to go out and do something to actually make a difference.
So, it’s not about simulation, but more about attaching the things about gaming that give people this sense of accomplishment to real-world activities.
Right. Real-world activities needs to be at the core of it.
– Interview by Ben Lillie