Edinburgh, Scotland
July 11-15, 2011
Edinburgh, Scotland
July 11-15, 2011
The audience watches in awe as the robotic SmartBird -- powered simply by the motion of its wings -- takes flight over their heads in the TEDGlobal theater. "We try to mimic nature," said designer Markus Fischer.
In a stunning demo, Harald Haas reveals (for the first time in public) a desk lamp which uses light, instead of radio waves, to transmit an HD video data stream.
"You have been digitally preserved," Ben Kacyra told the audience, who were 3D scanned during his talk. His CyArk project uses the same technique to document the contours of world heritage sites. "Our heritage is much more than our collective memory. It's our collective treasure," he argued. "We owe it to our children, grandchildren and generations we will never meet to save our heritage, and pass it along."
"Religion's ideas are so intelligent, so subtle, they are not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone," said Alain de Botton, in a thought-provoking talk on bringing religious culture and traditions into secular life. Could a religious framework -- without a supernatural aspect -- help atheists live more meaningful, emotionally connected lives? Most of the TEDGlobal audience seemed to think so -- the talk drew a thunderous standing ovation.
Now live on TED.com: Actor Thandie Newton talks about her success, and her progress as a person -- which she credits, in part, to an initial feeling of "lack of self" as a young woman. "When I'm acting a role, I inhabit another self and give it a life for a while. For when the self is suspended -- so is divisiveness," she said.
Now live on TED.com: Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.
Now live on TED.com: Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, looks at why extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold. He calls for new grassroots stories -- and global social activism -- to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia.
Now live on TED.com: Rebecca MacKinnon argues that the Internet isn't as free as you might think: Private companies have become "sovereigns of cyberspace," making arbitrary decisions that undermine access, privacy and free speech. She asks: "How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control?"
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What’s your vision and motivation for making this art?
I think it’s more a compulsion than a vision. It all started with The Uncle Phone. If you’ve seen my TED Talk, you’ll know it’s the very long phone I made for my uncle, who used to sometimes insist that I assist him in making a phone call by dialing the number for him.
In the Indian context, it’s a really bad thing to deny these simple requests and others, such as, “Can you get me a glass of water?” You can’t say, “No, I won’t do it.” And yet, if these requests become the cause of so many disruptions in your daily life, there is a need to rationalize it somehow. Just the proposition of having to communicate something very simple and innocuous to an uncle can become a very complex and difficult thing due to the issue of respect — it’s all so culturally coded.
I felt a need to deal with this complexity, which is so hard to put into words, yet occupies such a big space in my mind. Somehow I needed to find a way to express or even think about it. That was how it all started. I am quite satisfied with how the phone addressed this need – in an inquiring and affectionate way, without making a really big drama.
And what was your uncle’s response to it?
Actually, I didn’t really want to tell him because it would be too much of a confrontation. So I just kind of casually brought it home one day and didn’t address the story directly. He rightly assumed that it was a gift for him or inspired by him, but the funny thing is, he only realized the meaning and motivation behind it nine years later, after my TED Talk went live. So the talk was personally quite a highlight in my relationship with my family. They publicly came to understand what our work is about, and a lot of it is about them!
When my uncle finally understood the piece, he laughed. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t take things to heart. And the object is very affectionate. It’s humorous and flamboyant, like him. He also felt really happy being the hero of the TED Talk in a sense, because he inspired some of the objects, which others have also appreciated so much. I think he knows somehow he had a big role.
The complexity of the cultural struggle seems to inform your work. I’m curious about Missing Person — in which one spectator in a room is always invisible in the monitors — and where the idea of invisibility might fit into that.
A lot of people find the intercultural aspect of our work confusing, because my collaborator, Søren Pors, is Danish, while I’m Indian. So while the intercultural dynamic is there, we’re more interested in interpersonal relationships. About Missing Person — we just had this idea about experiencing a sense of invisibility, how it would feel to be invisible. The first time I experienced it, my brain went into a bit of a flip: “Okay, what the hell?” It’s a strange sensation, which I’d never had before. So that was exciting.
Probably, on one level, Missing Person is about the superhero idea of invisibility – being omnipresent and able to do your own thing without being seen. And on another level, maybe it is also a reference to the culture of domestic help in India. The usual practice is that you don’t acknowledge them on the same social level — mostly not at all. You don’t say hello, you don’t speak with them. It’s like they are furniture, to the extent that it is quite common to discuss deeply private things in their presence because you just forget they’re there. This seems to be a mutually comfortable arrangement.
When I came back to my home country after being away for six or seven years, I found the whole thing quite strange, interesting and comical – as did Søren. Also, many other things had prompted us to think about invisibility, both in a physical sense and a social sense.
But we found that people access this work on many different levels. For us, it was fun to be able to play with invisibility in a group – the work allows you to transfer your invisibility to others in the room by your movements in it. However, in Japan, they have a cultural phenomenon called Hikikomori, where people isolate themselves in a room, confining themselves for several years at a time, and society just stops acknowledging their existence. When we showed this work there, some people experienced it as a very dark piece.
Everyone just loves Pygmies — the fact that the pygmies appear to respond to the viewers by hiding away in reaction to sounds, and just the fact that they’re so charming. There’s a mischievous sense of humor in your work. Did you used to play practical jokes on people when you were a kid?
No, actually I was very quiet and shy, and didn’t engage much with others. We just think humor offers a lot of space to address certain things that may be difficult or complex to understand or deal with.
Also, it’s not a conscious decision to use mischief or humor. It’s just maybe a state of mind, a natural expression of what comes out. To me, Pygmies — or even Missing Person or The Uncle Phone — is a very serious work. I was quite surprised in the initial years when people found the work funny. I actually didn’t experience it that way myself. So that was an interesting dimension to reflect upon.
Actually, the pygmies are also shy – they hide a lot. This whole theme of hiding and being invisible is a part of, I think, who Søren and I are. But it’s very difficult to analyze humor. We think it’s just a sense of enjoyment, in a lot of ways, which is translated and called “fun.”
Have you had any other unexpected reactions to your work?
Two that I can recall now. The pygmies were made to respond to the natural environment. But we found that people would literally play with the pygmies, doing things — jumping, clapping, peeping, which we found incredibly annoying – to figure out how they would respond. That was quite unexpected.
But the most surprising response was for a work called Decoy. We got no response at all! That was quite a disturbing experience. We’d struggled and struggled to make this work and were so excited about how it had turned out. We had put our heart and soul into it and then got no reaction from someone whose opinion mattered. But later, as it turned out, a lot of other people really responded to it. I believe the initial reaction had to do with context: it was a preview situation where the viewer was trying to contextualize the piece in terms of Indian art history, rather than simply experiencing the piece directly as a spectator. This taught us that the context of the experience (both the psychological and the physical) makes all the difference in the subjective experience of the work.
But we have found — and this makes us very happy — that many different kinds of people are able respond to our work. It could be a child. It could be an arts-educated person. Recently we came across a situation where a very low-income, illiterate person who’d had no exposure to art saw the work and was genuinely absorbed and delighted by it. So it’s not really made with anybody in mind, but we enjoy the fact that most or many people can find some aspect of our work to relate to.
What is the experience of bringing an artwork to completion?
Søren and I have been working together for almost ten years now, and work occupies 90 percent of our lives, though we produce quite little, a maximum of three or four new artworks in a year. We have had coincidentally parallel experiences, though our backgrounds are so different in that we came from such diverse places and cultures. Somewhere along the way, we start getting drawn to similar things, and certain thoughts and expressions begin to crystallize. Most of our artworks have been stewing in our minds for at least three or four years — some artworks we’ve been thinking about for ten years! Usually the only way to stop thinking about them is to make them.
Then we go through a very much more structured process, which involves drawing, research, making physical models with cardboard, wire mesh and sometimes clay. We bring these into the computer by scanning them, and we make 3D models and animations. They we add the physics and create simulations to discover how they should move, and start working with companies that specialize in the technology required to make the movement happen.
On the practical level, we collaborate with each other throughout the process, but I take care of more of the mechanical and physical aspects — like fabrication, hardware, materials – while Søren focuses more on the behavioral aspects, the algorithms and the software. Each of our projects takes a minimum of a year and a half. We operate a studio and workshop where we have five full-time people who work with us. We’ve a very tight team.
Making our work is very much like conceiving and raising a child. We go through excitement when a new thought crystallizes, then the hard work and waiting follow. When it comes together, we live with it in our homes and start to refine its movement and behavior. And when we think it’s finally done, there’s a sense of euphoria — but also a disappointment or bewilderment sometimes. But we are always excited to see if there is something new that we can contribute to the art world.
What role does technology play in your ideas? Do you have a particular interest in it?
We think of technology more as a tool and as a natural part of the world we live in — just as artists go to flea markets and pick up stuff to work with, or to a hardware store for canvas and paints. I received my undergraduate degree in visual communication, but the gap between studying communication and not being able to communicate with my mother, my father or my best friend was too big. A year later, I went to do my master’s at a small but specialized institute in Italy, which really gave me space to look into myself and find something that I could clearly identify with on a deeper level. Here I understood that technology around us can be appropriated and even shaped into a personal purpose and direction.
How has the TED Fellowship influenced the way you work?
The most prominent way the fellowship has had an impact — and this is what we were hoping for — is getting the acceptance of the technical community as a whole. Even though our work isn’t really about technology, the quality of the end experience requires a certain finesse that must be delivered by technology. And each project is so different. For example, for the invisibility project we needed a special kind of video digital signal processing expertise, and for the pygmy project we needed mechanical expertise of miniature systems.
The people we need to collaborate with are quite specialized, and they often find it very difficult, when we bring them an idea, to understand WHY — why it would be valuable for anyone to experience hiding pygmies, for example. So we’d find ourselves low on their priorities list or not taken so seriously.
Now that we have TED’s support, they’re more curious and appreciative because TED represents a standard they aspire to. We’ve also gotten some invitations from international universities to collaborate, and that is really exciting.
You started producing comics after you got attacked after 9/11. What happened?
I was a student at the University of Minnesota at the time, and president of the international student union. On campus, racial attacks immediately started happening against students who were thought to be Middle Eastern and Arab — whether or not they were — so I was thrust into a position where I had to do something about it.
I started an awareness campaign and started contacting newspapers, senators and so on. The state district attorney got wind of it, and we had a big event where he came to campus and apologized to all international students. This got a lot of media coverage. Shortly after this, four college kids attacked me on my way home late one night. They started with racial slurs, then attacked me with beer bottles. I suffered many scars and injuries that led to surgeries.
As I recovered, I thought, “Well, either I pack my bags and go home to Jordan, or I do something.” And I decided the best way to fight racism is to start with the young. So I began talking to schoolchildren ages 6 and 7 about Middle Eastern culture and what happened to me on 9/11, spreading a very simple message: Not all Middle Easterners are terrorists, and Al Qaeda is like the KKK.
How did they respond?
They loved it! Actually, I’m a scary-looking guy, because I have a lot of scars — so I did have to break the ice. As soon as I got into the classroom, I’d ask, “Do you kids remember Aladdin and Jasmine?” They’d say, “Yeah, yeah.” Because you know, all the kids have watched Aladdin. And I’d say, “Jasmine is my ex and Aladdin stole her from me, and it really pisses me off!” The kids would just burst out laughing.
I also used to bring with me a really nice small carpet from the Middle East. I’d say, “Guess what this is?” And the kids would go crazy. “Yes, yes! It’s magic carpet! Make it fly!” I’d say, “I’m sorry, but it only works in really hot weather. It’s only works in the desert.” In Minnesota, eight months of the year it’s snow, so it worked out perfectly. That’s when I first started realizing that mythology and stories have such great power to bridge cultural divides.
And they wanted to know whether there were any Arab superheroes?
Yes, they were really intrigued by what kids in the Middle East do, read, believe. They asked, “Is there an Arab Superman? Is there an Arab Batman?” I realized that actually, no, there aren’t any Arab equivalents to Western superheroes. Yes, there’s Aladdin and Sinbad, but no one has ever done an animation or comic book based on the actual mythology from within the culture.
I couldn’t get this question out of my head, and did a couple of years of hardcore research, reading ancient texts, doing six month’s archeological research in the Arab desert. I even learned Hebrew. I wanted to read Aramaic so I could read the Dead Sea Scrolls for inspiration. Meanwhile, I started to teach myself to draw, and came up with some characters based on my knowledge of Arab culture. It was a journey towards discovering my own culture more than anything else.
Eventually, I became so convinced that this was my calling — creating characters and stories based in Arab tradition to spread the culture of tolerance — I dropped out of my master’s program in human resource development, went back to Jordan and in 2006 registered my company, Aranim — which comes from a combination of “Arab” and “anime”. (There is no Arabic word for animation, so I had to come up with something.)
What kind of experience did you bring to creating a comics and media business?
I’ll tell you something funny: I’d never drawn in my life! In fact, I once had an art teacher who refunded my parents’ money and advised me never to try again. And I had zero experience in the comics industry — nobody does, in the entire Middle East! So I just learned through trial and error. But I’m a very quick learner and a very hard worker, and working with other artists and writers in my company helped a lot. In my experience, effort always trumps talent.
I have a team of writers and artists working with me. My role is to develop the concepts, characters and stories, and run many focus groups to gauge what kids respond to. In this sense, Aranim’s characters are youth led.
When it came to game development, I hired some misfit programmers here in Jordan and we learned from scratch how to program games. We bought books on Amazon and literally taught ourselves how to program, using blogs and online communities for support. And we did it! We’re the only Arab company in the entire Arab world that creates social games in-house at the quality that we do. As a testament to my team and their hard work, just recently we won a bid by an international nonprofit to create a massive city-building social game to teach youth positive social values when it comes to urban planning.
Tell us about some of your favorite characters and stories.
All my stories have deep Middle Eastern mythologies ingrained in them. For instance, in my research, I discovered that in ancient Arabic mythology, fire has seven types, each color corresponding to a different one. So I gave Naar — which means “fire” — the first hero of my first comic, the power of the seven flames. The story is about a group of kids who wake up in a future post-apocalyptic Middle East to discover they have superpowers.
Another title coming up, Section 9, is based on Jordan’s real-life all-female counterterrorism team. I am a strong believer in empowering young women, and it’s a great story to help address the issues they face in their work, society and culture. At the same time, it encourages young men to see that girls can kick ass AND be feminine.
I’m also working on a modern retelling of the One Thousand and One Nights story, and a vampire story based on an ancient text. Did you know that the very earliest written record of any creature that sucked somebody’s blood happened here in the Middle East, in ancient Babylon? There’s a beautiful mythology behind it.
One of my favorite current characters is called Element Zero — he’s a special agent, kind of the Arabic Jason Bourne or Jack Bauer, who fights terrorism locally. One of the first social games we produced is based on this character and story. Within the first couple of weeks of posting the game and comic on Facebook, we got 50,000 players and readers.
Have you seen evidence of your games generating passionate discussions among kids?
When we posted the Element Zero game, young kids came into the forums and started fighting among each other about religion and politics. Worried it would turn into a platform for hate, I posted as game creator: “Kids, stop it. If you keep this up, I’m going to stop the game.” Their overwhelming response was: “This is not your game. This is our game now, and you have no right to turn it off.”
At the same time, I noticed I was getting a lot of fan mail letters for the character himself from girls on the board. So I logged into the forums as Element Zero, and through his character asked them to stop. Within one day, everybody apologized, and that conflict never happened again. That shows you the power of indigenous characters and stories, if people believe in them. This is a big difference. Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne are both great characters with great stories. People love them, but don’t identify with them or feel the same sense of ownership.
Do you generate a lot of controversy publishing these comics?
When I first started publishing my comic books, especially the ones that fight extremism and terrorism, I got attacked outside of my office by a couple of extremists. One of them hit me with a razor blade in my face. He was trying to take out one of my eyes. Because it was late at night and I drive a motorbike, I had to cauterize my own wound with a pocketknife before getting to a hospital. That’s how I ended up with a big, massive scar on my face. But … I got attacked by racists in the US and extremists here — so I must be doing something right.
What’s next?
We’ve got 30 comic book titles, but we’re moving away from print to digital publishing because print media is dying and just too expensive. Hopefully by the end of this year, we’ll have all the comic books available in English, and by summer, hopefully, on the iPhone and the iPad. And we plan to go international — I publish in Arabic, but when we go fully digital, we’ll also publish in English.
I’ve also currently got four games and two more in development, and we’re about to release our first iPhone game in March — a combination of the Arab Spring and Animal Farm. We’re also moving into TV and film: I’m producing two live-action shows, one a web TV show based on Element Zero character. One of the top Hollywood studios is interested in that story, too. I’m also producing my first live-action, low-budget feature, a horror story based in Arab mythology.
But it’s not really about the media. It’s about the characters and getting them out into the world to send a message. When people tell me, “You’re a comics creator,” I reply, “I create stories. Whether its presented as a comic or as a game or as a movie, it doesn’t matter.”
How has being a TED Fellow had an impact on your life and work?
Being a TED Fellow came at the best time in my life. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift in that moment. And what’s really amazing is, when I did my TED talk, it was on my birthday! The experience really helped remind me of why I do what I do, during a very difficult period in my life. I had zero funds at the time, and we’d just released the first game. During the conference, I got great coverage, and suddenly, we were one of the hottest startups in the Middle East, and we won a major investment deal from one of the largest TV and media networks in the region as a result. It shut down all the critics. I was also the first Jordanian entrepreneur to become a TED Fellow. So it was exciting on both personal and professional levels.
And here’s another story that’s a testament to the impact the TED fellowship has. During the time of the Libyan civil war, another TED Fellow, Adrian Hong, and I found out through our contacts that there were a lot of injured civilians that needed medical attention. We started lobbying, creating sort of a channel between Libya and Jordan to try and help some of the injured civilians come to Jordanian hospitals. The ball got rolling, and I am happy to say that over 15,000 injured civilians got treated in Jordanian hospitals. Adrian and I played a very, very small part. But, like they say at TED, “big ideas”. This was a small idea, but people jumped on board and it took on a life of its own.
So are you going to translate any of your print comics at all for young American audiences? Because, after all, they’re the ones who inspired you!
Absolutely. One day, I will go to that same classroom and give them the comic books for free, and answer that question, finally.
Late in January, Robin Ince tweeted:
balls, 7 months too late I’ve just realised what i should have done my TED talk on
So the TED Blog asked: What?
And here is what he wrote:
Every year I attempt to say yes to things that are out of my comfort zone. These are never physical things such as parachute jumps or mountain climbs — I am not so keen on actual death, I am happy to make do with the death of my own self-regard. A TED talk was one of those leaps into abject terror I made in 2011. I had admired these talks for some time and frequently fallen into bouts of voluntary insomnia playing TED talk tag until dawn.
My mistake was that I had never watched the funny ones. I didn’t even know that they existed. So I spent my first month of preparation for TED mulling over how I could create the illusion of being smart. This has been made even more difficult now you are no longer allowed to smoke a pipe onstage, a surefire device to create the illusion of thoughtfulness as successive British Prime Ministers demonstrated.
About a week beforehand I suddenly realized I had gone in totally the wrong direction. I had been asked for to provide levity, not compete with people who were clearly qualified to talk of astrophysics and the evolution of empathy. The wastepaper basket was rapidly filled and a new notebook opened. I gathered together some words on whether it was possible to be happy if approaching the world scientifically. In 8 minutes I hoped to cover love, death and the strong anthropic principle. As it was, I had to drop the strong anthropic principle due to time constraints. It appears that love and death take up more of your allotted eight minutes than you might imagine.
The night before my morning session (“morning session” is a term that strikes terror into the hearts of the predominantly nocturnal comedian), I sat alone in the hotel bar, scribbling and re-scribbling until I had nervously chewed all the ink from the pen.
The blessed relief of not overrunning, and saying most of what I had planned, meant I didn’t start mulling over the talk until I was on the train home. But by the time I walked through the door I had demolished all I had said and, as so often on these occasions, the clear picture I had wanted to see in the buildup only became transparent in the aftermath. To attempt eight minutes summing up happiness through science was preposterous. I now knew the TED talk I should have done, which was about the daily problems I face of attempting to write comedy routines about contemporary physics which both I and a reasonably broad comedy club audience can understand. A world of quark-based conundrums and neutrino dilemmas flooded my mind with a revelation at 7 minutes 34 seconds, which would have been like opening a box and a cat leaping onto your lap.
There is not time for regret — actually that’s not true; if you read French literature you’ll find it can occupy your life. Nevertheless I can’t look back too much and wish I had done something else. The process of terror was in itself fascinating, and I got the chance to enjoy coffees from around the world while listening to speakers who hotwired my mind (coffee and hotwired minds is a stimulating mix). And thanks to Hugh Everett and the many-worlds interpretation, I can be safe in the knowledge that in another world I did deliver the speech I wished I had, and also safe in the knowledge that in that other world I walked off and wished I had attempted something about happiness through science.
– Robin Ince
Watch his TEDTalk, which is really very funny >>
As a companion to today’s TEDTalk from Alain de Botton, he sent us this FAQ, a brief introduction to the thinking behind Atheism 2.0:
What do you think of the aggressive atheism we have seen in the past few years?
I am an atheist, but a gentle one. I don’t feel the need to mock anyone who believes. I really disagree with the hard tone of some atheists who approach religion like a silly fairy tale. I am deeply respectful of religion, but I believe in none of its supernatural aspects. So my position is perhaps unusual: I am at once very respectful and completely impious.
What is it you’re most interested in in religion?
The secular world believes that if we have good ideas, we will be reminded of them just when it matters. Religions don’t agree. They are all about structure; they want to build calendars for us, that will make sure that we regularly encounter reminders of significant concepts. That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten. Religions are also keen to see us as more than just rational minds, we are emotional and physical creatures, and therefore, we need to be seduced via our bodies and our senses too.
You propose to reform schools and universities to teach humans how to deal with the most important existential problems; loneliness, pain and death for example. Why? Can existential lessons be taught at school?
The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature – and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of moral instruction. But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this. We need to build a similar awareness into secular structures.
Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity.
Don’t you think that, in order to truly appreciate religious music and art, you have to be a believer – or, at least, don’t you think that non-believers miss something important in the experience?
I am interested in the modern claim that we have now found a way to replace religion: with art. You often hear people say, ‘Museums are our new churches’. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not true, and it’s principally not true because of the way that museums are laid out and present art. They prevent anyone from having an emotional relationship with the works on display. They encourage an academic interest, but prevent a more didactic and therapeutic kind of contact. I recommend that even if we don’t believe, we learn to use art (even secular art) as a resource for comfort, identification, guidance and edification, very much what religions do with art.
What aspects of religion should atheists (respectfully) adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a “religion for atheists” — call it Atheism 2.0 — that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 19:20.)
Watch Alain de Botton’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
You have a background as a writer, educator and journalist. How did you end up creating the Water Canary?
I went to NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) because I realized that so many of the social outcomes I was after as an educator and journalist could be better accomplished by designing better tools. I wanted to come up with some way of becoming what I was calling an “urban planner for the global village.” At that point, I was thinking about tools that could transform classrooms, but it was really a bigger vision than that.
I fell in love with circuitry and with making tangible objects that had real functionality. Next thing I knew, I found myself in a class called Design for UNICEF, taught by Clay Shirky in association with UNICEF’s Innovations Lab. We were looking at ways to leverage technology and telecommunications strategies to transform the work that UNICEF does in the field. This was just as things like Ushahidi (an open source project that lets users crowdsource crisis information via mobile) were beginning to gain traction. People were just starting to realize the potential of leveraging mobile phones. I was interested in other ways we might design social interventions that relied on simple but important pieces of information. I wanted to see what was possible with water, and I was lucky to have an incredible team and the support of faculty that were willing to take on such a huge challenge. We started off as novices but we all became water experts in the process.
Why water?
My parents immigrated to Minnesota, but I used to spend summers in Delhi when I was a kid and worked there as a journalist, so it’s like home to me. I grew up seeing my grandfather getting up every morning at 5am to boil water, but not understanding why. I always found water safety confusing.
When I dug deeper, every document I read inevitably acknowledged that, even with the Millennium Development Goals, there was a complete lack of information about water. We had some information about water scarcity and depleting freshwater supplies, but almost nothing about water quality. I wondered, “What would happen if you knew whether your water was safe or not? What would that knowledge do in a city like New Delhi?” You can’t really excuse the lack of safe water there. It’s no longer a money issue. I decided it was really a matter of there being not enough demand for infrastructure — maybe if people had more information we could transform that.
So the idea behind the Water Canary was an inexpensive gadget that could instantly tell you whether your water was safe or not with a red light or green light, so you don’t have to be literate to use it. Over time, it occurred to us that what we really had was something that could transform disaster response with real-time information. This was right around the time when the Haiti earthquake happened. In emergencies, the assumption that every aid organization has to make is that all water is unsafe. And that leads to the entire response being completely inefficient. They never really know where help is needed. So it means you end up sending too many supplies to places that don’t need them, and that there’s never enough in areas that do.
It started out as a very simple device just for testing whether or not there was a high concentration of bacteria in the water, but that has expanded into detecting nutrient pollution and volatile chemicals as well as microbiological contaminants.
How did you acquire the knowledge to create this device?
I worked very closely with a faculty member at NYU named Eric Rosenthal, who is kind of a genius in optics. He had never done anything with water. When I told him the idea, he told me he’d been working on a technology that might be able to do it affordably and generously taught me everything I needed to make it. It’s changed a lot over the years, but I still work very closely with Eric and he’s now the senior scientist at the company.
And how does the Water Canary actually work?
Right now, generally, if you’re going to test water, you use a chemical reaction that can take up to a day in an incubator. It’s very difficult to carry out for anyone who’s not extremely well trained, and almost impossible in a chaotic situation. The Water Canary uses spectral analysis — essentially shining light through a water sample and measuring what it absorbs — to form conclusions about what’s in the water. It’s fast and uses a microprocessor, so the raw data is captured in the unit, making it easy to transmit in real time. The GPS-tagged data can then be instantly transmitted, so that water safety information can instantly be shared with the world. This makes it possible to quickly identify and respond to hazards — protecting people and the environment and preventing full-scale disasters. Every other effort to link mobile phones to water testing has involved someone entering it into an application. The moment you introduce that step, it’s far less likely that the data will ever be shared, or accurate.
The data gathered will also help build an overall picture of world water health. When you’re distributing inexpensive and accurate devices to people all over the world and collecting lots of data, you’re setting up a system that could get better and better with every reading that you take. We’re starting off the way the weather service started — just as a system for predicting storms. Before we could predict storms, we had no agriculture security, we had food shortages. It was commonplace to lose ships at sea. So just having advanced warning of a storm was enough to transform the world we lived in.
Likewise, if we implement a system that very rapidly identifies a source of water contamination in real time, that in and of itself is extremely valuable. We’re not there yet, but once we’ve collected enough data, we’ll be able to go back even to legacy data and say, “Three years ago, there was benzene in this water.”
How has your business and distribution model evolved?
We originally thought our business would be to sell devices, instead we realized that an open source device and networked data provide us with a much better business model, as well as a way of building a community for sharing water quality information.
What next?
We’re getting the device ready for field testing, raising money to get there, and doing everything necessary to build the best device and community we can.
Who do you picture having Water Canaries? Relief and aid workers? Your grandfather?
I think about Water Canary devices the same way I think of flashlights and smoke detectors: they’re for everyone. Since they’re easy to use and affordable, I don’t see any reason why everyone shouldn’t have them. It’s clear that the most immediate need is for groups like water-testing professionals, scientists, NGOs, municipalities, and people that face unsafe water conditions every day, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be something everyone eventually owns and uses. The way we designed the technology, it could just as easily be a handheld unit as something installed at the tap, or something you plug into an Android phone.
How does the Water Canary empower people?
It gives people knowledge and a chance to form their own conclusions. Instead of just telling people to use sanitation supplies, you’d make them available and let people make up their own minds whether or not to use them. It also gives people a means to investigate the world around them, and to have a say in what data goes into decisions that impact their quality of life. There’s a huge opportunity to engage ordinary people to collect scientific data to solve problems like this. Citizen science isn’t all that different from citizen journalism: all you need is the simple tool, like a cameraphone, that enables them to report on conditions they identify. In the end I think scientific instruments are just another form of information technology, like computers, and shifts like this become possible when we have the right tools.
Tell us about your experience of being a TED Fellow.
I’ve made incredible connections, both personally and professionally. Water Canary has formed relationships with people from so many fields and disciplines who care about water, the environment and human rights, and want us to succeed. That’s allowed us to put a lot of care into finding the right people to work with and laying a solid foundation for everything we’re going to accomplish in the next few years.
On the most basic level, it’s amazing to participate in a community that collectively has the potential to do almost anything. With so many of the Fellows, it’s not a matter of whether we’ll do something incredible together, but a matter of when. That’s a huge source of motivation because it takes away so much of the isolation you learn to expect when you’re trying to do something impossible.
There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?
I always come back to a William Blake quote: “If the fool would persist in folly he would become wise.” If you’re doing something worthwhile, chances are you don’t know what you’re doing and nobody can tell you the right way to do it. That will always be true, so it’s nothing to be ashamed of and it’s never a good excuse to give up. Committing to your idea means being willing to make a fool out of yourself in the process, and if you can embrace that you’ll come out on the other side with nothing to regret.
How did you get interested in innovating solutions for problems in developing nations?
I first went to Tanzania as part of MIT’s D-Lab, a multidisciplinary course on development of appropriate technologies, innovation, and creative capacity-building to alleviate poverty. Among the principles taught is the concept of co-creation. Are you familiar with it? There was a phase in development where Westerners were saying, “Oh, if we just give people in developing nations tractors — i.e., technology that worked for us — it’ll be great.” What we didn’t realize was that we were dumping technology into a market where people had no idea how it worked. So now there’s lots of tractors all over, rusting. No spare parts are available because they were designed for the Western world. In contrast, co-creation is the concept of inventing new technologies alongside the people who will use it — having their input as well as ours. When two rivers meet, they meet at a confluence. Co-creation involves making confluent technologies: merging two ideas into one that’s better than either one on its own.
Did you go to Tanzania with an idea in mind, or did you go to identify a problem and come up with a solution?
We had to identify a problem before going, and build community partners, and then come up with the technology or solution that we thought would work. My project was a pedal-powered maize sheller. I actually started with a design from Guatemala, which had been used for the past 20 years. I didn’t invent this technology, but adapted it so it could be packed into a suitcase and moved more easily. But when I got to Tanzania, I saw that the technology was still completely inadequate — expensive, bulky. Why would a smallholder farmer want to own this machine? If he has two acres, he’ll have finished everything he needs to do with it after two days. Alternatively, who would want to lug their maize from place to place to get it shelled?
So we turned the idea on its head. I thought, “Let’s plug the machine into a bicycle — and also use the bicycle as a platform to bring the technology to the people.” So now the technology is shared among the community: it can be biked from place to place. Then when it’s out of season, a new machine can be plugged in, leveraging the bicycle as a tool of empowerment in itself.
At first, we rode the bicycle shellers out to the farms to shell maize. But then people started renting the bike shellers themselves, and some began offering it to others as a service, giving rise to an entrepreneurial model.
How does the bicycle sheller fulfill a need?
The bike sheller serves as a bridge technology. There are actually two extremes in maize shelling technology. Most people beat maize with a stick, or use their fingers. The “high tech” alternative is a large tractor which travels to villages offering to shell maize for 1,000 shillings, equivalent to 60 cents, for every sack filled. But tractor companies don’t want to visit small-holder farmers: they want to go someplace where they can shell 500 sacks of maize, not just 10 or 15. A bike-shelling entrepreneur can shell one sack of maize in 40 minutes, giving him the potential to earn $10 per day.
We think the ideal model would be that one person in the village buys the bicycle, becomes an entrepreneur and shells the maize for the rest of the village. Right now we’re working with village chairmen who would select a youth to be the one to provide the service to the whole village. So it’s his job, and he gets money from each of the villagers. That way, everybody benefits. During the maize harvest, he can use the sheller. During the off season, he can still make a living as a bicycle taxi, for example.
We’ve also developed other technologies to accommodate those who don’t want to be entrepreneurs, but just need useful technology. For instance, it’s not appropriate or comfortable for some people, like grandmothers or little kids, to use a bike sheller. For them, we developed a tiny $2 hand-sheller, which allows them to shell while protecting their fingers.
What else you can do with the bike?
We’re still developing more tools that can be plugged into a bike, but the one closest to being finished is a maize grinder, which basically grinds maize into flour. Another attachment is a rice thresher. We have a bicycle phone charger as well, which charges your phone as you bike from place to place. The possibilities of things you can do with a bicycle are endless, which is why the concept of GCS is so exciting.
What’s your ultimate goal, and when will you feel like you’ve succeeded?
The metric for success in terms of being sustainable as a company is getting sales and breaking even. But for me, it’s about getting the technology into the hands of people who need it. Even if I can get 1 percent penetration in Tanzania, which is still 40,000 farmers, I’d be delighted.
My grand vision is really to develop a portfolio of attachments and be able to achieve worldwide distribution. I want to break even in Tanzania after two years, and then to expand to Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia, and then to be able to travel.
We’re also expanding to the US market for our phone chargers, which were designed from spare bike parts by a 40-year-old Tanzanian inventor, Bernard Kiwia. He’s an amazing man who has made a pedal-powered drill press, pedal-powered hacksaw, a solar water heater out of fluorescent tubes. Selling in the United States would help us bring in revenue faster so we can expand faster elsewhere. And I want to celebrate Bernard’s story, not just to bolster him, but also to publicize our company to a wider audience and make people aware of the technology gap.
Too often, you hear about sustainable development projects that get started, and then the leaders leave and the project dies. I’d like this project to survive beyond my lifetime.
Making sure your project will carry on would require a lot of education and training.
Exactly, and that’s what we’re doing right now. We’ve realized customers need a lot of support, so we’ve trained technicians throughout the country to offer help if anyone has trouble assembling the machine. We’re also working on building relationships, interacting with all the chairmen who have maize farmers in their villages, and letting them know about the product. Last year we didn’t sell very many, but this year sales are suddenly exploding. It’s simply because we’re going into the villages and making personal contact.
What do they make of you, a young Asian-American woman trying to sell them this gadget?
Most of the time, my sales reps, who are Tanzanian, do the community contact, but I encourage my Western colleagues to integrate into local culture as much as possible, living as Tanzanians do. When I visit villages, I do think they’re always shocked and don’t know what to think of me. I actually have become quite fluent in Swahili, so that excites people. Attitudes towards foreigners can be tricky. People can be either excited and honored at your presence, or they think you’re going to donate something, because that’s been the history of Africa in general. Then we have to explain that it’s a business, which can be hard. It kind of helps that I’m Asian, because they don’t know how to perceive me at all. I’m not quite the typical European or American.
What’s the best part of what you do?
I love showing people how bicycles are really tools for empowerment. You can build a full business around a bicycle. You don’t even need a house. Just get a business card, your bicycle, your machine, your phone charger, and your phone — those are all the elements you need to start your own business. So I hope it takes off, but I think the biggest thing is just making sure the technology is accessible. I think a big failure right now in sustainable development initiatives is that there are a lot of technologies being developed at the university level, but they never go anywhere. No matter how good your innovation, if you don’t take it to the people that need it, it won’t have any impact.
What’s it been like to be a TED Fellow?
My favorite part about being a TED Fellow is meeting all the other Fellows. They are all amazing, passionate people, and it was incredible to spend time with all of them. The Senior Fellows were great advisers in preparing us for the TED conference and how to make the most of it, and the Fellows staff are extremely entertaining and supportive. I’m really glad we all got to take the main stage and learn how to give a TED talk. Hopefully, it will come in handy later in life!
There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?
Follow your passion and just dive in to start your company. You may not know what you’re doing, but for sure, you’ll learn and grow. That is, if you have the right attitude! Me, I have no regrets.
Political prisoners aren’t the only ones being tortured — the vast majority of judicial torture happens in ordinary cases, even in ‘functioning’ legal systems. Social activist Karen Tse shows how we can, and should, stand up and end the use of routine torture. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 14:20.)
Watch Karen Tse’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
Every day, we use materials from the earth without thinking, for free. But what if we had to pay for their true value: would it make us more careful about what we use and what we waste? Think of Pavan Sukhdev as nature’s banker — assessing the value of the Earth’s assets. Eye-opening charts will make you think differently about the cost of air, water, trees … (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 16:31.)
Watch Pavan Sukhdev’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
You’re an artist and designer primarily concerned with how our bodies interact with the world.
I’m concerned with finding alternatives that challenge the disconnect we have between our bodies and the environment, and the fear that we have of our own bodies. I think ultimately it speaks to our denial of death, our fear of death. Our bodies are essentially our primary reminders that we are mortal –- that we are physical beings. We eat, we defecate, we decay.
Can you tell me the idea behind the Infinity Burial Project?
I became very interested in the relationship between death denial and the fact that death has become harmful to the environment. I think death could provide an opportunity to reconcile all of our energy and resource consumption and pollution. Instead, in the West, at least, we fear death –- a fear which leads us to embalm the body with toxic chemicals.
I wanted to create a project and set of tools that would challenge this by promoting the actual process of and acceptance of decomposition.
But if you’re dead, why does it matter?
By simply living, eating and breathing, our bodies become storehouses of toxins, energy, and resources that are accumulated over a lifetime. Contemporary funeral practices both return those toxins to the environment and, in the case of a “traditional” funeral, increase the toxin load. In the practice of embalming, the body is drained of fluids and replaced with a formaldehyde-based fluid, which preserves the body so that it looks “alive” for open-casket viewing. Meanwhile, the body itself becomes a toxic site, which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel.
When a body is cremated, it releases all those toxins into the atmosphere, not to mention the additional energy used –- about 5 kilowatt hours, a tremendous amount. There’s no control over how the toxins then get reintegrated back into the environment -– all the mercury goes into the air, which falls back into the water, which goes into the plant life and the oceans and the fish, and then cycles back into our bodies. And many people think cremation is the most green option. It may be better than some funeral practices, but it’s not really green at all.
Have you found a species of mushrooms that already breaks down human tissue, are you developing one?
I am in the process of training edible mushroom species to break down human tissue –- cultivating them on my own discarded body tissue –- because they are known to remediate some of our environmental toxins. Of course, there’s no single mushroom or cluster of mushrooms that remediates all the toxins involved, but it’s a start. Paul Stamets has proven you can train some mushrooms to grow on any organic material. He has trained them to eat petrochemicals.
How does one train a mushroom?
Although the mushrooms I’m using prefer wood-based food sources, mushrooms will pretty much eat anything. The training process involves introducing different food sources to the mushrooms and then slowly depriving the mushrooms of wood-based substances. One mycologist has even trained mushrooms to eat plastics like Bakelite.
Your spore-embroidered ninja suit, which is in development, is a prototype. So tell us how this works: the corpse will be dressed and buried in the suit? What’s it made of?
The suit is made of a cotton base layer that is overlaid with a crocheted cotton netting. The netting is embedded with mushroom mycelia and spores. The pattern of this crocheted netting is a visual representation of how mushroom mycelia grow.
I’m also working on other delivery mechanisms. One is a second skin made of a nutrient gel, embedded with bacteria and spore-filled capsules.
Are people donating their bodies to you already?
Yes, a number of people have offered to do so. My TED Talk has allowed me to reach a broader audience, and as a result more folks have signed up to become decompinauts. But no formal agreements have been made. I’m exploring what language and legal instruments are needed to allow donations.
What else are you working on now?
I’m planning a workshop on the ins and outs of choosing, then declaring — both legally and socially — one’s desired postmortem corpse-disposal method. The workshop is meant to be educational and facilitate the selection of alternative postmortem options such as the Infinity Burial System.
Do your ideas spring from doing art? Or do they originate from life experience, then find expression in art?
The ideas often develop initially out of a lived experience such as a specific event, physical condition, etc. But then each project expands to become a platform for inquiry about larger issues. The design or product is not the end goal, but rather the beginning of an intentional dialogue.
For example, the MIT FEMA Trailer Project grew out of my work with the City of New Orleans and its soil remediation efforts. We received a single surplus FEMATrailer and converted it into a mobile composting site with a vertical garden, rainwater recycling apparatus, and Permaculture library. We used the trailer transformation as an opportunity to understand and create dialogue about the history of the trailers (via a timeline), their part in the longstanding and entrenched environmental justice issues in the Gulf Coast, and government waste.
In the case of the Infinity Burial Project, the Mushroom Death Suit, the Decompiculture Society, and the alternative postmortem gear are tools in themselves, but are also ways to investigate and create a dialogue around our funeral practices, death denial, and the relationship between our postmortem practices and the environment.
Tell me about the art program at MIT, and how you came to this very interesting intersection of science and art.
The visual arts program at MIT (now called the Program in Art, Culture and Technology) grew out of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies that was founded by Gyorgy Kepes in the 1960s, then later directed by Otto Piene in the spirit of facilitating greater integration of art, technology, and science.
Today, the program is based in the Department of Architecture and directed by curator Ute Meta Bauer. Many of the students and faculty are involved in research-based, transdisciplinary practices that don’t necessarily fit into a typical art or design structure.
I studied psychology and was pre-med as an undergrad, and just prior to entering the program I was involved in social work and social policy research. So when I started to look at art programs, I wanted to be in a place where aesthetic, social, and scientific inquiry could work together.
How has being a TED Fellow changed the way you approach your work?
I’ve been truly inspired by meeting the other Fellows and joining a community of discipline-agnostic game changers. What’s been really illuminating is learning that our methodologies are often interchangeable or transferable -– such as the strategies used to build a community around one’s work. This has imparted a feeling that I no longer operate in an art ghetto, that the definition and reach of my work, the processes, and dialogue are much broader than I realized.
There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?
A friend of mine came up with the phrase “Input thinking, output feeling” — in other words, don’t take things personally, and treat others with sensitivity and empathy. Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about Abraham Lincoln’s legendary empathy, which he exercised both in political strategizing and in his personal interactions with soldiers and young children, among others. He denounced criticism of Southern slave owners, and instead tried to understand their motivations, which allowed him later to mold and shift attitudes.