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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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.
Does science ruin the magic of life? In this grumpy but charming monologue, Robin Ince makes the argument against. The more we learn about the astonishing behavior of the universe — the more we stand in awe. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 8:38.)
Watch Robin Ince’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.
“Travels in Space, Time & Imagination” was the theme of the fifth TEDSalon in London, which took place on Thursday 10 November and played to a packed house.
“Journeys can be of many sorts,” TED European director, and the evening’s host, Bruno Giussani said, opening the Salon. And indeed the program was eclectic, featuring nine speakers, two performers, a fireside chat and the unveiling of the new issue of design mind magazine — published by partner frog and fully devoted to TEDGlobal 2011. The audience was also very diverse: 250 attendees gathered at the Unicorn Theatre from all over the UK and from several European countries.
The latest work of the opening speaker, Taryn Simon, is on show (until the end of the year) at the Tate Modern in London and at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Titled “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters,” it is a remarkably insightful investigation into the nature of genealogy and the way our lives are shaped by the interplay of many different forces. Simon spoke at TEDGlobal (see her TEDTalk) three years ago, and has been described by the Observer as “the most important photographer of her generation.” Through powerful and surprising storytelling, she took the audience on a narrated tour of her new work, from India (where we met Chandraban, the man who gives the title to the work, who walked one day into an Indian land registry office to find that he had been declared dead, at the instigation of members of his family who wanted to appropriate his land) to Kenyan healers, modern China, a Ukranian orphanage, occupied Poland, and more.
Mark Rock was next. The founder of Audioboo and creator of a technology that makes it seriously easy to “capture the spoken word,” he believes that the explosion of technology and of online innovation in the last few years has left oral history behind. From the treble of a child’s sadness, to water washing on the shore, an earthquake, or a mother’s voice forever silenced by death, the audience was reminded of the fundamental power of voice, and shown ways to make oral storytelling more permanent.
British soul singer Alice Russell took then the stage, accompanied by guitarist Alex Cowan, for an encore of her TEDGlobal 2011 performance, singing her unique take on “Crazy.”
“There is that other singer, or rather that intriguing pop phenomenon,” said Giussani introducing the next speaker, “a young woman who has gone in four years from absolute anonymity to first-name global recognition.” He was referring to Lady Gaga of course — the topic of Jörg Reckhenrich‘s talk. A German management thinker and artist, Reckhenrich tracked and analized Gaga’s rise and the rules of “Gaganomics.” (Some hints: You gotta have talent, work hard, create a narrative and an emotional impact, and need the ability to orchestrate human relationships.)
Giussani then unveiled the latest issue of design mind magazine, published by frog. The magazine, printed in big format, is rich in articles about TEDGlobal 2011 (of which frog is a partner) and in further explorations of its theme, “The Stuff of Life.” Its cover image is a photo of one of the hundreds of actions around the world prompted by the InsideOut project by JR, the winner of this year’s TED Prize. One of those actions took place in Bastrop, Texas, which was devastated by wildfires — and whose population gathered nonetheless around this artistic project, led by the magazine’s editor Sam Martin, showing strength, resilience and hope. The story is told in this video.
The closing speaker of the first session, Catherine Mayer, Time magazine’s London Bureau Chief, offered in an insightful and witty way her “anatomy of a (new) species” composed of the growing number of people who seem to be living agelessly, as if “the ages of man” had disappeared under the conjunction of higher life expectancy and better socio-economic circumstances. Mayer calls this group — of which she acknowledges she’s part — “amortals.“
The second sessions was opened by neuroscientist Neil Burgess, who tackled the very basic question: “Where did I park my car?” by discussing in details how the brain navigates space and develops virtual “maps” of the locations we have been to. Sensory information from the environment, especially distance and direction to boundaries, captured by place cells and grid cells play a key role in letting us know where we are — or in allowing us to remember where our car is parked, and to find it.
Erik Johansson, a young übertalented Swedish photographer and retoucher, discussed some of his work, which involves the creation of photos that show impossible scenes, but manage to maintain a sense of realism. This “impossible realism” plays on the moment’s hesitation, when seeing his photos, before realizing that while they feel familiar, they have unexpected twists and do not make sense. Photos like this one:
The TEDSalon audience was presented with a copy of The Wiki Man, the just-off-the-presses book by ad guru and TED star Rory Sutherland (see his TEDTalks here and here). Giussani sat down with Sutherland for a conversation about the book — a brilliant pastiche of insight, irreverence and debunking. The often-amusing discussion ranged from behavioral economics (Rory looks forward to the time when Daniel Kahneman’s bus tour will be “overturned by screaming, admiring Japanese school girls”) to the nefarious impact of spreadsheets and from technological innovation to the appropriate age for reading Brave New World.
A glimpse into the future was then provided by Lisa Harouni, the CEO of Digital Forming, which brought along a series of complex 3D-printed objects to make a convincing argument that 3D printing will disrupt the landscape of manufacturing, and will do so soon. As “additive manufacturing” (the technical name) becomes more available and ubiquitous, Harouni said, we will be offered the possibility to download product data from the web, customize it and print locally, instead of shipping the product itself.
Next, Somali archeologist Sada Mire took the audience to the land that she had to flee as a child and where she now heads the Department of Antiquities (when she’s not lecturing in London). Discussing some of her discoveries — cave paintings, ancient writings — she made an impassioned plea for us to start considering cultural heritage as a human right, and culture as an essential building block for reconciliation and healing in countries torn by droughts, wars and ethnic conflicts.
Preston Reed then erupted on stage, and rocked the house with his mindblowing, unique way of playing the acoustic guitar, mixing chord-based grooves and wild polyrhythms with percussive uses of the instrument.
The closing speaker was author and Member of the British Parliament Kwasi Kwarteng, who revisited the hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles of the British empire, the theme of his recent book Ghosts of Empire. Analyzing how we became the societies that we are today, Kwarteng posited whether the empire was really “nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who had very different ideas about government and administration.”
(Reported by Caitlin Kraft-Buchman. Photos by Robert Leslie. More photos of the event: TED’s Flickr stream. Also, TEDster Nesta Morgan was in the audience and has been drawing the speakers: her sketches are also on Flickr.)