TED 2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder, Day 3

Embracing chaos, 57 things Google knows about you, and how to 3D-print a kidney.

This week, we’re reporting live from TED 2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder. So far, we warmed up with 5 must-read books by some of this year’s speakers, synthesized highlights from Day 1 and Day 2, and spotlighted an inspired urban intervention by designer and TED Fellow Candy Chang. Today, we’re back — on the brink of our sleep budged — with highlights, photos and notable soundbites from Day 3 — dig in.

Historian Edward Tenner

Culture and technology historian Edward Tenner showed statistical evidence that the greatest time for game-changing innovation in modern history was actually The Great Depression, which had a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity. He argued that one of the grand questions of our time is how to close the gap between our capabilities and our foresight.

Our ability to innovate is increasing geometrically but our capacity to model those innovations is linear.” ~ Edward Tenner

Tenner’s excellent 1997 book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology & the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, will change the way you think about adversity, opportunity and innovation.

Chris Anderson presenting the winners of the Ads Worth Spreading contest.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

TED announced the 10 winners of the inaugural Ads Worth Spreading contest, seeking to reframe commercial communication from an interruption to inspiration.

Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org fame, author of the excellent forthcoming The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, delivered a stride-stopping and timely curtain-pull on our modern information diet and what we’re being force-fed by the powers of the Internet. Google, apparently, looks at 57 data points to serve us personally tailored search results.

We’ve moved to an age where the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” ~ Eli Pariser

Which raises the question of responsibility: Is the responsibility of those who serve information to give us more of what we already like and believe, or to open our eyes to new perspectives? And if it’s all algorithmically driven, is there even a place for such responsibility? Our key takeaway from Pariser’s talk, one particularly relevant to our own credo, is that human information curators will have an increasingly important role as moral mitigators of algorithmic personalization efficiency.

Eli Pariser 'We need the new information gatekeepers to encode a sense of civic responsibility into algorithms.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

We need the Internet to introduce us to different ideas and different perspectives.” ~ Eli Pariser

Virginia Tech’s Dennis Hong is building the world’s first vehicle for the visually-impaired. and recently made history with the Blind Driver Challenge.

Dennis Hong 'We need the new information gatekeepers to encode a sense of civic responsibility into algorithms.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

High-functioning autistic savant Daniel Tammet opened the door to his fascinating view of the world. He used synesthesia, the strange neurological crossing of the senses, as an example of how the world is often richer than we think it to be.

Daniel Tammet shows us the world through the eyes of an autistic savant.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Tammet’s Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant is one of the most fascinating perspective shifts you’ll ever read.

Google's Sebastian Thrun 'We took a driverless car from San Francisco to LA, and no one even noticed there was no driver.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

The idea behind the Stuxnet worm is quite simple: We don’t want Iran to get the bomb.” ~ Ralph Langner

Security consultant Ralph Langner 'Mossad is responsible for Stuxnet. But the real force behind that is not Israel, it is the only cyber force: The U.S.'

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

In one of the day’s most jaw-dropping demos, the kind that restores one’s faith in humanity, Berkley Bionics‘ Eythor Bender showcased the incredible eLEGS exoskeletons, which enable the paralyzed to walk again, and HULC, which enables ordinary people to carry up to 200 lbs. Bender was joined onstage by a soldier, who demoed HULC, and a paralyzed woman who walked for the first time in 18 years thanks to eLEGS.

Eythor Bender on stage with paraplegic Amanda Boxtel, ecstatic in her new non-invasive exoskeleton legs.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto is developing amazing non-invasive implants made of silicon and silk.

Fiorenzo Omenetto shows a disposable cup made of silk, a biodegradable, biocompatible alternative to the highly unsustainable styrofoam.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

There was no shortage of astounding demos today. Anthony Atala, whose work in 3D organ printing is an unbelievable next frontier in medicine, literally “printed” a kidney on the TED stage as 1,700 of the world’s smartest people gasped in awe, speechless.

Anthony Atala 'prints' a kidney to a collective gasp.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

The remarkable papercut artist Béatrice Coron, whose stunning artwork we’ve spotted on the New York subway, echoed some of our own beliefs about combinatorial creativity:

I’m influenced by everything I read, everything I see. In life and in paper cutting, everything is connected: One story leads to another.” ~ Beatrice Coron

Watch Coron’s creative process and swoon like we did:

Keep an eye on our live Twitter coverage and come back here tomorrow evening for highlights from the final day.

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LoudSauce: Crowdfunded Advertising for Causes

What bus shelters have to do with civic engagement and Marshall McLuhan.

The key folly of cause marketing can be reduced to low awareness and an unconvincing voice — weak, creatively uncompelling messaging that fails to reach a sufficient number of people and fails to engage those it does reach. Or, to frame it in Marshall McLuhan‘s famous medium/message paradigm, an insufficient medium carrying a toothless message. We’ve previously looked at how UK nonprofit DoTheGreenThing is solving the creative merit problem by borrowing talent from the traditional ad industry to reshape the message. Now, startup LoudSauce is borrowing, quite literally, media space from the traditional media industry to reshape the medium.

Dubbed the world’s first crowdfunded media buying platform, it does for causes what Kickstarter and other platforms do for creative projects, allowing fans and supporters to microfund media space for the causes they’d like to support who couldn’t afford it on their own. Part civic activism, part socialist capitalism, LoudSauce aims to give ideas that matter the share of voice they deserve, help bring smart projects to life and, ultimately, create a new market for conscious creative ad content.

Our vision is to transform the medium of advertising from one that primarily drives consumption to one of civic participation. What if we had more power to shape which messages were promoted on our streets? What if our billboards inspired us toward a future we actually wanted?” ~ LoudSauce

LoudSauce already helped Green Patriot Posters raise $3,200 to get beautifully designed sustainability PSA posters onto San Francisco’s bus shelters. This week, they’re helping Brain Pickings favorite The Story of Stuff microfund a teaser to reach 2 million people during A&E’s show about hyperconsumption, Hoarders.

If you have or know of a cause or pro-social message that needs to reach more eyeballs and eardrums, LoudSauce would like to hear from you. Meanwhile, browse the current campaigns to microfund and keep an eye on the site as it continues to grow — we think it’s a winner, and that’s our two-cent microcontribution.

Our only hang-up with LoudSauce is that, for a project that aims to up the ante on creative engagement in marketing communication, it suffers from tragically low production value and creative merit on its meta-communication, from the site design to the videos promoting the campaigns being microfunded. We wish they’d do a LoudSauce campaign for LoudSauce itself, getting funding to hire a good designer and a good microdocumentary filmmaker. We’d certainly contribute.

via TBD

In 2010, we spent more than 4,500 hours bringing you Brain Pickings — the blog, the newsletter and the Twitter feed — over which we could’ve seen 53 feature-length films, listened to 135 music albums or taken 1,872 trips to the bathroom. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

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Mad Men: The Illustrated World

Tips for the modern metrosexual from the 1960s, or what martinis have to do with Twitter.

Yes, we love Mad Men goodies, who doesn’t? Nearly two years ago, we featured NYC-based illustrator, designer and comedian Dyna Moe‘s absolutely wonderful Mad Men illustrations. The series eventually charmed AMC into launching the popular Mad Men Yourself app, which has since populated countless Twitter streams with Mad-Menified avatars.

This fall, Dyna Moe released her dynamite work in Mad Men: The Illustrated World — a truly, truly fantastic book that captures not only everything we love about Mad Men, but also the broader cultural landscape of the era, from fashion and style to office culture to lifehacks like hangover workarounds and secretary etiquette.

With stunning, vibrant illustrations inspired by the aesthetic and artistic style of vintage ads from the 1960s, the book is a priceless and colorful timecapsule of an era few of us lived in but most of us romanticize.

And, of course, effort to capture the spirit of the era would be complete without the spirits of the era.

Conceptually playful and artistically ambitious, Mad Men: The Illustrated World is the perfect gift for the vintage revivalist, illustration aficionado or Mad-Men-holic in your life, and a fine addition to your own collection of paper-based design gems.

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Sterling’s Gold: A Fictional Mad Men Memoir

Last month, we rejoiced in the news that Mad Men‘s Roger Sterling is publishing a fictional memoir to be sold on the very real Amazon — pure genius by AMC. Today, Sterling’s Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man hits the virtual bookstore in a very non-virtual way. In 176 pages, the fictional Sterling keeps it real on everything from the business consequences of his divorce settlement to juicy details on his longtime affair with Joan Holloway.

Divided into chapters on women, clients, drinking and other essentials of the Mad Men lifestyle, the book is full of Sterlingisms, many of which remain surprisingly timeless truisms about life in the Madison world.

The day you sign a client is the day you start losing him.” ~ Roger Sterling

Even the Amazon product description is written in complete biographical seriousness, treating Sterling as an actual pioneer from the golden age of advertising.

Being with a client is like being in a marriage. Sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons, and eventually they hit you in the face.” ~ Roger Sterling

Also abundant are the era-appropriate chauvinism’s we’ve come to expect and welcome with anthropological bemusement in the Mad Men universe.

When God closes a door, he opens a dress.” ~ Roger Sterling

Sterling’s Gold is without a doubt the most brilliant piece of cross-platform entertainment we’ve seen this year. What makes it all the more special is the stark contrast to the majority of try-hard transmedia storytelling efforts, which immediately jump to the flashy stuntsmanship of digital platforms. Yet here we have something as analog as it gets that adds a rich and engaging layer to some of our favorite “traditional” entertainment. Well played, AMC, well played.

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