Top 10 Contemporary Cross-Disciplinary Conferences

Ideas in real life, or how to increase the statistical probability of finding a clown, Malcolm Gladwell, and a rocket scientist in the same room.

It’s no secret that we’re huge TED fans here at Brain Pickings, but we also follow other conferences with a great deal of interest — ambitious alternative events determined to make oft-repeated phrases like “design thinking” and “interdisciplinary innovation” mean something. These expansive — but not prohibitively expensive — experiences also aim to create communities that live beyond the initial flurry of inspiration. And while we certainly don’t believe the world needs gratuitous gatherings of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, we do believe in incubating ideas and connecting inspired changemakers.

So here’s a list of the top-10 non-TED alternative live conferences — and we use the term loosely — bound to make your brain sparkle.

99%

Named after Thomas Edison’s dictum, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% Perspiration,” the 99% conference has a unique raison d’être: “making ideas happen.” In a twist to traditional conference talks, the speakers are asked to share the stories behind the execution of their great ideas, rather than the ideas themselves. (And with a brand-name lineup featuring Michael Beirut and Seth Godin, attendees were already familiar with the speakers’ main ideas anyway.)

Produced by the creativity consultancy Behance, the inaugural 99% conference took place in New York in April of this year; next year’s is already on tap for April 15-16, 2010.

BARCAMP

Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s famous invite-only hacker summit, Foo Camp, BarCamp borrowed from the hacker slang foobar to create a set of guidelines for an alternative, open-to-all, ad-hoc event around a common topic or theme that anyone can host anywhere. (These user-generated experiences are also sometimes called unconferences or non-conferences, after legendary eccentric curator Hans Ulrich Obrist‘s experimental non-conference in Jülich, Germany, in the 90’s.)

A self-organizing community of diverse interests, BarCamp participants are also its presenters. Attendees spend the first part of each event brainstorming and voting for session subjects, and can then choose among the various breakout groups. As you might imagine, the quality of a BarCamp can vary considerably depending on who’s present — we’ve had mixed experiences, accordingly. But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for; and BarCamps are typically free.

DO LECTURES

As with the 99%, the Do Lectures have the proactive premise “that the Doers of the world can inspire the rest of us to go Do something.” Fewer than 100 attendees, speakers, and staff gather in west Wales under a tent for a weekend of cross-disciplinary inspiration. Speakers at this year’s second-annual Do session included mountaineer Paul Deegan and Tony Davidson, Creative Director of ad agency Wieden+Kennedy.

The Do Lectures were started by David and Clare Hieatt, founders of the activewear brand Howie’s.

THE FEAST

Produced by the irrepressible duo behind All Day Buffet (Jerri Chou and Mike Karnjanaprakorn, who also put on the first 99% conference), The Feast is a two-day affair that had its first run in New York this year as well.

With the tagline “feast on good,” the focus here is social enterprise: self-sustaining, next-generation initiatives with nothing less than world-changing intentions. Talks from inspiring models such as charity: water and New Orleans’s 9th Ward Field of Dreams made for an amazing lineup, and everything from fifteen-minute breaks to flatware is carefully curated by the conference organizers. (Okay, perhaps we’re a little biased, having attended the first Feast as a fellow.) Bias notwithstanding, though, All Day Buffet’s thoughtful stewardship of this startup conference makes it a must-follow event.

GEL

An acronym for “Good Experience Live,” GEL is a twice-yearly conference in New York, focused — as its name suggests — on the human experience in all arenas. The main event takes place in April and features speakers from business, design, technology, and other service-driven disciplines (so basically anything). GEL Health focuses on improving the patient experience and is held in October. Entering its seventh year, GEL was founded by Bit Literacy author and user-experience consultant Mark Hurst.

The next GEL is scheduled for April 29-30, 2010; in the meantime you can check out clips from past GELs here.

IGNITE

Started in Seattle in 2006, Ignite talks hacked Pecha Kucha’s 20×20 format (below) for a Google generation’s attention spans. Speakers have five minutes and 20 slides (which automatically rotate every 15 seconds) with which to present anything from cheesemaking to conservation. In addition to these nano-talks, participants also spend part of any Ignite event making — usually coding or moding something to be judged in a subsequent contest. Founders Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis have roots in online networks (O’Reilly Media and Etsy.com, respectively), and correspondingly, Ignite events are openly geeky affairs. Since that inaugural event Ignite has spread to cities around the world, with strongholds in New York, Helsinki, Paris, and Portland.

You can view more talks at Ignite’s YouTube channel, including Scott Berkun’s now canonical “Why and How to Give an Ignite Talk.”

PALOMAR5

A global group of 30 people under age 30 just completed six weeks at this innovation camp in Berlin, forming Palomar5’s first graduating class. Six young entrepreneurs founded the group and formulated the question posed to these lucky souls: “How will we work in the future?”

The residency itself then became a kind of living laboratory for Palomar5’s premise. (In a great nod to the industrial-era fabrik that served as backdrop, participants were given overalls to wear for their first weekend, “to initiate a kind of reset-mode.” From the look of Palomar5’s Flickr sets, the attendees may have enjoyed a Hefeweiss or two on the former beer factory site as well.) Following weeks of envisioning, workshop-ing, and prototyping ideas, the camp culminated in a festival and livestreamed summit (that included a talk by Brain Pickings favorite Aaron Koblin).

Palomar5 may be in hibernation mode now, but you can still connect with its community on Facebook and Twitter.

PECHAKUCHA

What started in 2003 in a Tokyo gallery as an event for designers has since spread to 260-plus cities, from A Coruña to Zürich. Pecha Kucha pioneered the 20-slides-in-20-seconds format, providing a built-in check for creatives who tend toward too much exposition. Beyond this constraint, however, the talks have been held in bars, churches, and swimming pools; equally diverse are Pecha Kucha speakers, fulfilling the founders’ wish that anyone, from upstart to well-established, might be able to present.

Check here to see if there’s a Pecha Kucha Night near you, and catch up on presentations past on their recently launched video portal.

PINC

Held in the Netherlands, the annual PINC conference typically features around 16 speakers and 500 guests.

Its acronym stands for People, Ideas, Nature, and Creativity, and the prevailing ethos — as articulated by PINC’s founder, publisher Peter van Lindonk — is “passion.” (Not for nothing did van Lindonk spent 15 years moonlighting as a ringmaster for Amsterdam’s World Christmas Circus.)

The eclectic program aims to recharge the brain’s batteries with “[a]n inspiring cascade of new ideas, great stories, and impressive visual presentations.” Next year’s PINC is scheduled for May 11-18, 2010, but you can watch videos from past years here.

TEDX

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the fantastic success that is TEDx.

These independently curated, local talks have brought TED’s mission of “ideas that matter” to 350-plus places globally, and created their own rich cache of video for anyone to watch. TED may be the sine qua non of idea conferences, but these smaller stages are showcasing an exciting amount of big thinking.

We’re certain that we missed other great conferences and meeting models in this rundown, particularly non-English-language-based experiences, so do use the comments section to tip us off to your favorite alt-conferences.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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20 Steps to Sustainable Cities

Why changing our city-dwelling ways is the only way to keep our cities.

We’ll be brief today, because our video spotlight isn’t. But it is as culturally relevant and compelling as they come: It’s a talk by World Changing founder (and TEDster) Alex Steffen, given at the Danish Architecture Centre, where he makes a radical case for sustainable cities with 20 proposed solution spaces, each the domain of great urgency for change.

Long as it may be, the talk is altogether excellent — if there ever was a blueprint for a healthy planet still inhabited by our urbanite species, Alex Steffen has just laid it out.

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TED 2009 Highlights: Day 2

Lots and lots (and lots) of brilliance, wrapped in fascination and tied with a shiny ribbon of sheer jaw-droppingness.

Despite our sleep-deprived state, we managed to live-blog our way through another day of TED. Well, sort of — the guys at Long Beach had severe technical difficulties on their end, which sort of reduced TED to ED for a couple of hours.

But sleeplessness and glitches notwithstanding, it was a phenomenal day embezzled with a number of well-deserved standing ovations. Neurologist extraordinaire Oliver Sacks opened the See session with a fascinating talk about a specific kind of visual hallucinations in perfectly sane blind patients, called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which occur because visual receptors become hyperactive when they receive no real input. Apparently, over 10% of blind people get this, but only about 1% ever acknowledge it in fear of being ridiculed and perceived as insane — what a stark reminder of the clash between cognitive health and social health.

UCSB researcher JoAnn Kuchera-Morin followed, introducing perhaps the most fascinating piece of the night: The AlloSphere machine, a “scientific data discovery and artistic creation tool.” She proceeded to show phenomenal imagery, including the AlloBrain — a project that builds medical narrative through real fMRI data mapped sonicly and visually, with tremendously rich potential for medical application.

Also shown: the multi-center hydrogen bonds of a new material used for transparent solar cells, a clearly gigantic stride for clean energy. The footage itself was absolutely stunning, especially framed in the knowledge that it’s all real, not a CGI simulation.

Another visually and conceptually captivating talk came next, with light and space sculptor Olafur Eliasson. He tossed the audience into a visual experiment right there on the stage screen, demonstrating the link between eye and brain in a very raw, tangible way before introducing his equally compelling work — work that is, above all, creating a sense of consequence by making space accessible and instilling in people a sense of community and togetherness.

Olafur’s entire talk was a string of eye-opening epiphanies on the nature of art, our relationship to the world and each other, our shared sense of responsibility.

Art is obviously not just about decorating the world, but also about taking responsibility.

True that.

Ed Ulbrich was next, with perhaps the biggest shock-value jaw-dropper of the night: He took us behind the scenes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, revealing that Brad Pitt’s character was actually entirely computer-generated from the neck up. Crafting it was so laborious that just the person responsible for the character’s eye system spent over two full years on it. (Pause on that for a moment.)

They also had to create every possible lighting condition for the character, in order to make him appear realistic and believable in all scenes.

Their biggest challenge was animating facial emotion. Traditionally, facial animation is done by recording the motion on 100 surface polygons, with 100 tracking points. But they found that the richest emotional information came from the stuff between the points. So, unsurprisingly to us, they turned to one of our greatest heroes: Paul Ekman and his brilliant Facial Action Coding System.

Setting up a system of 3D cameras, they were able to record a surface of over 100,000 polygons, tracking 10,000 points.

We ended up calling the entire process “emotion capture” rather than “motion capture.”

In the end, Ulbrich made an excellent point that most of us hardly give much thought to: Despite the technological advances and the computer-generated character, animating it still fell on Brad Pitt’s unique acting skill and dramatic capacity — because the Button character, tech smoke-and-mirrors notwithstanding, is but a digital puppet to be operated entirely by its actor-puppeteer.

Closing the See session was experimental audio-visual artist Golan Levin, who introduced a mind-blowing subtitling technology that animates text with the amplitude, pitch and frequency of the speaker’s voice, so that the text literally becomes alive with meaning. Levin also revealed his fascination with the human gaze, introducing a revolutionary eye-tracking system aimed at making the computer aware of what it is looking at and able to respond.

What if art was aware we were looking at it, how could it respond?

He proceeded to show off another rather peculiar (by which we mean creepy-cool) extension of the technology: The Double-Taker, an enormous eye of a snout that follows a person as he or she moves through space, in a very organic albeit creepy way.

And although we were teched out of much of the Understand session that followed, regretfully missing anthropologist Nina Jablonski‘s much- anticipated talk, we did catch Elizabeth Gilbert‘s profound insight on the paradox of the creative process, which is always inevitably tied to anguish as artists fear being unable to outdo themselves creatively.

The final session, Invent, opened with iconic yet controversial architect Daniel Libeskind, whose reconstruction plan for Ground Zero was the people’s choice, but was tragically crushed by commercial pressures and had to give way to the current winner. Libeskind talked about the clash between hand and computer, pointing out the challenge of making the computer respond to the hand rather than vise-versa.

Showcasing some of his phenomenal commercial and concept work, he raised deeper questions about the role of architecture in the human story.

Architecture is not only the giving of answers, it’s also the asking of questions.

Green auto pioneer Shai Agassi followed. Besides showing the enormity of the scale, on which cars impact the world, he also drew a rather brilliant analogy: Before the Industrial Revolution, much of the U.K.’s labor force came from an immoral element — human slaves. And as soon as slavery ended, the Industrial Revolution began. We are, in effect, getting much of our energy from an immoral source, subjecting the planet to a form of slavery. Ending “planetary slavery” is the only way to the next social revolution.

True that.

The remaining talks showcased a broad range of truly revolutionary innovation in robotics and medicine, from Catherine Mohr‘s amazing surgical robots, to Robert Full‘s brilliant technology simulating the toe-peeling and air-righting of the gecko, to Daniel Kraft‘s Marrow Miner tool that bypasses transplant pain by allowing local anaeshtesia, harvesting 10 times more marrow.

Finally, polymorphic playwright Sarah Jones, one of the best entertainers to ever hit TED stage, closed the session with her truly — truly — captivating performance of her array of characters, each of whom she channels to an unbelievable level of believability. That’s one talk you’d want to see when it becomes available.

The last segment was the awarding of this year’s TED Prize, the streaming of which was accessible to everyone online and available in select theaters across the U.S. The winners — marine preservation advocate Sylvia Earle, space explorer Jill Tarter, and music education pioneer José Abreu — are every bit as deserving as you’d expect, so be sure to check out their wishes — and if you’re passionate about that field, you can even offer help to each of the three on his or her TED Prize page.

We’ll be live-blogging today as well, so be sure to follow us on Twitter if you’re into, you know, hearing stuff before everyone else does.

Buddhist Bottle Temple

Beer, Buddhism, and $100,000 worth of world-changing photography.

In 1963, Alfred Heineken traveled to the Caribbean, where he got a bright idea for a two-birds-with-one-stone solution to the region’s littering problem and the lack of affordable building materials. He contacted Dutch architect John Habraken and the Heineken WOBO was born — a beer bottle that can be reused as a “brick” after the bacchanalia.

Great idea. Except it never reached critical mass.

Half a century later, Thai Buddhist monks have resurrected the idea with the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple, built entirely out glass bottles. Over a million of them.

Every minute detail of the temple is made entirely from bottles, from the roofing to the washrooms to the crematorium.

Monks first began using bottles to decorate their shelters and the temple’s murals in 1984, which inspired people to donate more bottles, eventually amassing enough to build entire buildings like pagodas and ceremony halls.

We think the temple is a stunning reminder of the pressing need for recycling, repurposing, and rethinking our global drinking problem. After all, it takes 700 years for a single plastic bottle to even begin decomposing, and at a consumption rate of 30 billion plastic bottles per year, the we need more than prayers to move towards a more sustainable relationship with water. (Remember Blue Planet Run?)

Speaking of, the winner of the £53,000 Prix Pictet photography award was just announced — this year’s theme was water sustainability. Check it out.