TEDGlobal Highlights: Day 4

Solid sand, the art of curation, why doing nothing matters, and how to get 700 of the world’s smartest people singing.

The final day of TEDGlobal in images and soundbites — the closing of a truly phenomenal experience.

For full blow-by-blow coverage, skim our live Twitter feed from the event.

Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who has the highest ration of architecture awards to age in the world, showcases some of his stride-stopping work.

Magnus Larsson proposes a visionary project to stop desertification -- using bacteria to solidify sand dunes into stone and build a 6000km-long desert-break stretching across Africa.

The Sahara desert expands by nearly one meter per day, literally driving people out of their homes. ~ Magnus Larsson

Dan Pink says extrinsic incentives, a.k.a. 'carrots and sticks,' dull creativity. The key to economic success is in intrinsic motivations -- autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Science confirms what we know in our hearts. ~ Dan Pink

Maestro Itay Talgam on the intricate role of the conductor in creating not only the process of performance, but also the conditions in which this process occurs.

Interpretation is the real story of the performance. ~ Itay Talgam

Daniel Birnbaum on the art of curating -- something we can really relate to here -- as an unseen force that shapes the art experience beyond the individual objects.

It’s the gallery itself, the institution, that becomes the frame. ~ Daniel Birnbaum

German friar Brother Paulus Terwitte contests we've become primitive hunters and gatherers, preoccupied with collecting information, instead of taking in less and deepening our life. He advocates the 'organized doing of nothing' -- meditation, prayer, contemplation -- as a way to find 'the inner voices of things.'

The most important question is, ‘Where are you in your thoughts?’ ~ Brother Paulus Terwitte

Chris Anderson forewarns about the dreaded TED crash following the end of the 4-day idea binge, when sleep deprivation kicks in and dopamine plummets. We can already feel it.

The wonderful Tom Reilly's (in)famous satire of the conference. Here, impersonating TED Europe's charmingly stern director, Bruno Giussani.

Parodying the Lifesaver filtration bottle, Tom mock(?)-relieves in a glass, runs it through the Lifesaver bottle, and hands it to Chris to drink. Upon chugging it, Chris proclaims: 'Trust.'

The phenomenal Imogen Heap takes the stage for one last surprise performance after the fantastic audience response to her scheduled act. She plays the hang, a mysterious gong-like instrument, and asks us to be her live looping device, dividing the audience into a 3-part chorus. The collective experience is utterly magnetic, and you can just see the music running through her entire body as she performs. Magic, personified.

On a personal note, the TED experience has been every bit as invigorating, inspiring and incredible as expected, and then some. Exhausting as it may have been, reporting is has been a modest effort to help extend TED’s fundamental mission — “ideas worth spreading.”

And before we return to our regular “programming” next week, a big “THANK YOU” for following and sharing in this utterly lifechanging experience.

Focus on Focus: Rapt

Happiness, ADD, and why multitasking doesn’t work but denial might.

A few weeks ago, I came across Sam Anderson’s excellent New York Magazine article about the benefits of distraction. Sure, it took me a week to read — let’s face it, who has the luxury of single-task attention these days — but that was half the point.

In it, Anderson cites an intriguing book by cancer-survivor-turned-behavioral-science-writer Winifred Gallagher.

Rapt is a fascinating, thorough, yet brilliantly digestible foray into the power of attention. It’s solid science — from psychology experiments to fMRI studies — wrapped in Gallagher’s moving personal story: She turned to the focused life when her own life was disrupted by a grim cancer diagnosis.

From evolutionary theory to psycho-social science, Rapt is part descriptive expose on how the mind works, part prescriptive recipe for how to make it work better, live more richly, and inhabit each moment more fully.

You can’t be happy all the time but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.

For a closer look at productivity, why creative people pay attention differently, and how to train ourselves to focus, watch this excellent interview with Gallagher on Australia’s equally excellent FORA network.

In this epidemic of what I call “skim culture” — the inability to give our attention fully to any one thing, stirred by the constant anxiety that there’s something better, more interesting, more urgent happening elsewhere simultaneously — Rapt comes highly recommended. If only to find out just why multitasking — brace yourself — doesn’t even remotely work, but denial actually might.

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The Human Face, Up Close and Personal

What the CIA has to do narcissism, attractiveness and Autistic children.

The face, with its intricate lace of 33 different muscles, is a powerful gateway to human emotion and thus the subject of relentless research aiming to pin down how and why we express our inner selves on that living canvas. Here are 3 fascinating projects that probe what lies beneath.

RESPONSIVE FACE

NYU Media Research Lab professor Ken Perlin has the ambitious goal of isolating the minimal number of facial expression elements that capture our character and personality.

His project, Responsive Face, is a 3D animation demo that lets you play with various facial elements — brows, gaze, head tilt, mouth and more — to see how they change as they capture emotions like fear, anger, surprise, disappointment and happiness.

The eventual goal of this research is to give computer/human interfaces the ability to represent the subtleties we take for granted in face to face communication, so that they can function as agents for an emotional point of view.

The demo is based on the iconic Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered the study of emotions through the taxonomy of all conceivable facial expressions and whose work is now being used by anyone from lawyers to actors to the CIA. (Ekman also collaborated with the BBC on the excellent series The Human Face, which we couldn’t recommend enough.)

Perlin’s work is also being implemented in helping children with Autism, teaching kids not only how to “read” other people’s expressions, but also how to manipulate their own faces to communicate their emotions.

FACE RESEARCH

If you’ve ever made a few beer bucks in college participating in paid psych experiments, you know those can be long, tedious, and possibly involving being stuck in a a big, noisy fMRI machine for an hour.

Enter Face Research, an online portal for psychology experiments about people’s preferences for faces and voices, where you can help the advance of science from the comfort of your own living room. The project invites users to take a series of personality questionnaires and participate in various experiments in exchange for a look at the findings once data is collected. Granted, that won’t pay for beer, but it does indulge the psych geeks among us.

Previous studies have investigated fascinating topics like the relationship between averageness and attractiveness, women’s preference for masculinity in men’s faces, and various other aspects of why we like what we like.

The project is a joint venture between the University of Aberdeen School of Psychology Face Research Lab and The Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews. Sign up and help coin the cultural definition of attractiveness.

THAT’S MY FACE

That’s My Face lives in that awkward limbo between the scientific and the bizarre, with one foot firmly planted in the questionable. Simply put, it’s a tool that lets you upload photos of yourself and explore your face in 3D as you manipulate age, race, gender and other attributes.

So far so good. But then comes the questionable — the site offers various souvenirs of narcissism, such as your own action figure, framed 3D portrait, and custom 3D crystal. There’s even an affiliate program, where the more, um, entrepreneurial can make a few bucks off of other people’s self-worship.

That’s My Face was founded by a grad student from University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. We think it’s an interesting metaphor for the value of a PhD in today’s cultural environment — make what you will of that statement.

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More Than Form: Design for Disability

What a microwavable monkey has to do with the MoMA and open social conversation.

THE BOEZELS

Mental disability — from neurodegenerative diseases to developmental disability — is a difficult subject, often shoved under the bed of social dialogue. But the reality is that it exists, and those affected by it have needs — physical, emotional, mental — dramatically different from the average.

Dutch designer Twan Verdonck address this head-on through The Boezels, a series of animal-like toys designed for mentally challenged people and elderly with Alzheimer’s as sensorial stimulation therapy (Snoezelen) tools to help the learning process and reduce anxiety.

My project is a metaphor and example for how we could deal with social care, industry, design and art

The Boezels come in several varieties, each with a distinct “personality” and function, stimulating one or more of the four senses — touch, smell, hearing, sight. From a microwavable monkey meant to warm up the user’s belly to a snake infused with a relaxing smell, the toys are designed with a meticulously balanced combination of material, weight and size in a way that induces a strong sense of physical contact, stimulating emotional response.

Even more fascinatingly, The Boezels are not only designed for, but also by the mentally challenged — they are produced in De Wisselstroom, a daycare center The Netherlands, where a small group of people with mental impairments are working in close collaboration with Verdonck.

In 2006, The Boezels were acquired by the MoMA’s permanent collection. They are currently being successfully used for therapy by a number of European health organizations.

PROAESTHETICS SUPPORTS

Physical disability can be an uncomfortable subject often veiled in a sense of taboo. Most people address it through a mix of denial, awkwardness and nervous self-derision. But it doesn’t have to be.

Italian designer Francesca Lanzavecchia‘s latest project, ProAesthetics Supports, explores the perception of disability through artifacts — crutches, corsets, braces and more.

Beyond the expected blend of form and function, her designs transform these vital body accessories into conversation pieces that make the discussion of disability easier, less judgmental and more open.

Marsupial: Functionally exhibitionistic. This neck brace stores life’s necessities beneath a stretchable semi-transparent rubber skin.

Neck Plinth: An exercise in lightness: the deletion of the image of a neck brace through reduction, while function is fully retained.

Back braces are the first representatives of bodily differences; molded and tailor-made around the body they are a cumbersome second skin. I reinterpreted them with the aim of transforming them objects of desire and representative skins.

Polly: A young girl’s brace where she stores her prized possessions. A colourful brace with sculpted-in pockets to store personal artifacts.

Brittle: This aid manifests the symptoms that afflict sufferers of brittle bone. A cane with a delicate-looking but at the same time strong enough to support body weight.

While we’re far from suggesting there’s such a thing as “celebrating” disability per se, we do believe there’s a way to honor our bodies and their idiosyncrasies without shame and stigma. Francesca Lanzavecchia takes something often perceived as — if we’re really honest with ourselves — ugly, and brings a bold sense of aestheticism and pride to it, a much-needed perspective in the cultural dialogue on disability.

SNIFF

Visual impairment is tough, but it’s particularly challenging in young kids — sight is just too integral to the process of exploring one’s surroundings, a strong developmental need for children.

Norwegian industrial designer Sarah Johansson aims to tackle this this through Sniff, an interactive, RFID-detecting soft toy for visually impaired children.

Every time an RFID-enabled object comes close to Sniff’s nose, the toy gives feedback through sound and vibration. Sniff can react to different stimuli with different behaviors, giving kids a richer, more tangible experience of their physical environment.

In 2008, Sniff won the prestigious Design for All prize from the Norwegian Design Council. Johansson is currently working on a more sophisticated and technologically advanced 2.0 version — you can follow the progress on Sniff’s prototypes here.

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