Here’s a summary of each speaker’s talk from October 20, courtesy of bloggers Amy Sharp and Angela Condon:
Matt Slaybaugh opened the evening with spoken word poetry.
He gave us a spark of creativity and lit up the stage with his passion.
He made the audience laugh and sigh with perfect sentences like this:
Pick something that you love, and do it like a bad habit for ten years.
Ann Pendleton-Jullian began her talk by discussing Pacariqtambo, an Incan site built around a clan structure. Each clan was responsible for creating a different part of the wall, and the different personalities of the clans are visible in the types of walls they designed. For her, this highlights the notion of an indivisible ecosystem, in which every bit of work that happens goes back into the system to (hopefully) improve it. She also discussed her extensive travels throughout South America and Asia, studying complex systems with numerous interdependent parts.
Games—and their ability to help us see the relationships between all parts of an ecosystem—are also a topic she is passionate about. She has incorporated game design, analysis and play into the architectural curriculum to help students learn new ways to approach architectural design. Games allow us to bring the real world into the imagined world. She feels that designing and analyzing games helps students actually change the way they think about architecture.
Finally, she used an inverted triangle diagram to highlight the point that that Homo sapien (“human who knows,” the left point of triangle) and Homo faber (“human who makes,” the right point of the triangle) need to be combined with Homo ludens (“human who plays,” the middle point of the triangle) in order to bring imagination into the 21st century.
The first TED talk shown was the delightful Jacek Utko who spoke about the impact of design on newspapers.
Norah Zuniga Shaw wants us to understand the concept of “counterpoint”—things that don’t seem to have structure really do under the surface. In her “Synchronous Objects” choreographic visualization project (“If you don’t know what that means, that’s OK. We sort of made it up.”), she and her colleagues worked with William Forsythe to deconstruct once of his dances—One Flat Thing, reproduced—to see what physical thinking might look like displayed visually. His dance incorporates a high degree of difference, with the “dancers constructing a cacophonous structure.”
So how does this relate to everyday life? According to Zuniga Shaw, the concepts learned from her project can help us learn many good ways to work in groups. She highlighted the differences between a marching band and counterpoint. When you look at a marching band, you see unity and uniformity, with each member marching in step with the others. There is diversity in a marching band, but it is under the surface—the different instruments played, the different parts of the same song played by different sections. Counterpoint is the inverse, where the primary visual effect is different. Uniformity exists, but at a deep, structural layer.
Through her project, we see how something artistic, like a dance, can demonstrate concretely the fact that there are various ways to move together as people through this world.
John Mueller opened the evening with his promise of a cheerful talk of nuclear weapons. The crowd laughed and immediately we were taken into Mueller’s work of obsession and weapons with ease.
The talk of weapons of mass destruction seemed less intense as he reminded us that, throughout history, they have been mostly sources of anxiety. We were reminded that, although there is a sad past tied to nuclear weapons in places like Hiroshima, nuclear weapons will never destroy the earth like in the movies.
The roles of nuclear weapons were discussed, and Mueller explained that these weapons are useless in military, a massive waste of money, and sadly take away brilliant minds in science. We were reminded that the people of the planet are highly stressed and anxiety-ridden when faced with the concept of nuclear weapons. We were able to rationalize–at least for a moment, as a whole audience–that the obsession truly is a bit out of reach for us.
John Mueller took this provocative subject matter and filtered it through his engaging and intelligent mind. He reminded us of what Einstein said about the nuclear bomb: “[It] has changed everything except our way of thinking.”
Muller is working on changing the way we think about nuclear weapons with a smile.
Before the break, Ken Robinson’s talk on creativity from TED was shown. It was, of course, a huge crowd pleaser.
John Glenn is concerned for our children’s education (and future). How will we be compared to other nations in 80 years? Glenn, who spoke with Mike Curtin, Associate Publisher Emeritus of The Columbus Dispatch, focused much of his discussion on this topic. He is concerned about how our educational system will compare to that of other countries going forward. One of his main points was that young people can aspire to do whatever they want to do. The audience obviously relished in being in the presence of such a national icon. My colleague, Amy, and I were fortunate enough to have dinner with Glenn and his wife of 66 years, Annie. They are a wonderful couple (and, FYI, John Glenn has an iPhone).
The power to change the world? What would you do?
Reade Harpham knows technology and design.
Tonight Harpham spoke to us not as a Battelle employee, but as a visionary.
Harpham is working with the OneLab Initiative and creating pearl millet threshers for the people of Malawi, where malnutrition is widespread. Harpham spoke to us about pearl millet and its high protein content, as well as how the millet is nutritionally superior to wheat and rice. He also told us about how the people of Malawi worked manually to process pearl millet with only a 30% yield. Harpham and his crew think this can be done better. He is working on the creation of a portable millet thresher that can fit into a suitcase and fly to a faraway place to help feed people. The new thresher can increase the yield two-to-three times over; even with the issues that will arise in places like Malawi (There is no Home Depot and will people accept change?), it is incredible to think that Harpham and others have found the “physical manifestation of a what if question.”
Harpham asked us to harness our own power to change the world. He asked us what we would do to change the world. I think we all thought hard after hearing his inspirational talk–I know I did.
Chrystie Hill grew up in the Pacific Northwest in a small, very controlled religious community. However, the day she first visited the Kitsap Regional Library, she felt the world opened up for her. The first book she discovered to have a profound impact on her life was The Thoughts of Thoreau (which she ended up stealing in the end—“I couldn’t bear to let it go!”).
In 1999, while attending library school, libraries were rethinking access based on technological advancements. In thinking of the library, she felt there was a disconnect between the community aspect and the reference desk—which she saw as a barrier between herself and the people she wanted to serve. She set out to change this by incorporating community features into the library’s role.
According to Hill, “Libraries should be about people, not about books.” When librarians pay attention to their patrons, they learn about their needs and how they can serve them better. In other words, it’s about human interaction and a desire to connect with other people in the community.
She highlighted the recently revamped Seattle Public Library, which looks spectacular—both visually and in terms of the services it offers. Hopefully, Hill’s research—featured in her new book, Inside, Outside, and Online: Building Your Library Community—will help revolutionize the way libraries interact with their patrons and provide essential services to their communities.
Arthur Epstein loves plastic. He believes in it. Epstein spoke about plastics and the new amazing science that is happening with polymers. He opened with a clip of “The Graduate,” with a young Dustin Hoffman being given advice from an older man. “One Word: Plastics.”
Epstein told us stories about his segue into the world of plastics via metals in graduate school. He talked to us about the merging of plastics with technology, biomedical fields, physics, and chemistry. It is a new frontier for plastics as we learned about great advances in the medical field, including a new glucose sensor Epstein and his colleagues are creating.
I enjoyed hearing about how science is “being with people,” as Epstein says.
I liked hearing about his passionate work with plastics.