Review 6 – Tim Brown on creativity and play

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.html

Tim talks on the ideas of how creativity works, and how it can be encouraged. He starts off with an experiment. Everyone has a sheet of cardboard, and they draw a person’s face next to them within 30 seconds. Lots of “sorry”s are exchanged. Tim goes on to explain why adults are so embarrassed when showing their ideas to others. It’s all about trust and security; about being in an environment where everyone is free to try and fail. Then Tim contrasts adults with children, which proudly show their drawings without embarrassment  (most of the time). In early school years, activities like recess and play times let kids express their creativity by trying out different approaches to problems. Tim points out that play does need to have a predefined set of rules for the participants to follow, otherwise play is unproductive.

He then jumps to companies that encourage their employees to be creative and have fun with their work, such as Pixar, Google, and his own company IDEO. Pixar has jungle like huts which breaks the blandness of a regular cubical. Google has a giant dinosaur with pink flamingos. Weird, but cool and funny ideas which encourage playfulness. Finally, Tim explains a couple approaches to testing creative ideas. For physical objects, prototypes work great. They allow people to take a look and manipulate the idea which always generates more feedback. If it’s an experience, role playing helps by identifying the events that occur along the way, giving the designer empathy in the situation they create.

I really enjoyed hearing Tim’s ideas. As someone who has a blast playing with ideas and concepts, I was encouraged to look past the constraints of self doubt and judgment. I’ll definitely take his challenges to play as the opportunity arises.

Review 5 – Howard Rheingold on Collaboration

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html

Howard Rheingold talks about how collaboration has changed throughout the ages. He describes the challenges of language, cultural, and technology barriers.

One of the barriers that he talks about is the prisoners dilemma, where two prisoners have a choice to make, but can’t trust each other to make a choice that benefits themselves. With collaboration, they could step outside of the dilemma by interacting with each other to find out the best solution. Howard’s examples include eBay: a service where traders can trust each other based on reputation. More examples of collaborative efforts in technology are open source development, wikis (Wikipedia), Bittorent(file transfer where you upload and download simultaneously), and Folding@Home (a program that runs protein folding calculations). By using the power of many brains, you can end up with a much greater resource than with a individualist approach.

Collaboration definitely plays a huge role in the internet’s popularity. The whole social media phenomenon can only survive with collaboration. I also really like the idea of distributed computing (Folding@Home), because it makes use of the wasted idle time of the millions of computers worldwide to help a cause. Collaboration is also key to a successful large scale project. Having many people who specialize in a certain area pool their resources creates a strong product if the team is managed effectively.

Review 4 – “John Maeda on the Simple Life”

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_on_the_simple_life.html

John Maeda is a design philosopher. He distils what simplicity is, and discovers when complexity works better. He admits his tendency is for the complex; he has 5 daughters, and his early design work features complex patterns. Simplicity seems to follow John wherever he goes. On his vacation, he saw a series of companies using “simple” in their slogan. He also contrasts the simplicity with some complex things we love, such as relationships and nature.

I find simplicity is very important to design. We use many aids such as grids, spacing, typography, and icons all to simplify communication to our audience, which creates a greater impact. Even complex design must start with something simple. Its like the Occam’s razor principle: given two solutions to a problem, the simper one is better.  Less work and better results, works for me!

Review 3 – “Milton Glaser on using design to make ideas new”

http://www.ted.com/talks/milton_glaser_on_using_design_to_make_ideas_new.html

I appreciate how Milton Glaser is down to earth in this talk. He admits how his ideas take a lot of rethinking and revisions to get somewhere, and sometimes they just don’t work. In the first piece he shows, he suggested using nature as a variation to the theme — meaning using common ideas found in nature to combine with the existing art, hopefully creating something more dynamic. He challenges conventions by introducing ideas used in other areas of life in his posters. In one, he uses isometric perspective often found in architectural drawings, in another he even describes his poster on the poster – something usually done in a rationale. One step further, he shows another revision of the poster with the description. Its challenging what is commonly found in art and kind of humorous.

This talk clearly touches on every kind of design I do. All design involves creative solutions to a problem. Not being afraid of failure is very freeing to the design process. You can try whatever comes to mind, thinking visually opposed to thinking of ideas in your head and shooting them all down before they get a chance to live in the medium.

Review 2 – Jonathan Harris, “Web Stories”

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html

Jonathan Harris is an artist from New York, who has a knack for injecting meaning into large data sets. His education includes computer science at Princeton University.  According to Wikipedia, “He has won three Webby Awards and was honoured as “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum”.  He believes in making technology more human by using computer science, statistics, storytelling, and visual art.

In one recent project, he aggregates the first sentence of blog posts related to certain phrases starting with “I feel…”. Through different types of visualizations, you can quickly see how many people are sad, happy, and all sorts of feelings. His “Universe” visualization reveals the connection and influence circles of news-makers by gathering and filtering news posts on popular topics.

I find the connections made through visualizations fascinating, and would like to have the technical skill to make the complex simple as Jonathan does.

Review 1 – Evelyn Glennie, “Listening”

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html

Evelyn Glennie is a truly unique musician. Her talk challenges what we all assume about music by sharing her way of “listening” to music. Though she has been deaf since age 12, Evelyn’s finely tuned sense of touch can feel the vibrations of her instruments, allowing her to sense pitch, volume, and the character of the sound.