If not, you should definately have a peak into the world of TED, and it truely is a world of its own, which comes to life four days every year in Monterey, California. At the last even in February 2006, they had 800 attendees, and next year they are inviting 1000 people, and most of them have already been sold out. I truely hope to some day to get a chance to participate in TED sometimes, but in the meantime, I am just thrilled to be able to watch the many pocasts that they make available trough their website, and through the TEDblog.
They guy you see in the picture is Cameron Sinclair, who presented at TED 2006, and I just had the pleasure of watching his presentation on video podcast yesterday. And he truely had a great story to tell. Sinclair co-founded the non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity in 1999, which started off in response to the housing-crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo - they basically wanted to use architecture to make the world a better place to live in.
Cameron Sinclair and his partner started off by making a website (www.architectureforhumanity.org) where he and his partner basically just posted a call asking architects to come up with potential solutions which could be used to help out in Kosovo. And to his big surprise, within a couple of months they received more than 200 ideas, which led to a series of prototypes being built in Kosovo within a short period of time.
This is what they do and have done ever since. At their website, you can see Architecture for Humanity also helped out after Hurricane Katrina, after the Tsunami, and in countries all over the world in response to humanitarian crisis. Wauw, a great initiative - is there anything better than a great innovation story? And especially when it is a humanitarian one as this most certainly is. This is a link to the TED video postcast with Cameron Sinclair
But there are many other great video podcasts on the TED website, I personally especially enjoyed the presentations of Sir Ken Robinson (about education and creativity), Al Gore (our global environmentalist), Larry Brilliant (epidemologist accounting for the eradication of smallpox), Nicholas Negroponte (about the $100 laptop), and non the least Jeff Han, who demonstrated the interface-free computer of the future. But there are many many more, and I look forward to seeing the ones that I have still not seen - there is so much more to learn .....
Find all of this and more at the TED website
