Best of TED – Day One

Image courtesy of Frogdesignmind

Adliterate is supposed to be about my ideas and not other people’s. But I have had the priviledge to get to TED global in Oxford and these people’s ideas are better than mine.

So I thought I’d share the best of what I have seen.

I guess the talks will be available in due course online (Gordon Brown’s has already been put up) so the links are to the speaker’s own sites and work.

Stefan Sagmeister – Design and typographical genius. Talked about how to return your career to a calling by taking a sabbatical every 5-7 years. Also great stuff on the curse of sameness in identity design and how the most powerful identities are now infinitely flexible.
Gordon Brown – Prime Minister. Talked about creating new global institutions to relect a new set of global ethics and the idea that the prosperity of this world is not indivisible and belongs to all of us.

Willard Wigan – Microsculptor. Astonishing sculptures on the heads of pins and in the eyes of needles. He works a this scale by slowing his pulse down and then working between heart beats with materials like fibres plucked from the air, money spider’s webs and paint brushes made from hairs taken from a fly’s body.

Josh Silver – Runs the Centre for Vision in the Developing World. Has designed a pair of glasses that turns the wearer into an optometrist and create the perfect prescription in seconds with no training. This is because there is no shortage of glasses in the developing world but there is a huge shortage of people to fit them correctly.