Notes from TedxDePaul 2013
I’ll be updating this post with notes from each speaker at TedXDePaul 2013, held today at the Museum of Contemporary Art, hosted by Daniel Gurivech. I don’t speak until the second set, but will take notes for as many speakers as I can all day.
Rules: I will revise and update all day long, cleaning up links and sloppy grammar.
Dan said two there are two kinds of people: creators and curators, which was the theme for the day.
Then an unnamed warm up team came out: They were unexpected and excellent. Dan’s opening was short and cold, but they walked through the speaker list making safe jokes, warming up the crowd. An unexpectedly good choice of curation [If you know their names, as they're not on the program, please leave a comment]
Scott Schuman, The Satorialist
He briefly described his work and blog, but walked through a series of photographs mostly by others, but some by him, and what they mean to him. He expressed that photography is a quiet act and its a surprise to go out and talk to large groups like this. He grew up by reading fashion magazines, which he thinks trained his eyes for how to see.
When he moved to Brooklyn from Indiana, he didn’t know anyone. Walking on Atlantic avenue, he saw a postcard of a couple on a boat and it moved him. It had an emotional effect. The first real photographic images he bought. He talked through a series of images and what they meant to him. He likes to think his images start a story. Good photographs don’t tell you everything.
Photographs lose their initial meaning over time. They are taken in one context for one reason, but live on, and take on meanings, often superficial ones, by those who come later who do not know the context.
It was hard to catch the names of all the photographers he mentioned. They included Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Helen Levitt, Lartigue, Slim Aarons, Edward Weston (whose diary he referenced) and several others.
“The truth of a photograph is less interesting than the romance… allowing the romance is sometimes the most interesting part [as a photographer]”
He told a story of following a young woman on a bicycle, while on a bicycle, trying to time it right. And he worked hard to find the right angle and exposure, while moving. And later he realized a detail he’d missed: she had a metal right leg. A powerful detail that was entirely circumstance.
He wonders what photograph wil mean with digital photography and tumblrs, and the digital natives who don’t know what photography used to mean as an expensive, physical object, rather than cheap, easy, fast digital photography. Images on the internet are so easy to share that it makes the images themselves mean something else. He thinks it’s fascinating, unlike photographers of the past, that modern photographers can capture in the present, and 5 and 100 years from now, how the meaning of a photo has changed for the people looking at it.
George Aye, Greater Good Studio, Greater Good Studio
Transportation is the interaction of people’s choice and government. Includng tensions. The CTA has anxiety and a history of animosity between transportation users and employers ”we’d have a great service if [it] weren’t for all those people”.
The CTA’s main focus is to provide logistical expertise. The CTA is similar to FedEx – except these packages are people. But as a designer, Aye was interested in the experience of being inside those packages.
After 11 months leadership changed at CTA, support for a designer (or for Aye) diminished, and he was fired. Now he’s a professor and wants to use what he learned to teach designers are everyone from the challenges he encountered. He created GGS to answer the question how can we help? And they realized what they needed was a ‘new model for public engagement.’ A new way for people to access the information and services CTA(?) already have.
Initially he resisted crowd sourcing, but realized there was a role for all kinds of research, including the messy, unfiltered elements of involving many people. He used his frameworks from being a teacher to consider the entire problem different: the city is a classroom. Which led to a new term: public design team. “Everyone of you in this room has a slightly different perspective on transit” and the spirt was to be open about finding ways to incorporate many of those views into the process.
Which led to…. a mobile app. To help people navigate the city. They launched a public kick starter campaign, which was terrifying. They set a goal of $125k, but only got $23k. Which was devastating.”After crying myself to sleep… he realized they were free from all of the expectations.. it didn’t matter if they screwed up again since they’d failed so largely before”
“Succcess hides learning” he realized. And what he’d learned was the project was much to complicated. They needed to simplify.
They developed three principles:
Give the team a role and give it a name. They came up with the title “Urban Agent” and people loved it. Volunteers could refer to themselves as “Agent #23″.
Ask questions that respect your team. There are no stupid questions but there are some that are deeply flawed. Assignments should be clear and real “observe your commute and look for transit tools – what could they do differently?”. Because we asked in a particular way we prevented people from whining. There were 300+ submissions.
Give the team tools so they can respond with solutions. “How can non designers help with design?” He believed the only prerequisite was to have motivation and an idea. 600 ideas were submitted, which were narrowed down to 70 app features. Then they went to wireframes. [but he didn't explain what the final app is and how it did - if anyone has linkage leave a comment]
Marcy Capron, CEO of Polymathic
I had to prepare for my own talk and sadly didn’t take notes for Capron’s talk.
Elaine Chernov, Founder of Quite Strong
Elaine is an art director, involved with a group of female creatives called Quite Strong.
She opened by talking about advertising, and showed a short film by Gene Kilborn [killing us softly] about gender bias in ads:
Ads sell more than produts – values, perceptions, morals
“I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford” – no one looks like they actually look
She studied women’s studies in school– and felt about marketing and advertising and thought “what a bunch of assholes…advertisers ruining everything”. Apparently Beer ads are known as being the most evil. But there is still room for good work: Budweiser did an add with the bottle cap as a crown. Compelling, simple and without any cultural issues.
She decided ”I am going to change this industry from the inside”. On photo shoot she managed to hire a size 14 model, something unheard of – but they resized her in post production. She alsWorked on beer ads for Coors (Ice cube).
Created Lustlist – a curated list of female talent they admire. Artists, directors, etc. to highlight their work and a place for advice for female creatives. In the beginning all they had was each other for confidence, but soon we were asked to speak at events. At the first of 2o speakers, 2.5 were women. Design conferences are better. But she noticed men speak differently and more egotistically, but that in some ways she admired that style: “hey what’s up, here’s my work, it’s cool, I get paid a lot of money for it… {mic drop}”. Inspiring to walk
6 out of 20 of top 20 are women on top ted talks. Most persuasive 19/20 all men except one, where the woman spoke about women representing women in media. It’s called TEDx non TINAx or TabithaX.
With some colleagues she created the Moxie conference, with the tagline “Make that cheddar (money). Look good doing it.”
She was honest in saying “What merit did we have to throw a conference? We had no merit. But we wanted to practice what we preach” It was a success, and 40% of attendees were male, which they were proud of Their agenda wasn’t too big to include everyone.
Question to ask when making work:
Is this coming from a conscious place
statement bigger than myself
You have the power to vote with your $$, vote with interests, likes & shares
“it’s either you [in the TED audience] or the people posting youtube comments, and they’re not stopping any time soon”
David Kadavy, Author of Design for Hackers
Coming soon
Dan McComas, Redditgifts.com
Created a site that failed – he used reddit and learned inside jokes. Ran one of the first kickstarter campaigns – Jetblue travel challenge. Fly for 30 days, 15 cities. Two people did it. Led to idea for something related to reddit – gifting to strangers.
First rule for people who signup: Don’t be a dick. The first version of redditgifts did very little. The first secret santa, where you could gifts to strangers was in 2009 - 4380 participants in 52 countries. It was awesome for him, but super scary for many reasons.
Was awesome but super scary.
Needed to build:
you sign up
likes / dislikes
matching process – pull names out of a hat
you friendly stalk the person you have
you tell us what you got and how much you spent
if you get a gift – you post pictures
Reminders// etc.
Beyond the tech challenge, wondered if people would abuse it and send garbage? it was scary and Exciting. The First gift: a copy of half life 2. Next gift: Package required surgery – they packed a set of gifts, based on research of that stranger, and stuffed them in a stuffed shark. “We put your present in the shark you are going to have to do surgery to get your gifts out”. The person who received it brought it full circle: and took photos as if it were real surgery. Other gifrst includes $1500 in cash. Hand paintings. Amazing – got fame.
[He showed many great photos of gifts and the responses from the recipients. I'll try to dig some up later online if I can]
They wondered Was it just Christmas? They tried another day. Named: Arbitrary day.
2010 – signups quadrupled. Crazy portraits (found their picture and painted them a portrait). 2011 – Jimmy Fallon. $1million to strangers
Someone sent a case of live crabs to eat and the reciever posted as a joke “I got crabs from an internet stranger.”
They did another version for U.S. troops and another that worked one-way (not reciprocated).
2012 – even bigger – $2 million, 127 countries
WHY? Is it working? Why does it grow? He saw a recent TED talk about using money for happiness, it can help but you have to spend it on strangers. That’s basically what redditgift is to him, this idea improved and amplified by the web.
Jon Satrom, Glich Artist, jonsatrom.com
“I’ve got 99 problems but a glitch ain’t one”. Weird meme: people biting their computers.
Glitches break us out of the context of consumer. What’s wrong? Is my tv? my web connection? We pay attention and the illusion is broken. Systems are unstable and messy if you pay attention, just like we are.
Glitch safari: looking for glitches in different mediums and places.
Referring to updating software: “My art sometimes breaks when things get fixed.
His work is often called Brikolage, working with curating found objects. He looks at something like Word, the Microsoft application, is a collection of sounds, scripts, icons and code, and to him all of this is fair game. [And showed video of one of his works based on Word].
The Language of new media: modularity is one of the modes of new media.
When stuff stops working the way I want [due to upgrades and such], it forces me to make new work.
Satromizer - iPhone app for glitching (It’s funware, not exactly a real app).
Glitches are more than a stunt: but a philosophy of creation and awareness. Glitches offer us a chance to see things we depend on and forget about differently. He invites us to take a moment when we encounter them and consider what it means.
Betsy Hoover, Online organizing directory for Obama Campaign
She asked the audience to think about a social problem that requires a community to solve.
She studied at Xavier and was interested in community building. Went door to door in Cincinnati to ask about what they liked and disliked about their neighborhood. She heard 6 people tell her they wanted a speed bump, to protect their children. They were surprised many people had the same issue. She brought it through the right government channels, and made it happen. And this inspired her to do even more.
She worked on the campaign, and after they won South Carolina Primary the campaign was broader, and she was interested in using online tools. Rather than go door to doo she found MYBO which was pivotal in the campaign.
She continued doing online community and found the switch from offline to on was very similar She never imagined the internet would be central to her work, but it’s not surprising now. These were people who cared and the task was to help them relate to each other: organizing.
Discovered subject lines with the most casual subjects did best. They were treating the recipients as people (She joked “Sorry for all the emails (not really) but thanks for all the action”).
In 5 weeks someone who joined rose form being an unknown local volunteer rose to play a key role in the Ohio campaign. [I think her point was the online tool created local engagement that would have been unlikely without it].
Always have to meet people where they are. Not on obama.com, but on reddit. Many people don’t self select to join a community. But Reddit was a risky place to be (as a president). 30k people registered in one day, their highest spike in the campaign until near the end.
Modern Americans are hard to reach by phone. They move, they don’t answer cell calls to numbers they don’t know. But 85% of unreachable people can be reached online, through facebook, through their friends. Friends as messengers is the most powerful way.
If you are an organizer, you are not the best representative to get the people you don’t have already. Your friends or subordinates might be, but you definitely are not.
The internet is not a holy grail: it’s just a tool. Use it to build relationships.
Doug Zell, Intelligentsiacoffee.com
[He arrived late and apologized for being dressed casually: he was in a bike race. He was slated for 5:30 and luckily didn't need to go on until 6:00, which he joked about a bit. He carried all this well and got laughs but it was disrespectful on principle]
His company started as a small coffee roaster, now has coffee bars across the U.S. and 1000 wholesaler accounts, and buy from 20 counties, paying above fair trade values.
What’s required to build a great brand?
Conviction: you do what you say you’re going to do. Patagonia is a great example. That’s how you make brands that last.
Unimpeachable quality: if you build brand well it will last forever. Four Seasons started as a motor inn in Toronto. When it moved into London it had to change to compete. They decided on unimpeachable quality as their goal. Every detail smacks of quality (Also mention Krug champagne).
People see through lack of authenticity There are many inventa-companies (“we thought of this while out on a hike”). Levi’s embodies this. Gold rush history, 200 [it's more like 130] years later the jeans have the same quality. Dockers however have lost their way. In coffee they see many other brands jump in and them jump out. They don’t commit completely, or aim to deceive customers about what they are.
Innovation and evolution. JCrew launched as preppie brand when he was in college, but now have reinvented themselves. Went from preppie and sleepy to leading edge. The tiring part is, just when you’re getting sick of your brand, the public is just starting to get it, they’re chasing you and are behind you. You need to be patient, but always working on what’s next. There are brands that just fell asleep for 3 or 4 years [and don't survive].
Integrity. It took 18 years to have the success he has now, and deflects praise he gets from others (“Google started after we did”). If you are going to build a great company and brand you have to have the utmost integrity. It’s easy to do things that are cheap and low quality but it won’t last.
Be deliberate. Where do you want the brand to go? Even successful companies lose their confidence and way. Apple is a good example for their patience and dedication to quality.
He talked about how bike races don’t need to talk or make excuses. Great brands also stand on their own, with little artifice [which didn't jive with him being cavalier about being late].
