For those of you who haven’t heard of TED before:
TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
The TEDx events are local events/conferences under the TED umbrella. So for the first time a TEDx event was organised in Ghent (11-06-2011). The venue for the event was the chapel of the Vlerick Management School which gave me a pleasant first impression, although it wasn’t really suited for these kind of events. The chapels acoustics where not good, the chapel couldn’t be obscured which made the presentations hard to see and the chairs weren’t that comfy either.
But let’s focus on the talks. Listening and looking at the presentations made it clear that presenting an idea in a short period of time (15-20 minutes) in a clear and engaging way (like we expect from TED talks) is very difficult. Between the live presentations a couple of recorded TED talks were shown and this made this even more clear. A few of the presenters were struck by ‘powerpointitis’ and ‘bullet-point-bacteria’, some weren’t actually presenting a (new) idea and some couldn’t get the idea across. Here’s a quick overview of the different talks:
Folke Lemaitre: the rise of the personal web. I guess he was the presenter with the worst spot on the afternoon schedule. During his talk there were lots of technical hiccups and he had to shorten his presentation. This and the fact that I didn’t hear anything new (just read DIgital: the new normal from Peter Hinssen) felt like a bad start for the event.
Dirk De Ridder: why the brain creates phantoms. We got an explanation of why our brain tells us we have pain in a leg after it has been amputated. Very interesting but overwhelming due to overload on information. If our brain doesn’t get enough information from the environment (through our senses) for a situation, it adds information from memory to remove uncertainty. If we don’t receive any information (amputated leg) then our brain creates information from memory which creates phantoms.
Ellis ten Dam: cradle to cradle. This was the first presentation that really presented an idea with a nice visual presentation, but the idea didn’t get across (at least not to me). In the talk Ellis ten Dam gave 3 principles related to circular society for sustainable solutions
- think in positive outcomes: create a positive business case efficiency towards effectiveness and using less raw material will only delay the outcome
- think in circles: loops instead of lines, chains of stakeholders
- innovation on co-creation: not only technical innovations but also: legal and financial
Bas Haring: successful vs happy life. The last session before the break and this was the best one so far. A very good presentation and an idea that leaves a lot of room for discussion (I don’t agree with his black/white view in the idea). The idea: living a happy long life just doing nothing or leading a short successful life although less happy? Maybe you should opt for the long boring happy life.
Patrick Vyncke: fitness cues. This was an entertaining talk about when sex makes a difference in advertising. The reaction of a human being is divided in 2 systems (system 1 and system 2, or instinctive and rational). By using sex in copywriting results in no difference: this toothpaste – shiny teeth, this toothpaste – sexy teeth, no difference because we know rationally that this is not the case. But we do react differently to specific cues: we are finetuned to react to cues that enhance our survival. One obvious example: 75% of women choose an ad which has a man holding a baby to 25% that choose the man holding a caught fish.
Louis Jonckheere: mobile development. This was one of the most clear talks for the whole afternoon. A nice visual presentation, a clear idea and a good presenter. With some statistics and numbers he made it clear that mobile applications will make up the larger part of the number of applications worldwide in the near future. That’s where the audience of the future is.
Philip van de Gehuchte: dance organ – decap beat machine. Hacking an analog organ to be digitally controlled. Making the organ dance parties from the 50ties into contemporary dance parties. See this video.
Lars Sudmann: the virtual presentation project. Again a very good presentation on how to make your virtual presentations better and make them interact more with the audience. Some tips: speak like a radio presenter, learn from tv (visual elements), make it more visually appealing, make use of scribble (A scribble can also refer to a roughly drawn representation of a design) to give the presentation a more human touch and lastly make us of social media (for example to do a live polling).
Johan Braeckman: natural selection. Good presentation but nothing new here for me. A clear explanation of ‘natural selection’, but one that belongs more in a lecture hall in my opinion.
Clo Willaerts was the excellent facilitator for the afternoon. One remark on the little experiment on leadership and followers: being a follower is not something you are told to do but something you do out of free will.
All in all it was a positive experience, but I expected more from a TEDx event. To wrap up: some good presentations, a few good ideas and some things that can be improved upon for the next TEDxGhent event which will have me surely again as an attending TEDdict.
Here’s a link to photos of the event taken by Hans Stockmans: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hans_stockmans/sets/72157626826048961/with/5827729287/
No comments:
Post a Comment