In 1984, Richard Wurman, graphic designer with a passion for making information comprehensible, sensed that technology, design and entertainment were converging. So he organized a series of talks in Monterey, California, with the stipulation that they could only be 18 minutes long. The first edition featured the presentation of the new Mac and discussions on fractals and mind theory. It was a great success, but the event lost money. Wurman tried again six years later (speaking of tenacity…) and the TED phenomenon was born. More than 450 talks are online, and they’re so interesting, says the NYTimes, as to be addictive. Listen, for example, to the story of Aimee Mullins and her twelve pairs of legs; to Elizabeth Gilbert or Amy Tan talking about creativity; to Malcolm Gladwell’s views on spaghetti, or Christopher deCharms’s thoughts on the brain. Join Milton Glaser as he shows how design, starting with Piero della Francesca, makes old ideas new through variations on existing themes, or Jacek Utko as he explains how to save the newspapers, or Golan Levin as he demonstrates how to make art with technology.
A few months ago, TED launched an online project to subtitle its archive of talks in different languages. More than 1,900 have already been translated. Anyone who is reasonably fluent can do it (as compensation, you get a blurb on the TED site). Feel like lending a hand?
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