Tag Archives: design

I was very lucky to get a ticket to the 3rd version of TEDx Helsinki, the locally-organised TED mirror event. You can find a small summary of the talks below.

• Theme of the day: Doing out of the box.
• Jody Turner Opportunity: Developed world  vs Developing world means industrialised and ready versus human touch and in progress. Your passion is the most valuable thing you’ve got. There’s no ownership in innovation. Empowerment. The change generation is all of us.
• Kaikki muuttuu paremmaksi (It all gets better, in Finnish) video premiere
• Janne Gallen-Kallela-Siren: visual literacy, more than just normal literacy. Think more in images and symbols, less in letters & numbers. More creative, less engineering.

• Matti Posio: Future of Finnish culture. Culture is threatened by new culture. Media endangered by social media, if they don’t know how to use it unlike CNN. Finns believe in authority somewhat, Americans not really, which influences the way they approach media.

The future is here, just unevenly distributed.

• Puppetry of the penis (NSFW).
• David Wolfe: The fruit tree planting foundation. Chocolate history. Chocolate for health.
• Alf Rehn: Love and raw materials. Passion for doing, extreme production. What can chefs teach of management:  Linking strategy, esthetics, passion and implementation & Organized caos.
• Mikko Hyppönen: Internet. Evolution leads us to Facebook =) . What threatens the net? Web crime.
• Hannu Lauerma: Psicopathy. Antisocial personality disorder. Nervous system doesn’t react to stress like majority of people. Feelings missing. Can develop with lack of physical contact when young. Lack of empathy. Leading to crimes against humanity.
• Itay Talgam Conductor video first, then live talk.

• Video of 3 year old jonathan conducting beethoven 5th. How to do the same but different? Leaders are afraid of being ignored. Making people get out of their comfort zone. Build order and then destroy it. Empowering instead of command and control. Create metaphors and bring people into them. Customising message to relationship. Authenticity matters. Leadership is suspension of disbelief. Do it all wrong, but still get it right (think out of the box).
• Stefan Bremer and violinist Teemu Kupiainen remember photographer Jouko Lehtola, showing his photographs to Johann Sebastian Bach “Chaconne”.

Was invited to attend the second edition of TEDx Helsinki last week, and I have to thank the organizers for a fantastic event.  We had great speakers, awesome videos from official TED conferences and some very interesting insights.  A quick bullet-point summary below.

1. Sebastian Wernicke and how to create the ultimate TED talk using statistics (video).  “Tool” available from get-tedpad.com.
2. Esa Saarinen introduced us to the idea of Baby Radicalism, or what should we learn from toddler behaviour in our daily life: the power of smiling, growth and love.
3. Juuso Nissilä went over how our biology hasn’t evolved as fast as our culture and society, and our bodies struggle to catch up with our conduct and environment.
4. Bjarke Ingels showed us the power of letting ideas evolve in the architectural design process (video).
5. Virpi Kuitunen gave us a very personal talk on the challenges of giving up something. “The most difficult thing of quitting is not leaving stuff behind, is starting anew as you don’t know what lies ahead”.
6. Reidar Wasenius put the audience to exercise their brains for a little while.
7. Anssi Vanjoki explored the power of volunteering and volunteer organisations.  He mentioned the open source software movement and sports clubs as good examples, while contrasting them with the sad state of political party volunteering in Finland.
8. Mikael Jungner talked about the illusion of control and how it affects the decision-making process giving biting examples from his time at the helm of YLE.
9. Tom Wujec on the nature of collaboration (video).  Openness, expertise and facilitation will go a long way.
10. Kirsti Lonka showed us some of the challenges the Digital Natives pose to the way the education system in Finland currently works, and what are they doing to change it.
11. Teppo Turkki talked about the rising economic, technological and even cultural influence of South Korea, Japan and China.
12. Temple Grandin on how autistic minds work, and why they can and should be allowed to contribute to society (video).
13. Jufo Peltomaa showed why the coming singularity won’t mean the end of the human race.  In fact the emerging AIs will evolve so fast they will not care more for us than we do of, say, wolverines.
14. Miina Savolainen closed the event with a bang, talking about the empowering quality of portrait photography: what it says of the photographer’s values and ways of communication.  When you look at pictures, don’t only focus on what’s present, but also on what is not being photographed.  More info on her website.  You’ll never see family albums in the same way again.

All in all an enjoyable and inspirational occasion which I hope I can attend again.

TEDx Helsinki was organised this year as a local mirror for the wonderful, famous TED talks.  The event was quite good overall, even if the level of the talks was a little uneven.  The only problem they had was with misleading marketing in one important aspect: while their website and the registration process was in English, 80% of the event was in Finnish with no translations, which meant those attendants who didn’t master the language of Aleksis Kivi (and there were quite a few), were given a cold shoulder from the get go.

This was one of those situations where I was really glad to have learned the local lingo. If you are interested to know more about the event, you can check twitter or Anssi Kela’s post (in Finnish).

Update 18.05.2010: Videos from the presentations here, here and here (in English).