TED Design

Shigeru Ban: Emergency shelters made from paper

Long before sustainability became a buzzword, architect Shigeru Ban had begun his experiments with ecologically-sound building materials such as cardboard tubes and paper. His remarkable structures are often intended as temporary housing, designed to help the dispossessed in disaster-struck nations such as Haiti, Rwanda or Japan. Yet equally often the…

16 Aug 2013 11 min

Derek Paravicini and Adam Ockelford: In the key of genius

Born three and a half months prematurely, Derek Paravicini is blind and has severe autism. But with perfect pitch, innate talent and a lot of practice, he became an acclaimed concert pianist by the age of 10. Here, his longtime piano teacher, Adam Ockelford, explains his student’s unique relationship to…

16 Aug 2013 19 min

Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets

From simple alphabets to secret symbolic languages, graphic designer Saki Mafundikwa celebrates the many forms of written communication across the continent of Africa. He highlights the history and legacy that are embodied in written words and symbols, and urges African designers to draw on these graphic forms for fresh inspiration…

8 Aug 2013 8 min

Jinsop Lee: Design for all 5 senses

Good design looks great, yes -- but why shouldn't it also feel great, smell great and sound great? Designer Jinsop Lee (a TED Talent Search winner) shares his theory of 5-sense design, with a handy graph and a few examples. His hope: to inspire you to notice great multisensory experiences.

7 Aug 2013 9 min

Bastian Schaefer: A 3D-printed jumbo jet?

Designer Bastian Schaefer shows off a speculative design for the future of jet planes, with a skeleton inspired by strong, flexible, natural forms and by the needs of the world's, ahem, growing population. Imagine an airplane that's full of light and space -- and built up from generative parts in…

30 Jul 2013 5 min

Kate Stone: DJ decks made of... paper

"I love paper, and I love technology," says physicist and former sheep herder Kate Stone, who's spent the past decade working to unite the two. Her experiments combine regular paper with conductive inks and tiny circuit boards to offer a unique, magical experience. To date, applications include a newspaper embedded…

24 Jul 2013 11 min

Gavin Pretor-Pinney: Cloudy with a chance of joy

You don't need to plan an exotic trip to find creative inspiration. Just look up, says Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. As he shares charming photos of nature's finest aerial architecture, Pretor-Pinney calls for us all to take a step off the digital treadmill, lie back and…

17 Jul 2013 10 min

Michael Green: Why we should build wooden skyscrapers

Building a skyscraper? Forget about steel and concrete, says architect Michael Green, and build it out of … wood. As he details in this intriguing talk, it's not only possible to build safe wooden structures up to 30 stories tall (and, he hopes, higher), it's necessary.

11 Jul 2013 12 min

Bob Mankoff: Anatomy of a New Yorker cartoon

The New Yorker receives around 1,000 cartoons each week; it only publishes about 17 of them. In this hilarious, fast-paced, and insightful talk, the magazine's longstanding cartoon editor and self-proclaimed "humor analyst" Bob Mankoff dissects the comedy within just some of the "idea drawings" featured in the magazine, explaining what…

27 Jun 2013 20 min

Alastair Parvin: Architecture for the people by the people

Architect Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? The concept is at the heart of WikiHouse, an open source construction kit that means just about…

28 May 2013 13 min

Phil Hansen: Embrace the shake

In art school, Phil Hansen developed an unruly tremor in his hand that kept him from creating the pointillist drawings he loved. Hansen was devastated, floating without a sense of purpose. Until a neurologist made a simple suggestion: embrace this limitation ... and transcend it.

27 May 2013 10 min

Skylar Tibbits: The emergence of

3D printing has grown in sophistication since the late 1970s; TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits is shaping the next development, which he calls 4D printing, where the fourth dimension is time. This emerging technology will allow us to print objects that then reshape themselves or self-assemble over time. Think: a printed…

5 Apr 2013 8 min

Jessica Green: We're covered in germs. Let's design for that.

Our bodies and homes are covered in microbes -- some good for us, some bad for us. As we learn more about the germs and microbes who share our living spaces, TED Fellow Jessica Green asks: Can we design buildings that encourage happy, healthy microbial environments?

28 Mar 2013 8 min

Jarrett J. Krosoczka: How a boy became an artist

When Jarrett J. Krosoczka was a kid, he didn’t play sports, but he loved art. He paints the funny and touching story of a little boy who pursued a simple passion: to draw and write stories. With the help of a supporting cast of family and teachers, our protagonist grew…

10 Jan 2013 18 min

Paolo Cardini: Forget multitasking, try monotasking

People aren’t just cooking anymore -- they’re cooking, texting, talking on the phone, watching YouTube and uploading photos of the awesome meal they just made. Designer Paolo Cardini questions the efficiency of our multitasking world and makes the case for -- gasp -- "monotasking." His charming 3D-printed smartphone covers just…

3 Dec 2012 2 min

Amos Winter: The cheap all-terrain wheelchair

How do you build a wheelchair ready to blaze through mud and sand, all for under $200? MIT engineer Amos Winter guides us through the mechanics of an all-terrain wheelchair that’s cheap and easy to build -- for true accessibility -- and gives us some lessons he learned along the…

21 Nov 2012 11 min

Kent Larson: Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city

How can we fit more people into cities without overcrowding? Kent Larson shows off folding cars, quick-change apartments and other innovations that could make the city of the future work a lot like a small village of the past.

9 Oct 2012 16 min

Thomas P. Campbell: Weaving narratives in museum galleries

As the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Thomas P. Campbell thinks deeply about curating—not just selecting art objects, but placing them in a setting where the public can learn their stories. With glorious images, he shows how his curation philosophy works for displaying medieval tapestries—and…

8 Oct 2012 16 min

Aris Venetikidis: Making sense of maps

Map designer Aris Venetikidis is fascinated by the maps we draw in our minds as we move around a city -- less like street maps, more like schematics or wiring diagrams, abstract images of relationships between places. How can we learn from these mental maps to make better real ones?…

3 Oct 2012 16 min

Julian Treasure: Why architects need to use their ears

Because of poor acoustics, students in classrooms miss 50 percent of what their teachers say and patients in hospitals have trouble sleeping because they continually feel stressed. Julian Treasure sounds a call to action for designers to pay attention to the “invisible architecture” of sound.

21 Sep 2012 9 min