TED Community » James McBennett

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Design, Digital Fabrication, A safe world for a global population.

An idea worth spreading

Brick.

Large numbers migrated to informal cities throughout the 20th century, ushering a new age of the world’s largest urban sprawls, a phenomenal growth with severe environmental consequences. Informal dwellers are unable to build homes more than three floors, spreading city boundaries more than 20km in every direction, an unmanageable growth.

8,000 years, the brick has had six sides. Opportunity exists to upgrade the brick with as many sides as a material can tolerate. Mud is cheap, abundant, recyclable, everlasting and thermally suitable for comfort. 3D printing is a zero-waste addictive process that will allow us to produce new forms that are cheaper, stronger, lighter and more intelligent than previous construction. The informal city will rise safe against disaster

The disruption is not the change for one billion in cities like London and New York, but the introduction of architecture, engineering and urban design to five billion people that have never had it before.

Talk to me about

Anything, bring back the renaissance thinkers!

Comments

• TEDCred score: +4253.40 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Talk: John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

  Apr 22 2013: Is txting/chatroom a language in decline being replaced by other newer mediums such as tweets?
  
  If language and technology are seemlessly connected, how can we imagine Google Glass and augmented reality amongst other upcoming technical innovations forming newer mediums of communication, each with their own lol's and slash speeding up the shelf-life of a medium from several generations to only one decade.
• +3

  A comment on Talk: Skylar Tibbits: The emergence of "4D printing"

  Apr 5 2013: Fans of this tech might like this chair by designer Carl de Smet of which the video shows what we can make beyond small letters. I get a mention too about my rocking stool currently on kickstarter! :)
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22030428

• A comment on Talk: Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ...

  Mar 20 2013: The aluminium intro reminds me of the CNC unibody fabrication of Apple
  
  Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of Industrial Design, noted that, "Traditionally notebooks are made from multiple parts. With the new MacBook, we’ve replaced all of those parts with just one part—the unibody. The MacBook’s unibody enclosure is made from a single block of aluminum, making the new MacBook fundamentally thinner, stronger and more robust with a fit and finish that we’ve never even dreamed of before.”
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

  Mar 1 2013: I love the direct business models that are emerging. D2C (Designer to consumer) M2C (Musican to Consumer) and so on......
  
  Great talk! Love it!
  
  (Realise consumer may not be the right word, but coming from term B2C business to consumer.)
• +3

  A reply on Talk: Lee Cronin: Print your own medicine

  Feb 8 2013: "Earl Grey... Hot,"

• A comment on Talk: Cesar Kuriyama: One second every day

  Feb 7 2013: Awesome! Well done Cesar!

• A comment on Conversation: What's a degree worth?

  Feb 3 2013: I think we need to Look at how both work and education are changing,
  
  In the past you got a degree which was collection of classes that is aggreated to a score (GPA) and an employer can take that score into account along with the university attended that indicates both the network of that candiate and the quality of the GPA, (some universities give A's easier than others.) Then you starting working and recording success/failure was not as easy from that point on. I believe the CV of the future is going to look more like web-analytics tracking skills, education, online courses, offline courses, networks and lots more. I think work will equally track using web-analytics and be very similar.
  
  Professions over the last 150 years have been organised by a triangle of hierarchy, the CEO at the top, the other directors who manage and the people down below who do the day-to-day tasks. Airbnb.com is a great example at looking at a different organisational system, airbnb is a circle that allows someone to build their reputation in that circle. If we look at the same system applied to lawyers, rocketlawyer.com allows people find a lawyer using reputation. These networks let you find individuals not organisations and the extra reports, management, marketing and everything else the organisation gave to the individual hard-working lawyer, the platform can not only provide, it can be better. The obvious step is see management consulting go this way where you no longer work for McKinsey or Bain, but have an account on consultant.com with a high reputation.
  
  For a young high school student, I would probably recommend to go to college as the system today and system above will take time to switch. Nevertheless for myself, I have a degree, but have done the latter thereafter instead of a postgrad. I have taken classes and skills that accumulate into what I want to be, not taking them to get a piece a paper.

• A comment on Talk: Leslie Morgan Steiner: Why domestic violence victims don't leave

  Jan 26 2013: a similar message to wikileaks at a different scale?
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Boghuma Kabisen Titanji: Ethical riddles in HIV research

  Jan 11 2013: Great talk Boghuma!

• A comment on Talk: Jeff Smith: Lessons in business â�¦ from prison

  Dec 6 2012: Quite a few interesting talks on prisoners, e.g.
  
  TEDxBoston - Jenny Phillips, Ph.D - The Only Way Out is In
  http://youtu.be/150cqgYh8sQ