. What makes a great designer? According to IDEO founder David Kelley, who gave the TED Talks “Human-centered design” and “How to build your creative confidence,” being an incredible designer isn’t necessarily about having a great aesthetic sensibility or coming up with out-of-the-box ideas. No,  Kelley says that the key characteristic is e...

In 2012, IDEO founder and longtime Stanford professor David Kelley took the TED stage in Long Beach and shared a deeply personal story. It was the tale of his own cancer diagnosis, of finding a lump in his neck and being told he had a 40% chance of survival. This was clearly a sobering moment, but he wasn't sharing the story to seek our sympathy...

Good design has the power to improve lives. Yesterday, Public Interest Design -- a group dedicated to design for social good -- released the Global Public Interest Design 100, a list of 100 "designers" (including some people you really might not expect) who are designing for the good of all. We love this sweeping list of 100 architects, designer...

Designer Alastair Parvin begins this Session 4 of TED2013 with the theme "Disrupt!" When we use the word architect or designer, Parvin suggests, we mean a professional, a person paid to design. And we believe it's only these people who can solve the world's biggest design problems. But he says firmly: That's wrong. When Parvin was abou...

Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, has died. He was 69. Moggridge, who designed the first laptop computer and was the co-founder of the design firm IDEO, was an enormously influential figure in the worlds of design and technology, beloved by all who knew him. In fact, what’s most noticeabl...

It is, indeed, a monumental day here at TED Towers. We're winners! Or, as June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, described this morning's news of our winning the 2013 National Design Award for corporate and institutional achievement: "We're thrilled!" "Design and design thinking has always been core to TED's mission. After all, it's...

With just over a month to go before the 2012 presidential election in the US, eyes around the world are on the contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The election may well come down to a few key issues. So what matters most to Americans? The TED Blog read this Gallup poll from late July on issues that citizens want the next president ...

If you look closely at the Lideta Mercato -- a shopping mall in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, designed by TED Fellow Xavier Vilalta -- you will notice a unique pattern on its skin, inspired by the beautiful, bold patterns found on Ethiopian women’s dresses. But if you look closer, you will also notice something else: that the design is based on fra...

It is hard to believe that this is final session of TED2015. Luckily Session 12, "Endgame," is our longest ever — with two full hours of talks that took us on a journey through the human experience, from anger to laughter and back again. Read a recap of these inspiring talks. An ode to anger. Kailash Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Peace ...

Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré (TED Talk: How to build with clay ... and community) designs with both people and sustainability in mind. Raised in Burkina Faso, though he’s now based in Berlin, Kéré is always keen to include community-oriented spaces that invite people to sit down and engage in thoughtful conversation. The central nature of ...

Bill Nye the Science Guy (watch his TED-Ed lesson) will be joining the cast of “Dancing with the Stars.” New York Magazine says of Nye’s inclusion in the lineup -- alongside Snooki, Valerie Harper and Jack Osbourne — that he is “the big get.” How long do we think it will be before he and his partner dance to “She Blinded Me With Science?” ...

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Juliette LaMontagne’s Breaker offers millennials a unique, hands-on alternative learning opportunity -- working on projects with serious social impact. Breaker teams take on such challenges as illiteracy and feeding the city, while gaining valuable real-world social entrepreneurship skills. Take us through the Breaker process -- how does it w...

“If you’re a teen, you’ve been called apathetic, narcissistic and social-media obsessed,” said Taylor Trudon, the youth editor at Huffington Post. Standing tall in a crisp white blazer, the 25-year-old shared how she went from keeping a high school diary — decorated with stickers and magazine clippings of John Mayer and Uggs — to becoming th...

  Summer: the season for cracking open a good book under the shade of a tree. Below, we’ve compiled about 70 stellar book recommendations from members of the TED community. Warning: not all of these books can be classified as beach reads. And we think that is a good thing. Picks from Elizabeth Gilbert, author  The Principles of Uncertainty ...

How can we make advances in technology that don't require massive job losses? Work with nature to protect both the planet and humanity? Ensure all people are treated equitably? In a day of talks, interviews and performances, 17 speakers and performers shared ideas about a future in which people, technology and nature thrive interdependently....

At Fuji Kindergarten outside Tokyo, kids make the most of a magical environment designed just for them. The roof of their oval-shaped school, designed by Tokyo-based firm Tezuka Architects, is an endless playground, and trees grow right through classrooms. So how do you build to let children be children? Says Takaharu Tezuka (TED Talk: The be...

Sarah Jane Pell is making preparations to live in the ocean. That’s right, under the sea -- but not until after a jaunt to the Arctic. Never one to be satisfied with the ordinary, Sarah Jane founded the Aquabatics Research Team Initiative to explore water choreography, technology, and human behavior as works of live art. Her future projects wi...

Leyla Acaroglu aims to make people think about how the choices they make on a daily basis affect the environment. And she aims to make thinking about this fun. In today’s TED Talk, Acaroglu turns her attention to four bits of “environmental folklore,” like the idea that it’s more environmentally sound to opt for the paper bag over the plasti...

Tucked into the northeast corner of the Vancouver Convention Centre, a podium was set up for the duration of TED2015. A small camera captured what happened behind it, with a panorama of Vancouver’s mountains and harbor in the distance, complete with sea planes skimming across the water. From this vantage point, classrooms around the world...

Kibwe Tavares combines his training as an architect with his love of storytelling and animation to create futuristic 3D animated/live action films with social and political depth, creating incredibly detailed, vivid, and kinetic visual environments to entice audiences. His short film, Robots of Brixton, distributed on the internet, won a speci...

A new curriculum makes design-build projects into a part of every student’s education. How can a well-designed home change someone’s life? During the 2014-2015 school year, some high school students in Berkeley, California, asked that question as they took on a big project: to build a pair of tiny houses. Affordable housing is a huge issue ...

In 2009, author Emily Pilloton moved to Bertie County, North Carolina -- the poorest county in the state with a population of just 20,000. There she and her partner Matthew Miller launched Studio H, a design and build program meant to engage the creativity of high school students while bringing design innovation to the area. Pilloton told the st...

Some inventions are about solving a need. Others are about opening up our understanding of the world. Still others are motivated by a sense of whimsy or adventure. At TED@IBM, 14 speakers shared ideas that fit into all of these categories. Themed “Necessity & Invention,” the second edition of TED@IBM challenged the often-repeated trui...

Design icon John Maeda shares the everyday objects (well, non-objects) he can't live without. When most people think of design, they think of objects. Lights, chairs, cars … tangible things that we can ooh and aah over. That’s why it’s surprising to hear designer John Maeda (TED Talk: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders) de...

In a session that honors the “deeply practical and the entirely improbable,” pyromantics and biosynthetic designers meet artists and flag-worshippers. Helen Walters, host of Session 10: Creative Ignition, calls this session a "celebration of the catalytic thinking that reshapes the world around us." Here's a recap: How to reboot society. ...

"I am in love with cities,” says British designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick (TED Talk: Building the seed cathedral). “It’s just incredible that we all live together, and together we add up to something incredibly rich.” Heatherwick has already come up with some pretty bold urban designs -- including a garden-topped bridge across the R...

What might our clothes look like in 50 years? When textile designer Suzanne Lee was researching her book, Fashioning the Future, she found the most interesting answers to that question when she looked beyond the traditional borders of fashion design. Beyond cut, color and cloth, our style in 50 years will be driven by new materials from the ...

A persistent sight in David Sengeh's childhood, growing up in Sierra Leone: amputees. Losing a limb was an all-too-common fact in the civil-war-torn region. But the aftermath was almost worse, Sengeh saw, as he watched family members and friends struggle with ill-fitting, uncomfortable prosthetics that hurt too much to wear. Here, the 201...

On August 27, an extraordinary group of people will gather in Arusha, Tanzania, for TEDGlobal 2017, a four-day TED Conference for "those with a genuine interest in the betterment of the continent," says curator Emeka Okafor. As Okafor puts it: "Africa has an opportunity to reframe the future of work, cultural production, entrepreneurship,...