From the micro scale to the building scale, Neri Oxman imagines and creates structures and objects that are inspired, informed and engineered by, for and with nature.

A part of the Bangalore-based artist duo Pors & Rao, TED Senior Fellow Aparna Rao works with electro-mechanical systems and interactive installations.

About this event: Considering common places, objects, and ideas from another angle.

Inventor Saul Griffith looks for elegant ways to make real things, from low-cost eyeglasses to a kite that tows boats. His latest projects include open-source inventions and elegant new ways to generate power.

Walter Hood imagines urban spaces as a new kind of public sculpture -- full of beauty, strangeness and idiosyncrasy.

Known as "Captain Organic," Ross Lovegrove embraces nature as the inspiration for his "fat-free" design. Each object he creates -- be it bottle, chair, staircase or car -- is reduced to its essential elements. His pieces offer minimal forms of maximum beauty.

Tamas Kocsis is a self-taught web developer who was always obsessed by new technologies.

TED Senior Fellow Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil studies extreme objects -- including a rare double-ringed elliptical galaxy she discovered -- to help us understand how galaxies form and evolve.

Katherine Kuchenbecker works on incorporating the sense of touch directly into virtual objects. Imagine being able to feel textures on your digital screens.

Miwa Matreyek creates performances where real shapes and virtual images trade places, amid layers of animation, video and live bodies.

Boaz Almog uses quantum physics to levitate and trap objects in midair. Call it "quantum levitation."

A neuroscientist and engineer, Daniel Wolpert studies how the brain controls the body.

Marjan van Aubel promotes extreme energy efficiency through intelligent design.

Using innovative orbiting instruments, aerospace engineer Jeremy Kasdin hunts for the universe’s most elusive objects — potentially habitable worlds.

For most of us, trying to picture the future is a futile exercise that leads at best to some bad ideas that should likely never be shared out loud. For people like TED Fellow Chris Woebken, it's why the present exists. Along with Elliott Montgomery, Woebken runs The Extrapolation Factory, a studio devoted to imagining future scenarios. One re...

Scott Summit uses his 20 years of experience as an industrial designer to make artificial limbs that help people take personal control of these intimate objects.

From wedding invitations to Utopian newspapers, Kelli Anderson re-designs commonplace objects to go beyond their ordinary functions and create surprising experiences.

Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum's MaKey MaKey kit lets you turn everyday objects into computer interfaces -- inspiring both fun and practical new inventions.

Engineer and daredevil cave explorer Bill Stone is obsessed with discovery -- on Earth and beyond.

Sarah Sze's immersive works challenge the static nature of art.

Christien Meindertsma uses art (and craft) to expose the hidden processes and connections of our modern life.

At XponentialWorks, Avi Reichental is helping to imagine a future where 3D scanning-and-printing is an everyday act -- where food, clothing and objects are routinely output at home.

Paola Antonelli is on a mission to introduce -- and explain -- design to the world. With her shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, she celebrates design's presence in every part of life.

Nora Atkinson is a craft curator, a humanist and a romantic -- as she says, "I can’t believe I get to do what I do for a living."

About this event: In a world accelerated by technology, brought to a standstill by the pandemic, we have begun to pause and reflect on the relationships we carry with others, ourselves and the objects around us.

Ariana A. Curtis gets to research, collect, interpret and display objects and stories that help tell the history of all of us and our connections to each other.

Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO algorithm, which combines the simple face detection of your phone camera with a cloud-based AI -- in real time.

MaKey MaKey -- the kit that encourages you to rig a banana piano or control a video game with pencil-etchings -- was one of the most successful projects on Kickstarter in 2012. The project raised 2, 272% of its goal in 30 days, bringing in a cool half million from excited makers. Today’s TED Talk comes from the co-creator of the MaKey MaKey, ...

Dr. Helen Czerski investigates the physics of ocean bubbles and spends a lot of time sharing the big scientific ideas hidden in the small objects around us.

To help him come to terms with the tragedy of his own homeland, Bosnian photographer Ziyah Gafić turns his camera on the aftermath of conflict, showing his images in galleries, in books and on Instagram.