Bassam Tariq is a blogger, a filmmaker, and a halal butcher -- but one thread unites his work: His joy in the diversity, the humanness of our individual experiences. In this charming talk, he shares clips from his film "These Birds Walk" and images from his tour of 30 mosques in 30 days -- and reminds us to consider the beautiful complexity with...

What if your job didn't control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don't have to). It's a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what wo...

Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art. Not for her a life of sketching and stretching canvases. Instead, she selects a topic and then paints it--literally. She covers everything in a scene--people, chairs, food, you name it--in a mask of paint that mimics what's below it. In this eye-opening talk Meade shows off photographs of some of ...

Seattle is a city celebrated globally for fostering artistic expression. Producer and arts advocate James Keblas tells the story of Seattle's evolution from conservative town to music capital, and offers advice for citizens looking to keep their local music scenes vibrant.

As the creator of a large chunk of the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee knows a thing or two about conjuring new superheroes from thin air. In this instructional and charmingly idiosyncratic talk, Lee shares a few lessons on how to write your own superpowered characters and deploy them in stories that connect with the largest possible audience.

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

Imagine you're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates -- but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us...

With a career that fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography, Paula Scher is a master conjurer of the instantly familiar.

Astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison‘s inclusive, audacious journey to improving life here on earth and beyond is paving the way for human interstellar travel.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library TV combines an irreverent approach to wine and a shrewd social media strategy. It won him web fame and the cachet to spin off book deals, new businesses and his own entrepreneurship consulting firm.

UPS’s David Lee works to create platforms that make it easier for people to turn fuzzy ideas into concrete solutions.

Cristina Domenech proposes to use language as an instrument of liberation and as a way to change the world.

LaToya Ruby Frazier focuses her camera lens on working class families, exploring themes of family, inequality, health care and environmental racism.

"The hood is good," says Jon Gray of the Bronx, New York-based creative collective Ghetto Gastro. Working at the intersection of food, design and art, Gray and his team honor the soul and history of their community while applying their unbridled creativity and expansive imagination to unexpected, otherworldly collaborations. Learn more about how...

With an outspoken approach to the problems of rebuilding cites and a fearless eye for design, Reed Kroloff is helping to change the urban landscape of cities from New York to New Orleans.

Liz Coleman radically remade Bennington College in the mid-1990s, in pursuit of a new vision: higher education as a performing art.

Bill Gross founded Idealab, an incubator of new inventions, ideas and businesses.

At the intersection of word and form, Marian Bantjes makes her art.

Growing up as a comic book fan, artist Shawn Martinbrough rarely saw people of color depicted positively (or at all) in the stories he loved. So he headed over to New York Comic Con to wrangle himself his first assignment for Marvel Comics. Now, as a successful artist who has worked on "Black Panther" and "Hellboy," he shares the importance of d...

Two decades into his career photographer Levon Biss decided to cast aside humans and focus on a new subject: insects. In this visual talk, Biss explains how he developed a fascinating process using composite macro-photography to capture stunning images of creatures that measure mere millimeters.

From the printing press to the digital camera, innovation has often democratized the creative arts. In this forward-looking talk, music producer Drew Silverstein demos a new software that allows anyone to create professional-grade music without putting human musicians out of work.

Engineering student Péter Fankhauser demonstrates Rezero, a robot that balances on a ball. Designed and built by students, Rezero is the first ballbot made to move quickly and gracefully -- and even dance. (Could the Star Wars sphere droid be real? Watch this and judge.)

How does The Onion comes up with satirical articles everyday? In this funny talk, Brian Janosch, a former editor at "America's Finest News Source," takes us into The Onion's writers' room and shares some lessons about how creative teams can work together and brainstorm successfully.

Can architects re-engineer their design process? Joshua Prince-Ramus shows how the results can be spectacular. He walks us through his fantastic re-creation of the Wyly Theater as a giant "theatrical machine" that reconfigures itself at the touch of a button.

Some kids learn by listening; others learn by doing. Geoff Mulgan gives a short introduction to the Studio School, a new kind of school in the UK where small teams of kids learn by working on projects that are, as Mulgan puts it, "for real."

In the center of Caracas, Venezuela, stands the 45-story "Tower of David," an unfinished, abandoned skyscraper. But about eight years ago, people started moving in. Photographer Iwan Baan shows how people build homes in unlikely places, touring us through the family apartments of Torre David, a city on the water in Nigeria, and an underground vi...

Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated -- until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’...

Bidding adieu to his last "real job" as Al Gore's speechwriter, Dan Pink went freelance to spark a right-brain revolution in the career marketplace.

We're on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity -- and it's not human. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results...

What if building intelligent systems and innovations was as easy as drawing connections on a computer screen? Joachim Horn has made this possible. His toolkit puts the brainpower and experience of engineers in the hands of anyone interested in experimenting with new ideas and inventions. He enables anyone with imagination to go from idea to prot...