Theme: Urban Sustainability

Our first event has now happened! We learned an enormous amount from having been through the entire process, and look forward to improving our next event.

People from 9 cities in our urban cluster turned out to help us initiate the Urban Sustainability series, 76% of them between 22-54 years old - the perfect mashup to get things done!

116 guests were initially curated from 181 applicants. 20 offered their regrets before the event, allowing wait-listed applicants to be accepted. 106 guests arrived of these 116. There was a 10% no show rate. It was a no-charge event.

10% of them heard about us through TED.com, and 12% through Facebook or Twitter. 48% had a connection with someone involved in the event - many of these connections were professional - several of the metro area’s more prominent architects came to hear the ASU Design School Director speak for instance. 30% left that question blank.

There were standing ovations for two of the speakers, and the entire speaker lineup came out for a bow at the end - the crowd stood and cheered for over 5 minutes! Each speaker touched on a different aspect of sustaining a city, and each was very well received. There remains a great deal of subject matter to uncover!

Response to the event has been inspiring - and we’re already exploring a TEDx in the women’s state prison complex on the outskirts of our urban cluster.

Each of our team did an exceptional job, and special thanks to Tyler Hurst, who pulled together all the technical aspects of the event as well as being a master recruiter of volunteers, Layal Rabat who created the social media leading up to and during the event as well as jumping in at the last minute to redesign the brochure and nametags, and Krystofer VanSlyke who managed the live stream by massing the entire event’s video into a seamless whole, archiving the raw video feeds for editing.

We received help, guidance and cheers from TEDx Licensees around the world as we worked through all the challenges of putting on this first event. It’s wonderful to be part of this global project!

The speaker videos are all up.

ASU SkySong
1475 N Scottsdale Road
Scottsdale, Arizona, 85257
United States