TEDtalk Tuesday: Disruptive Design Wonder

Sorry for the lack of posts everyone--I've been sick lately, and every time I go to blog, I can't seem to look at the screen long enough to finish a post I'm happy with...until today.


Lately I've been listening to a lot of TEDtalks, since I haven't been able to watch them.  It's been hard to filter out which ones I want to talk about the most!  Chris Anderson, TED curator, has been up to a lot of things since the TED conference in Cali ended a little while ago.


Not only have they posted a ton of new videos from TED 2012 for me to catch up on, but Chris has begun this new project called TED Ed.  So far, I've only seen animated webcasts narrated by Chris, and short TEDtalks given by children and teens on their accomplishments.  As far as I can tell, Chris is trying to reach out to kids and inspire them to learn and become our future.  How sneaky.  He's trying to save the future by educating our youth.  He seems to be in the perfect position to do so, I think.  Nice job, Chris.


I'll post a few of those TED Ed videos that have been exploding on my blogreel.  Oh, and if any of you know any animators...Chris is looking to assemble an animating armada to tackle this new project of his.  (oh, if only I knew how...)

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Here's today's TEDtalk for you.

The speaker is a woman named Kelli Anderson, and the reason I chose her talk is really because she's a graphic designer.   Personally, I think graphic designers have a unique perspective on the world because they constantly have to look around themselves for solutions to their projects.


Kelli seems to be a graphic designer that's acutely aware that she looks at the world in a different way, and she's trying to encourage everyone else to look around, too.


I don't think she's a particularly good speaker--in fact, I can positively tell that her speech is rehearsed.  But I can't keep judging people on how good a speaker they are. I mean, that woman I posted about two  weeks ago, Susan Cain?  She's an introvert, and that definitely doesn't make speaking easier for her.  Kelli is a graphic designer.  She doesn't often get to practice her oratory skills.  But that doesn't mean she doesn't have a lot of great quotes.

"Visual and experiential things exert this invisible authority over our brains at all times.  And they yield this power in subtle and sneaky ways." (45 sec)

She has gotten to make some really cool things, too, and she talks about them in this video.



She made what I would call a meta-card...a card that tells a story about itself when you fold it.

She also designed the graphics on a solar powered popsicle truck. (what she calls a visual infographic on wheels.

She redesigned a wedding invitation to play music...she designed a record player...out of paper.  (6:50)












She also helped design a perfectly counterfeited, utopian, New York Times. (10:25)




Because the real newspaper is so depressing, Kelli and a team made a paper with only good news, with policy ideas that we actually thought would help our current issues.  They printed all the news they hoped to print, and handed it out to people without the permission of the actual New York Times.  An artifact from the utopian future.

"The world is full of order that doesn't necessarily deserve our respect."

In her work, Kelli has to actively choose what to do with the expectations that we all have.
She wants to confound these expectations through disruptive wonder.
She wants us to witness a reality from the back door--where it can infinitely surprise us.

"The more an experience repeats itself, the less it means...When we experience things over and over again, they just lose their gravity. I demonstrate that by rejecting normal order, by messing things up, and by rearranging the pieces, we can expand our notion of what we demand from reality."

I thought her talk was inspiring not only because I want to become a graphic designer some day, and not only because she somehow figured out how to make paper sing, but because throughout the talk, she encouraged me to continue finding surprises in my reality.


Sometimes I get too wrapped up in the repetition of going to school, and doing homework, and visiting family, that I forget that I'm the only one who can make my life fun.  I need to remember how to look at the world in a different way, and I need to remember that I can rearrange the pieces of it to mean what I want.


If you want to see more of Kelli's work, you can find her at kellianderson.com or, as she says in the talk, she can also be found at illsnorenaked.com.