The success of the TED Talks platform has shown the power of the Internet to share knowledge and amplify good news. Furthermore, there has been a democratisation of optimism through the internet, digital media and mobile phones. People are empowered to share good news with each other, and have the tools to do it.
As an experience, a TED conference is always more than the sum of its parts, and TED Global 2010 was no different. This installment felt incredibly well curated, and managed to tell a full range of stories through a guiding theme of ‘Here Comes The Good News.’ As an abstract concept, good news is an interesting one. Typically, it tends to occur in a singular moment. However, while continuing progression is rarely perceived as good news, it of course actually is.
It was also clear from TED Global that we are increasingly looking at the way we share knowledge differently too. We no longer look at sharing insight on the internet as ‘giving away content for free’ or ‘allowing others to pick our brains.’ We think instead about sharing our own knowledge as amplifying the message – and soliciting feedback.
The benefits of this shared knowledge can hit you in unlikely ways. TED Global gave me an insight into fields which I am an outsider to, and reinforced or challenged visions I have of my own sector. I found, for instance that hearing from neuroscientists at TED furthered my opinion that we should be designing for the brain, and not the user. We can leverage MRI-type techniques to determine whether a design is good or not. Using these techniques one could eliminate cultural noise and regional preference, something which is often used to drive personal agenda rather than product improvements and user benefits.
While this vision of design cannot work across all aspects of service, it can certainly work across more generic control types such as gestures and information architectures. It is important that there is an open culture from people who work in these areas. If they become closed and cater to their own community, they become specialised, plagued with jargon, and ultimately, inaccessible to outsiders. If this happens, the benefit to both the design community and the user-base is lost.
In some ways, the TED experience was a sobering one too. The world is real-time and hyper connected, and as digital natives we rarely take the time to sit down and think. There are very few digital philosophers and digital ethnographers making sense of these changes. It is a thankless task, as once the studies have been made, society has moved on, and we are obsessed with something new. We can only hope the data is still there when the time comes for analysis.
Christian Lindholm / Partner and Director @ Fjord
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