Instagrammed: Moments from TEDxUbud in Indonesia, held at beautiful Fivelements in Bali.
The Map Your Memories project: TEDxWilliamsburg speaker Becky Cooper creates a cartography of people’s lives in New York
If a map is a filter, the goal of it is to make people stop and think about what’s noise and what’s essence. And so I wanted these letterpress-printed maps to actually be the objects that force people to take the time to reflect on their life in the city. —Becky Cooper at TEDxWilliamsburg
When Becky Cooper got her first job out of college — working to make a giant map of all the public art in Manhattan — she soon realized that the makeshift maps she made on napkins and left on her desk, chronicling trips to dinner, shows, and work, were much more interesting than the ones she saw in books. Because these maps told a story, built a cartography of her life in New York: her invisible Manhattan. They, as she says in her talk at TEDxWilliamsburg, “told a story of Manhattan as it is actually lived and it is actually experienced.”
This led her to wonder about other people’s invisible cities — the mental maps of their lives — where they had their first kiss, where they met their best friend, where they rented their favorite apartment, their worst. She wondered how she could collect these memories; how she could expand and match her maps with the maps of other New Yorkers — to show Manhattan “as it actually exists.”
So she letterpressed 300 hand-drawn, blank maps of Manhattan, and left them around the city, with instructions asking brave participants to map their memories and mail them back to her. She inscribed each map with a mission statement:
“Maps are more about their makers than the places they describe. Map who you are. Map where you are. Map your first snowfall. Your favorite cup of coffee. Map the invisible. Map the obvious. Map your memories.”
None came back. So Becky took a different approach. She gave them to people she met in person: people on the subway, on benches, in stores. Maps began to return to her, telling stories about first dates, first loves, first apartments, finally becoming comfortable with who you are. And they told Becky something about her city. From her talk:
And I realized that these invisible cities that I was getting back were invisible cities of emotion. And that if I were to get a complete map of Manhattan — it isn’t that I am trying to map a fixed coordinate … because a city … is not a fixed coordinate, but an evolving relationship between a place and its inhabitants … [and] at the end of it all, that’s what I thought I was trying to map — the heart of the city.
Becky is still collecting maps. To contribute your own or see what others have mapped, visit the Map Your Memories Tumblr, and to hear Becky’s whole story, watch her talk below:
(Photos via TEDxWilliamsburg & Map Your Memories)
“Make things you wish existed.” A page from an attendee gift at TEDxUbud in Indonesia.
Hacking Morocco: Sahara Labs brings the very first hackerspace to Morocco
Enter the doors of the airmail museum in Tarfaya, Morocco on a certain Friday this past February, and you would have seen something far from airmail — Moroccans of all ages working together on DIY engineering projects — or, as it was also known as — the first meeting of Sahara Labs: Tarfaya’s first hackerspace.
Still in its infancy, Sahara Labs has already been named one of the 8 hackerspaces changing the Arab world by Wamda.
“Sahara Labs — Tarfaya Hackerspace — is for everyone,” they say on their Facebook page, “and everyone is invited to all of our events and meetings.
[We provide] hacking tools such as 3D printer[s], Arduino, electronics, and other awesome things…
Anyone can become a member of Sahara Labs - Tarfaya Hackerspace and start making their own workshops, use our tools or do whatever they want to do. The sky is the limit.”
Sahara Labs was founded by TEDxTarfaya organizer El Wali El Alaoui Mohamed El Mostapha. “In Tarfaya,” he said, “there is only one school, one high school, and no other place to get knowledge. People here are creative — especially kids, youth and women — so this is why we built our space.” Sahara Labs is like TEDx, he said, because “TEDxTarfaya shares the ideas worth spreading and Sahara Labs makes and builds ideas worth spreading.”
What did the folks at Sahara Lab build for their inaugural meeting, you may ask? littleBits! And what are littleBits? The design of TED Fellow Ayah Bdeir, littleBits are tiny circuit boards that snap together with magnets to allow even the smallest kid to create projects complete with motors, lights, sounds, buttons, and sensors.
A littleBits racecar (Photo: littleBits)
At TED2012, Ayah explained the educational potential behind littleBits:
“Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures,” she said in her talk. “The nicest thing is how [kids] start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don’t learn at schools,” For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch.”
At Sahara Labs’s first meeting, El Wali and his partner, Bilal Ghalib, invited kids from ages 6-16 to experiment with littleBits and make their own projects. Adults worked to help kids on their way. Ayah’s talk was projected onto the wall and kids and adults fiddled with their circuits.
“Everyone got the opportunity to understand the fundamentals of electronics and create their personalized circuits,” El Wali said, “…achieving their goals by themselves.”
“By the end of the event, he said, “happiness was present on each face of participants, both in trainees and trainers. Kids and teenagers asked to take LittleBits kits back home. [We] distributed half of kits among them and kept another half for future events.
“It was just great. No better way to start a project based on shared values.”
