6 talks on good design: TEDx honors the Global Public Interest Design 100 winners
Above, a static version of Public Interest Design’s Global 100 graphic. Head to PublicInterestDesign.org to play with the interactive version »
Public Interest Design is a movement that seeks to recognize and celebrate architects, designers, and planners who work for social good. This month, the organization released the Global Public Interest Design 100, cataloging 100 designers who are changing the lives of people in need.
Here at TEDx, we were pleased to find quite a few of our speakers among the honorees. Below, we highlight just a small sample of those speakers. Get ready for 6 talks about the power of design to create change in the world.
The next generation of global health: Barbara Bush at TEDxBrooklyn
As she finished up her college career, Barbara Bush, daughter of former president George W. Bush, saw an opportunity to make a mark in the world — by asking members of her generation to join her in changing the face of public health. At TEDxBrooklyn, she explains how she got here, and tells the stories of some of the designers and planners working for her organization, Global Health Corps.
From PID: Barbara Bush is co-founder and CEO of Global Health Corps, which places and engages fellows—like Rwandan architects Christian Benimana and Commode Dushimimana of MASS Design Group—in developing nations to work towards improving health outcomes for the poor.
Dr. Timothy Noakes has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about health and exercise advice. At TEDxCapeTown, he explained how many of the popular recommendations and guidelines for how to be healthy — from diet advice to instructions for proper hydration — aren’t supported by even basic scientific research.
From his talk:
The [question] that I really got involved with in the 1980s was: Should we drinking more or less during exercise?
…In the 1960s, it was held that if you drank that actually if you drank during exercise, that wasn’t a very good idea. And Abebe Bikila, who was the first African runner to win two Olympic gold medals in the 1960 and the 1964 Olympic marathons, he ran both races without drinking anything.That was what runners did those days.
Then, all of a sudden, in the 1960s and 1970s, things changed and we were told that if you didn’t drink enough, you were going to die during exercise.
…In 1981, on the first of June, 1981, an athlete started the Comrades Marathon in Bourbon and she reached 70 km and her husband withdrew her from the race because she didn’t recognize him…within two hours, she was unconscious having epileptic seizures and she had to be taken to a hospital in Bourbon. And when she was admitted to hospital, she became the first case of this condition: [exercise-associated hyponatremic encephalopathy (EAHE)]… Her chest X-ray [showed] that [she had] fluid in her lungs and it took five days later before the fluid had gone out of her lungs.
…Over the next four or five years, we picked up a couple more cases and worked out that they had probably overdrunk and that — in other words — they’d [drank] too much during exercise … So the more you overdrink, the lower your sodium, and the sicker you were. And we published that in 1991, and thought, “That’s the end of the problem. We cured the problem. We know what causes it: it’s overdrinking.”
And we thought the problem would go away. But, unfortunately, at the same time that we were doing that, industry had come along and said, “No, actually, the more you drink, the better.”
…And we predicted what would happen. We predicted this would happen: The accumulative incidence of this condition, which had never existed before 1981, never existed — there were a total of 1,600 cases in the medical literature…and, tragically, 12 deaths. All completely avoidable.
And so what happened was that the sports drink industry came along and then they influenced the official drinking guidelines drawn up by official bodies. And those promoted overdrinking.
Then a lady died in the Boston Marathon in 2002, and in 2003 I was invited by two organizations to produce alternate drinking guidelines, which promoted drinking to thirst, and that finally has now been accepted that that is the way we should be drinking.
…The “science of hydration” is utterly bogus. There is no science to it. It was dreamed up by marketers to sell a product.
For more of Dr. Noakes’s research into health and exercise claims, watch his entire talk “Challenging the myths of good health” below:
Three reasons to watch TEDxChange tomorrow
Melinda Gates speaks at TEDxChange 2012
TEDxChange, happening this Wednesday, April 3, is a global conversation on some of the most pressing and intractable health and equity issues in our world today — like access to clean water, to schools, to medicine, to technology and to information. Overall, the event will deliver inspiration to those who have the courage to believe that change is possible.
The event, hosted by Melinda Gates, will begin at 9 am (PDT) at the Gates Foundation Campus in Seattle, Washington. The 90 minute program will stream live online at TED.com and TEDxChange.org.
Why should you be one of the many people watching TEDxChange live?
The theme: Positive Disruption. We all want our world to be a better place to live in. But most of us know that sometimes that’s easier said than done. Sometimes, it takes a shake-up to our assumptions, our traditions, our schedules, our values and our communities to get us to spring to action and make real change happen. This is where TEDxChange comes in. It’s that (positive) disruption to your regularly-scheduled program. RSVP to watch »
You won’t be alone. More than 200 TEDxChange events will be bring together folks around the world in their schools, homes and businesses as they watch the TEDxChange livestream and discuss the ideas they hear in it. Find an event near you »
The speakers. Melinda Gates has traveled the world seeking out great speakers with bold ideas for change. Here is the speaker lineup:
- Julie Dixon, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication
- Spoken-word poet David Fasanya
- Halimatu Hima, Niger’s first Youth Parliament president
- M. Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and of theology at the University of Notre Dame
- Salim Shekh and Sikha Patra, 15-year-olds working to eradicate polio from their communities
- Roger Thurow, author of the book Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty
Psychiatric disorders — like autism, depression, and schizophrenia — take a terrible toll on human suffering. We know much less about their treatment and the understanding of their basic mechanisms than we do about diseases of the body.
Think about it: in 2013 — the second decade of the millennium — if you’re concerned about a cancer diagnosis, and you go to your doctor, you get bone scans, biopsies, and blood tests. In 2013, if you’re concerned about a depression diagnosis, you go to your doctor and what do you get? A questionnaire.
Part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. We tend to view them — and the popular press aids and abets this view — as ‘chemical imbalances’ in the brain, as if the brain were some kind of chemical soup full of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.
This view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders, like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup.
But that can’t be the answer, because these drugs actually don’t work all that well. A lot of people won’t take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects. These drugs have so many side effects, because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. Some of it will drip into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good.
—From Dr. David Anderson’s TEDxCaltech talk,”Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals,” a TEDx editor’s pick this week.
