TED Blog

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• A very cool new video: A brief introduction to 4D printing
• Awesome new video: A cell phone tool to help micro-entrepreneurs get loans
• Phil Hansen gives the gift of TED
• Gallery: Beautiful words from TEDxMet, immortalized as art
• How should we talk about mental health?
• Mother knows best: Re-making the Embrace baby warmer for moms

A very cool new video: A brief introduction to 4D printing Posted: 18 Dec 2013 02:42 PM PST It’s not often that you see a designer throw their creation on the ground and break it to smithereens. But that’s exactly what TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits does in the video above. Why? Because he works in the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. When the pieces break apart, they quickly re-assemble themselves, as if the film were playing in reverse. In this video, Tibbits also explains his concept of 4D printing. “We wanted to add time to 3D printing,” he explains. This video is the latest in the Fellows in the Field series, which bring together young filmmakers and innovative thinkers who are a part of our TED Fellows program. It was directed and edited by Anthony Dinham and was made with the support of State Street. Watch another amazing Fellows in the Field video, about a tool that may help micro-entrepreneurs in the developing world get formal loans »

Awesome new video: A cell phone tool to help micro-entrepreneurs get loans Posted: 18 Dec 2013 02:25 PM PST In the developing world, would-be entrepreneurs are easily able to get microloans. But getting access to formal financial institutions — the kind that give large-scale loans — well, that’s much more difficult. Because 70% of those who start small businesses simply don’t have a financial identity. TED Fellow Shivani Siroya has created a tool to help by allowing anyone with a cell phone to build a financial track record. In this video, she not only shares the logic behind InSight, her SMS-based accounting tool, but reveals how it works. You also get to meet some of people who are using this tool and seeing their businesses grow. This video is the latest in the Fellows in the Field series, which bring together young filmmakers and innovative thinkers who are a part of our TED Fellows program. It was directed and edited by Daniel Monico, and was made with the support of State Street.

Phil Hansen gives the gift of TED Posted: 18 Dec 2013 01:08 PM PST Limitations, schimitations. At TED2013, Phil Hansen shared the story of how he thought his art career was over when he developed a severe hand tremor. Instead, by learning to “embrace the shake,” Hansen became a creative powerhouse, constantly coming up with new ways to transcend his limitation. And so we wondered: what if we asked Phil Hansen to go holiday shopping with one big limit in place — that he could only gift people in his life with TED Talks rather than tangible items. Below, see the talks Hansen chose to give. Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion The Talk: Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion For: All the art educators I’ve had the pleasure to work with Why they’ll like it: “One of the hardest things for an art educator is to help their students overcome their fear of risk-taking. Rita gives great insight into the key ingredients in building a trusting relationship, which is a foundational piece for fostering creativity.” Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work The Talk: Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work For: My intern, Joe Tin Why he’ll like it: “I wish I had seen this talk at the beginning of my career, when I was Joe’s age. I think he will not only appreciate the hilarity of this talk, but also the invaluable wisdom that Shawn shares about journey versus destination, and putting happiness in front of success, literally.” Andrew Solomon: Love, no matter what The Talk: Andrew Solomon: Love, no matter what For: My parents, Diane and Jerry Hansen Why: “This talk reminds me of all the things I tried to find myself growing up — including dyeing my hair green, cutting the top off of my car, etc. And as someone living an authentic adult life, I want my folks to know how much I appreciate them always encouraging me to be me, through all the transitions of ‘me,’ and loving me, no matter what.” See more ways to give the gift of TED » And participate in our holiday effort to spread ideas! Share a TED Talk with someone you adore via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook using the hashtag #giveTED. We’re excited to see which talks you spread.

Gallery: Beautiful words from TEDxMet, immortalized as art Posted: 18 Dec 2013 02:20 PM PST Click to zoom into this detailed image. Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Andrew Solomon, 2013 When the lights went down at TEDxMet, a TEDx event hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October, anyone looking very closely could see a tiny light in the first row, casting a dim glow on a lucite desk. The desk was created for artist Alice Attie, who sat with a piece of paper and pen in hand, drawing intently as each speaker took the stage. The drawings were part of a project she calls Class Notes, which started as visual reimaginings of Columbia University graduate lectures on physics and philosophy. Her collaboration with the Met captured the spirit of that project, using the talks at TEDxMet as fodder for her art. As you’ll see in the gallery below, each drawing is a delicate web of words spoken during the talk, intricately arranged into a shape that captures the feel of that talk’s content and delivery. In short, they’re the prettiest class notes you’ll ever see. The Met chose five of these drawings and made prints of them, giving one to each member of the TEDxMet audience. Looking at the beauty and exactness of the words themselves and the shape they form, it’s a wonder that Alice was able to create them spontaneously without pausing to think or fix mistakes. Andrew Solomon: Depression, the secret we share“It’s really my hand that I have to credit,” she said in a phone conversation with us. “It moves forward of its own volition, and I just have to let the line move in the direction it needs to move without forming a preconception.” Creating the image above of Andrew Solomon’s talk — “Depression, the secret we share,” featured on TED.com today – was an especially moving experience for her. Looking back at it, she thinks of Kafka. “Kafka believed that language was a kind of mediation between two worlds,” she says. “One of those worlds allowed itself to be articulated — insisted on it, in fact — and the other was so deeply within that it was never able to enter the field of language. At one time, Andrew must have had a pain that was so profound that he was silent, but he gave voice to that experience onstage. He transformed that darkness into a shared experience.” Attie thinks of her drawings as a transformation as well, a bridge between what we feel and what we have the means to express. “I go back to Kafka,” she says, “and this idea that we touch something inaccessible with something accessible, like language or drawing.” Looking at each piece, they are both completely different from the talk that inspired them and eerily accurate representations of what it felt like to hear them — you see each talk through her eyes. Below, see a collection of Alice’s drawings from TEDxMet. Click on each image and use the magnifying glass to zoom in, to see the full effect of her extraordinary handiwork in detail. Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Luke Syson, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Jeff Rosenheim, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: James Nares, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Nicolai Ouroussoff, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Melanie Holcomb, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Bill T. Jones, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Ron Finley, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Navina Haidar, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Lorna Simpson, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Negin Farsad, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Kyle Abraham, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Eric Kandel and Maira Kalman, 2013 Alice Attie, TEDxMet: Andrew Bolton, 2013

How should we talk about mental health? Posted: 18 Dec 2013 01:11 PM PST At TEDxMet, Andrew Solomon gave an extremely moving talk about depression. (This shot was snapped during an upbeat moment toward the end of the talk.) Today, we ask this speaker—and several other experts: how can we do a better job of talking about depression and other mental health issues? Mental health suffers from a major image problem. One in every four people experiences mental health issues — yet more than 40 percent of countries worldwide have no mental health policy. Across the board it seems like we have no idea how to talk about it respectfully and responsibly. Stigma and discrimination are the two biggest obstacles to a productive public dialogue about mental health; indeed, the problem seems to be largely one of communication. So we asked seven mental health experts: How should we talk about mental health? How can informed and sensitive people do it right – and how can the media do it responsibly? End the stigma Easier said than done, of course. Says journalist Andrew Solomon, whose tear-inducing talk about depression was published today: “People still think that it’s shameful if they have a mental illness. They think it shows personal weakness. They think it shows a failing. If it’s their children who have mental illness, they think it reflects their failure as parents.” This self-inflicted stigma can make it difficult for people to speak about even their own mental health problems. According to neuroscientist Sarah Caddick, this is because when someone points to his wrist to tell you it’s broken, you can easily understand the problem, but that’s not the case when the issue is with the three-pound mass hidden inside someone’s skull. “The minute you start talking about your mind, people get very anxious, because we associate that with being who we are, fundamentally with ‘us’ — us as a person, us as an individual, our thoughts, our fears, our hopes, our aspirations, our everything.” Says mental health care advocate Vikram Patel, “Feeling miserable could in fact be seen as part of you or an extension of your social world, and applying a biomedical label is not always something that everyone with depression, for example, is comfortable with.” Banishing the stigma attached to mental health issues can go a long way to facilitating genuinely useful conversations. Avoid correlations between criminality and mental illness People are too quick to dole out judgments on people who experience mental health problems, grouping them together when isolated incidents of violence or crime occur. Says Caddick, “You get a major incident like Columbine or Virginia Tech and then the media asks, ‘Why didn’t people know that he was bipolar?’ ‘Was he schizophrenic?’ From there, some people think, ‘Well, everybody with bipolar disease is likely to go out and shoot down a whole bunch of people in a school,’ or, ‘People who are schizophrenics shouldn’t be out on the street.’” Solomon agrees that this correlation works against a productive conversation about mental health: “The tendency to connect people’s crimes to mental illness diagnoses that are not in fact associated with criminality needs to go away. ‘This person murdered everyone because he was depressed.’ You think, yes, you could sort of indicate here this person was depressed and he murdered everyone, but most people who are depressed do not murder everyone.” But do correlate more between mental illness and suicide According to the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), 90 percent of people who die by suicide have depression or other mental disorders, or substance-abuse disorders in conjunction with other mental disorders. Yet we don’t give this link its due. Says Solomon, “Just as the association between mental illness and crime is too strong, the connection between mental illness and suicide is too weak. So I feel like what I constantly read in the articles is that ‘so-and-so killed himself because his business had gone bankrupt and his wife had left him.’ And I think, okay, those were the triggering circumstances, but he killed himself because he suffered from a mental illness that drove him to kill himself. He was terribly depressed.” Avoid words like “crazy” or “psycho” Not surprisingly, nearly all the mental health experts we consulted were quick to decry playground slang like “mental,” “schizo,” “crazy,” “loonie,” or “nutter,” stigmatizing words that become embedded in people’s minds from a young age. NIMH Director Thomas Insel takes that one step further — he doesn’t like the category of “mental health problems” in general. He says, “Should we call cancer a ‘cell cycle problem’? Calling serious mental illness a ‘behavioral health problem’ is like calling cancer a ‘pain problem.’” Comedian Ruby Wax, however, has a different point of view: “I call people that are mentally disturbed, you know, I say they’re crazy. I think in the right tone, that’s not the problem. Let’s not get caught in the minutiae of it.” If you feel comfortable talking about your own experience with mental health, by all means, do so Self-advocacy can be very powerful. It reaches people who are going through similar experiences as well as the general public. Solomon believes that people equipped to share their experiences should do so: “The most moving letter I ever received in a way was one that was only a sentence long, and it came from someone who didn’t sign his name. He just wrote me a postcard and said, ‘I was going to kill myself, but I read your book and changed my mind.’ And really, I thought, okay, if nobody else ever reads anything I’ve written, I’ve done some good in the world. It’s very important just to keep writing about these things, because I think there’s a trickle-down effect, and that the vocabulary that goes into serious books actually makes its way into the common experience — at least a little bit of it does — and makes it easier to talk about all of these things.” Solomon, Wax, as well as Temple Grandin, below, have all become public figures for mental health advocacy through sharing their own experiences. Don’t define a person by his/her mental illnesses Just as a tumor need not define a person, the same goes for mental illness. Although the line between mental health and the “rest” of a person is somewhat blurry, experts say the distinction is necessary. Says Insel: “We need to talk about mental disorders the way we talk about other medical disorders. We generally don’t let having a medical illness define a person’s identity, yet we are very cautious about revealing mental illness because it will somehow define a person’s competence or even suggest dangerousness.” Caddick agrees: “There’s a lot of things that go on in the brain, and just because one thing goes wrong doesn’t mean that everything’s going wrong.” Separate the person from the problem Continuing from the last, Insel and Patel both recommend avoiding language that identifies people only by their mental health problems. Says Insel, speak of “someone with schizophrenia,” not “the schizophrenic.” (Although, he points out, people with autism do often ask to be referred to as “autistic.”) Making this distinction clear, says Patel, honors and respects the individual. “What you’re really saying is, this is something that’s not part of a person; it’s something the person is suffering from or is living with, and it’s a different thing from the person.” Sometimes the problem isn’t that we’re using the wrong words, but that we’re not talking at all Sometimes it just starts with speaking up. In Solomon’s words: “Wittgenstein said, ‘All I know is what I have words for.’ And I think that if you don’t have the words for it, you can’t explain to somebody else what your need is. To some degree, you can’t even explain to yourself what your need is. And so you can’t get better.” But, as suicide prevention advocate Chris Le knows well, there are challenges to talking about suicide and depression. Organizations aiming to raise awareness about depression and suicide have to wrangle with suicide contagion, or copycat suicides that can be sparked by media attention, especially in young people. Le, though, feels strongly that promoting dialogue ultimately helps. One simple solution, he says, is to keep it personal: “Reach out to your friends. If you’re down, talk to somebody, because remember that one time that your friend was down, and you talked to them, and they felt a little better? So reach out, support people, talk about your emotions and get comfortable with them.” Recognize the amazing contributions of people with mental health differences Says autism activist Temple Grandin: “If it weren’t for a little bit of autism, we wouldn’t have any phones to talk on.” She describes the tech community as filled with autistic pioneers. “Einstein definitely was; he had no language until age three. How about Steve Jobs? I’ll only mention the dead ones by name. The live ones, you’ll have to look them up on the Internet.” Of depression, Grandin says: “The organizations involved with depression need to be emphasizing how many really creative people, people whose books we love, whose movies we love, their arts, have had a lot of problems with depression. See, a little bit of those genetics makes you sensitive, makes you emotional, makes you sensitive — and that makes you creative in a certain way.” Humor helps Humor, some say, is the best medicine for your brain. Says comedian Wax: “If you surround [your message] with comedy, you have an entrée into their psyche. People love novelty, so for me it’s sort of foreplay: I’m softening them up, and then you can deliver as dark as you want. But if you whine, if you whine about being a woman or being black, good luck. Everybody smells it. But it’s true. People are liberated by laughing at themselves.” Andrew Solomon: Depression, the secret we share Ruby Wax: What's so funny about mental illness? Vikram Patel: Mental health for all by involving all Thomas Insel: Toward a new understanding of mental illness Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

Mother knows best: Re-making the Embrace baby warmer for moms Posted: 18 Dec 2013 01:11 PM PST A new mother uses the Embrace babywarmer to protect her premature baby in a village in southern India. Photo: Embrace. When Jane Chen and her team arrived in India five years ago, it was with a bold idea. They wanted to develop a simple, affordable solution to a terrible problem: infant mortality. They went to the right place. According to a recent Child Mortality report, produced by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, India accounts for more than a quarter of neonatal deaths worldwide, about 725,000 babies in 2012 alone. Infant mortality is the result of many factors; Chen and her team decided to focus on the fact that many premature and low birth weight infants are especially vulnerable to hypothermia, and they came up with a design to address this problem. Embrace is a sleeping bag-style baby-warmer that can be used when high-tech, hospital-based incubators are not available to mothers who either can’t afford to pay for a hospital stay or who can’t afford to remain away from home (and work) for long periods of time. In contrast, Embrace is portable, affordable and low-tech. “My team and I realized there was a need for a low-cost, locally appropriate solution to this problem,” Chen said in a talk earlier this month at TEDWomen in San Francisco. “It had to be extremely easy and intuitive to use and able to function without a constant supply of electricity.” But, for all they thought the idea was a good one, the Embrace team knew there’d be no substitute for observing target users on the ground and in the field. “There are so many nuances that are critical to design and effective implementation, so many nuances that you don’t understand unless you’re there and living and breathing that culture every day,” Chen, a TED Fellow, said in a recent telephone call. Appreciating this critical part of the development process prompted her to leave San Francisco in 2009 to live and work in India full-time. Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves livesThe first demo of the warmer was a success, garnering acclaim, news stories and even a TED Talk — but she knew this was just a beginning. That original design was made for local health workers. What about making it useful for moms directly? The hunch was backed up by product tests, which showed that mothers, even those who are illiterate, did even better at using the Embrace warmer than their local health care workers. Which makes sense, says Chen: “Who fights harder than a mom for their child?” So Chen and her team went to India to listen to the direct feedback of the mothers who’d actually use the product. Not the nominal nod at a focus group of so many design programs, this was an exhaustive, intense process, with mothers having a say over everything from the straps on the babywarmer to the instructions printed on its front. “Mothers would say, ‘We don’t trust western medicine. If you told me to give a certain dosage of medicine to my baby, I’d cut it in half, because it’s probably too strong. If you told me to keep the babywarmer at 98 degrees, I’d keep it at less than that, because it’s probably too warm,’” Chen recalled. The new Embrace solution: remove any chance of unintended user error. For instance, by swapping out the numerical thermometer for a simple red/green light. The Embrace warmer is either warmed to the correct temperature to use or not. Chen’s team also designed the product to complement practices like skin-to-skin care, or putting a baby on a mother’s bare chest. This is an extremely effective form of thermal regulation that provides other benefits to the child — but it can be difficult for mothers to provide this type of care continuously throughout the day. As such, the team designed the product to allow for easy access to the baby, so mothers could provide skin to skin care and breastfeed when possible. As with any design, the product itself is just one part of the story. Spending time in the homes of their target users also uncovered the social and cultural conditions at work around the arrival of a new baby. “Oftentimes the mother-in-law is the decision maker,” Chen said. “So we needed to figure out how to involve her too, whether by having her heat the water or replacing the wax pouches. Really, the biggest question is how you think about the system as a whole, not just from a technology perspective but from a usability perspective, and that requires understanding the social dynamics of systems.” Creating a system to distribute baby warmers to those who need them has also been a complex, lengthy process. So too developing a business model that would allow the company to grow while still reaching women who often rank among the poorest in the world. That’s why Embrace now has both a nonprofit arm, which donates the product to those in need and runs educational programs, and a for-profit side, which sells the babywarmers to government entities and private clinics. It’s a two-pronged approach Chen hopes can meaningfully combine reach and scale. Embrace the company won’t remain devoted only to baby warmers; plans are under way to develop products or services that might tackle some of those other factors that cause infant mortality, perhaps diseases such as meningitis or pneumonia or infections such as sepsis or diarrhea. “Embrace really goes beyond the baby warmer,” says Chen, who recently moved back to San Francisco to work on developing strategic partnerships, confident that the team in India is set up to enjoy success rolling out the company’s first product — and that they’ll continue their research with mothers. “We’re back on the ground working to understand where the gaps in the market are — and where else we might meaningfully help through human-centered design.”