10 Awesome Words (or Phrases) to Live By

The Holstee Manifesto: “Do what you love and do it often.”

At TEDActive 2012, TEDActivators opened their gift bags to find a copy of the Holstee Manifesto, the famous poster beginning with the words “This is your life.” Here, we’ve collected ten other inspiring quotes, manifestos and beautifully designed graphics that speak to us. What are the words that inspire you?

1. Austin Kleon’s “Steal Like an Artist” is a creative manifesto made from the ten pieces of advice he wished he had heard when he was starting out.

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Need more inspiration? Click through for more of Austin’s drawings and sage writings.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” Ryan McArthur successfully captures the complexity of Emerson’s words with his minimalistic design.

Ryan McArthur has an Etsy store with more fabulous prints of famous quotes.

3. Maptia‘s goal is to build an inspirational map created from memorable experiences. Maptia’s Manifesto is “a pledge to be open to new things, to always stay curious, and to go explore the world – whether it is just around the corner at home or on the other side of the globe.”

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Help the Maptia Manifesto travel. Take a photo with the Manifesto and add to Maptia’s growing collection of photos from around the world.

4. “I live under the sky too” is Shilpa Gupta‘s art installation erected in Bandra, Mumbai. The text is written with LED lights in three different languages — English, Hindu and Urdu — and the words from each sentence are interwoven into the other. The lights go on and off highlighting each version of the sentence.

I live under the sky_ Shilpa gupta

It’s a big sky that we share. Click to see the Youtube video of the lights cycling through the words.

5. Remember: A spark is all it takes. Charlotte Estelles Littlehales put together her art piece using 2,600 matchsticks in the course of 720 minutes. Within a minute, the entire project was engulfed in flames and ash.

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6. Bruce Mau, lauded designer, wrote a design manifesto in 1988 titled “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.” We especially resonated with his first piece of advice: “Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.”

7. You are here. So, deal with it. An eco-friendly wall sticker, designed by Antoine Tesquier Tedeschi, may be the reminder you need to stay present and just deal.

8. “I will do one thing today.” We know you TEDActivators are busy folks. You probably have fifty things on that to-do list. Let’s start with one.

Pretty Bitter makes these cool notepads!

9. Designer James O’Connell dedicates this illustration to “the few people who can’t digest the sense of sharing or helping.” So, what are we waiting for? Let’s all do good together.

10. And finally, we have the very wise words from workisnotajob. Their company name also serves as their motto and their goal is to inspire you to do more.

Posted in TEDActive 2013, TEDActive 2014 | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Lincoln Reimagine Project launches with the TEDActive 2013 artists-in-residence

The Lincoln Reimagine Project is launched! Click through for more info.

The Lincoln Reimagine Project! Click through to explore

After an exciting night of design-themed talks at TED@250 the Lincoln Motor Company unveiled three new videos (created in collaboration with TED) to profile the incredible artists they brought to the TEDActive 2013 conference – Aurora Robson, Andy Cavatorta, and Gilberto Esparza.

Launched today, the Lincoln Reimagine Project will lend support to these visionaries in the arts, design and innovation — artists who are equal parts fearless and creative. At TEDActive this year, Aurora, Andy and Esparza showcased original pieces that disrupt the traditional ways we imagine music, sculpture, and even recycling. The videos highlight their artistic philosophies and their unique approaches to the pieces they produced for TEDActive.

Over the past year, the Lincoln Motor Company has embarked on a journey to reimagine the world around with. In this spirit, they collaborated with TED to identify three artists who are equal parts fearless and creative. Aurora, Andy and Esparza each produced pieces that shifted cultural and environmental paradigms. In their hands, the traditional ways we imagine music, sculpture, and even recycling have been turned upside down. These videos highlight their artistic philosophies and their unique approaches to the pieces they produced for TEDActive.

At this year’s TEDActive in Palm Springs, Gilberto debuted his Auto-Photosynthetic Plants and created a futuristic symphony made from plastic tubes, an iPad, and bacteria.

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Aurora asked TED attendees to give her the plastic packaging from their gift bags, which she used as a medium to create an ethereal, floating sculpture.

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Melodic, chant-like music is not the obvious byproduct of swinging, robotic tubes of steel, but MIT Media Lab graduate and former punk rocker, Andy Cavatorta, has made gigantic, aural structures that are meditative and comforting.

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20 Courageous Women of TED — a playlist curated by Nassim Assefi

Nassim gives a TEDYou talk at TEDActive 2013

Nassim gives a TEDYou talk at TEDActive 2013

During this year’s TEDActive, Nassim Assefi gave a rousing TEDYou talk on ululation, a high-pitched fusion of howl and trill used traditionally in her Middle Eastern culture as an expression of both great joy and sorrow. She is a TED Fellow, co-organizer of TEDxRainier and a co-host and co-curator for the session “World on Its Head” at this year’s upcoming TEDGlobal in Edinburgh, Scotland (June 10-14). She is also a novelist, a global women’s health advocate, a doctor and program advisor to TEDMED.

Given her expertise in weaving stories –whether it be through curating or writing — we asked her to come up with a playlist on her favorite TEDTalks on a subject of her choice. “In my 3 minute TEDFellows talk in 2009, I suggested new diagnostic criteria for courage, a playful melding of my medical and writing worlds. In it, I illustrated courage by sharing the stories of 3 women from Afghanistan all named Malalai (I could add a fourth now, since Malala Yousafzai, who is from the Pakistani border of Afghanistan in Swat). So I thought it would be fun to curate a TED Playlist on courageous women.” Stay tuned for her complete Q&A on her TEDActive experience and on tips on how to cultivate passion and curate a great speaker program.

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TED team visits Whistler!

2013-04-22 10.27.24

A beautiful day to be in Whistler

A handful of the TED team, including TEDActive’s incredible co-host Kelly Stoetzel, just returned from an energizing and thrilling site visit to our new home in breathtakingly beautiful Whistler, Canada. The team spent a week touring around Whistler imagining and dreaming up possibilities for every nook and cranny of the site and thinking of how to create a unique experience true to the TEDActive spirit. Things on their mind included understanding ski culture, programming for cold weather, testing out new fire pit locations and visiting all of the local hotspots.

Throughout the year we’ll be keeping you posted on all of the goodies the TEDActive team is cooking up for next year’s TEDActive. Stay tuned for more sneak peeks and previews!

(All of these beautiful photos were taken by TED Partnerships’ Special Projects Manager Stephanie Kent)

Posted in TEDActive 2013, TEDActive 2014 | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Your Coffee Horoscope

Coffee drinkers unite -- with this cool comic by Doghouse Diaries

Coffee drinkers unite — a comic by Doghouse Diaries

Coffee plays an important role in the lives of many TEDActivators, whether it keeps you awake for the TED sessions, kickstarts your brainstorms or helps you meet new friends while waiting in line. We found this awesome graphic and thought of all of you who are hard at work churning out mind-boggling ideas, breaking out of boxes and silos and saving the world.

So, what kind of coffee are you?

Coffee bar at TEDActive 2013

Coffee bar at TEDActive 2013

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TEDActive 2013 College Campus Takeovers

RISD students brainstorming away

RISD students brainstorming away.

Measuring impact, fostering communication, eliminating silos, harnessing innovation – good ideas lie behind these phrases, but their unspecific overuse often reduces them to meaningless buzz words.

It should come as no surprise that TEDActive’s student interns breathe new life into the phrase “reducing siloed communication.” Maybe it was because they were referring to free pizza. Or maybe it is because – among the students I spoke to – their TEDActive projects are living on post-conference, improving the daily lives of their fellow students.

A little background for those unfamiliar with TEDActive Campus Takeovers:

This year, TEDActive sent a toolkit to students at seven different TEDx participating universities across the country — UCLA Anderson School of Management, University of Washington’s Comparative History of Ideas SchoolVirginia TechSouthern Methodist UniversityThe Ohio State UniversityRhode Island School of Design and New York University. Students opened the kit to reveal four prompts that mirrored the prompts for the TEDActive Projects – Impact, Local, Lifehack, and Mobile. One representative from each university served as the school’s TEDActive Intern. The interns came to TEDActive in Palm Springs and presented their schools’ work to the community.

TEDActive University Interns

TEDActive “Interns”

University of Washington unwraps their Takeover Kit

University of Washington unwraps their Takeover Kit

Students’ responses ranged from a microsite with an interactive visualization depicting the diverse backgrounds of Southern Methodist University students to an internal, standardized assessment among NYU student organization leaders, designed to measure the impact of their own projects and find areas of overlap or openings for collaboration.

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Griffin Dooling, who is also a TEDxNYU organizer, described how it allowed “all of these different groups to coalesce around TED, which helped galvanize support for their own projects.”  He added that this was the “first event at this scale with so many organizations” on board participating.

Julia Columbro felt similarly excited by how TED acted as a catalyst for Ohio State’s student groups to work together. Her time at TEDActive in Palm Springs “was really inspiring, and reaffirmed to me that social change is possible and something that I want to pursue.” Back at Ohio State’s campus, she helped set up an RSS feed that allows students to promote their on campus events and meetings – especially meetings that served free pizza. This live feed helped promote the event “A Taste of OSU,” a food fair thrown by another student organization and associated with the Local Project. Due to its promotion, over 4,000 students attended the fair.

Taste of OSU

Taste of OSU

As Brandon Lazarus from SMU said, “Among our student organizations, we share a lot of commonalities, and can share resources and ideas. It’s not a competition when your goal is impact and social good.” At SMU, TEDActive challenged students to a hackathon – they had to prototype a mobile app in six hours to solve an on-campus problem. The winner was an app that helped students avoid construction sites in order to make it to class on time.

Or maybe the winner was the Harlem Shake video that they made during a break:

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Inspired by their prompts and TEDActive, student interns were able to lasso the creative energy of their many campus organizations, and demonstrate how they could map out efficient ways to work together.

Posted in Projects 2013, TEDActive 2013, TEDActive 2014 | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

20 Canadian slang words you should memorize

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HOW’S SHE BOOTIN’ER?

Uh what?

This is Canadian slang for “How are you doing?” After a few visits to Whistler, we realized we needed to brush up on our Canadian before we hit the slopes next February for TEDActive 2014. So, we compiled this handy guide of the most useful slang words you need to know to pass yourself off as one of the locals. And as a bonus, we’ve added a sample sentence you’ll most likely be overheard saying.

1. Eh?: Add at the end of your sentence as a friendly short-cut for “don’t you agree?”

Session 5 of TEDActive was mind-blowing, awesome, crazy cool, phenomenal, eh?

2. Double-double: Coffee with two creams and two sugars. A triple-triple is cream and sugar times three. Made popular by famous Canadian staple, Tim Hortons.

I stayed up till 3am at the Welcome Home Party; I desperately need a double-double.

3. Pop: If you’re craving a Coke, don’t say “soda” or you’ll find yourself with a glass of carbonated water. “Pop” refers to the bubbly soft drinks you love.

I could use a cool refreshing pop right now — Sprite, Diet Coke or Pepsi — anything that will rev me up during the breaks.

4. Loonie (Toonie): 

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A loon on the Canadian dollar coin led to it being nicknamed the “loonie.” The toonie or twoonie is the tongue-in-cheek nickname for the two dollar coin.

Do you happen to have a toonie on you? I forgot my wallet and I want to buy a postcard.

5. Queue: A line of people.

The queue for coffee goes out the door! Good thing I’m surrounded by cool TEDActivators to talk to.

6. PoutineTHIS.

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An amazing Canadian dish of fries + gravy + curd cheese. 

That Translator’s workshop made me so hungry. I need to eat a big plate of poutine to recharge and get ready for more brainstorms.

7. Washroom: bathroom, loo, potty

Is there a washroom on the first floor of the Fairmont?

8. Housecoat: bathrobe

Don’t forget to wear your housecoats for PJ Morning for tomorrow’s 8:30 session.

9. Zed: the last letter of the alphabet (Z) 

The program is organized in alphabetical order of speaker last names, it goes from A to Zed. 

10. Serviette: napkin

Do you have any serviettes? I spilled a coffee as I jumped to my feet to give a standing ovation.

11. ToquePronounced “took” is a knitted winter cap or beanie. See our list of reasons why Whistler is awesome.

12. Back-bacon

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Or “peameal bacon” is cured bacon rolled in cornmeal. Yummy.

Good thing I woke up early for breakfast. This back-bacon is life-changing. 

13. Van: Short for “Vancouver.” Locals use it to refer to different areas: East Van, West Van, North Van.

Are you hanging out in Van after the conference is over?

14. Chinook: an warm wind that blows from west to east during late winter to early spring.

A chinook blew through and melted all of the snow. 

15. Hydro: electricity

Watch out for the hydro pole when you’re on your scooter.

16. Whale’s Tail: Fried dough pastry. Also known as elephant ears or beaver tails.

Snacks at TEDActive are healthy and delicious … but I’m craving a whale’s tail.

17. Giv’n her: an act carried out to it’s fullest potential. Short for “Given her hell.”

We’re gonna giv’n her at TEDActive this year!

18. Kerfuffle: awkward or stressful situation, commotion.

If you’re ever in a kerfuffle, go talk to Rives or Kelly. They’ll be sure to help you out!

19. Knapsack: Backpack or bookbag.

Did you check out the TED Gift Bag? It’s a knapsack that glows in the dark and has a hundred pockets.

20. Decal:  Is pronounced “deck-ul.”

I love the deck-uls (not dee-kals) adorning the walls of the Theater.

+ a bonus word

21. Canuck: A nickname for Canadian

The writer of this blog post is not a Canuck. But she loved learning these new words :)

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