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BY MICHELLE DEWITT
Published March 27, 2012
You may have seen TEDxUofM chalked on the sidewalk before you picked up this magazine. Or you could have seen a Facebook friend post about going to the event tomorrow. But what’s the big deal about this conference with funky capitalization?
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A week and a half ago, I drove up to North Campus to observe the TEDxUofM build day — a day dedicated to constructing the set of tomorrow’s conference. After I got lost (twice), I found about two dozen members of the TEDxUofM team scattered around studios in the School of Art & Design, soldering ping-pong balls to a wooden frame, painting wood beams black and sewing red fabric into tubes.
For the first time since I learned about TEDxUofM, I was impressed. It’s one thing to listen to conversation and buzzwords surrounding the now famous TED brand – inspiration, transformation, innovation, etc. – but it’s another to observe the hands-on process that actually makes this event possible.
And TEDxUofM is not your average event. Last year’s conference — with a staggering attendance of 1,700 University students, faculty members and others — was one of the largest of its kind in North America.
Students attending tomorrow’s event or watching the livestream online will be a part of something truly unique and, the TEDxUofM team hopes, inspiring.
What is TED?
Founded in 1984, Technology, Entertainment and Design sought to give a platform to “ideas worth spreading,” inviting a number of big-name speakers to talk about their accomplishments to an eager audience. Previous TED speakers include Jane Goodall, Bill Gates and Richard Dawkins, and cover a range of expertise.
The defining feature of a TED Talk is its simplicity. The speech must be under 18 minutes long. There is no lectern or podium on the stage – just the speaker and a PowerPoint presentation – and it’s up to the speaker to present their idea in a moving and interesting way.
It doesn’t seem like a particularly populist idea, but the TED conferences have enjoyed an enormous amount of recognition in recent years. They’ve become so desired that the parent conferences have spawned a number of TEDx events – independently organized conferences that seek to bring the power of TED to individual communities around the world.
The University has hosted its own annual TEDxUofM event since 2010, and tomorrow night, 19 groups of speakers will grace the Power Center of the Performing Arts’s stage to cover topics ranging from the benefits of yoga to the role of shape in developing new materials.
Informing to transform
The TEDxUofM conference is completely student-run, unusual for an event of its magnitude. University students designed the website, invited speakers, advertised the event and constructed the set of the conference.
Engineering junior Ben Mason, the director of TEDxUofM, said the cornerstone of establishing a successful conference was selecting a theme that coincided with the event’s goals.
Mason said the team wanted to select a topic that clearly established the “mission” of TEDxUofM: to take "the information and the knowledge you gain from being a student here and using that to go change the world.”
Once the theme was established, the organizers took a top-bottom approach to the event, selecting speakers and activities to perpetuate the specific goals of the conference.
Or I should say the TEDxUofM experience. Because the TEDx team considers TEDxUofM to be more than just a passive, one-day presentation.
“Everything this year is experience-based,” Business junior Jeremy Klaben, a member of the TEDxUofM planning team, said. “It’s not set up like, ‘Let’s see how many people we can get in this big room to just listen.’ We’re making it really interactive.”
The event organizers are making that interactivity possible in more ways than one.
In between the 19 planned speakers, the audience members are allotted breaks for lunch and conversation throughout the day to foster discussion of what they’ve heard.
There are two locations near the Power Center for lunch – a place to “eat, sit and interact” and a place to “eat, stand and listen to jazz music” – where all participants will eat as a group. And after the conference ends at 5 p.m., the organizers offer an optional after-party in the evening.
Another feature of tomorrow’s conference will be TEDx Labs, which Engineering senior Laura Willming described as being like a “science fair.” There will be booths set up around the lobby displaying different projects by students and faculty.
Among these demonstrators will be Michael Flynn, a lecturer in the College of Art & Design. Flynn is the founder of the company Fun Exhibits, which primarily designs displays for children’s science museums.
Flynn will showcase an exhibit called the Magnetoscope, a magnetic liquid that functions in between two magnets that two people maneuver, creating a visual, public form of art.
