TEDxDelft 2011 was a wonderful experience. It is best summarized by the poem our host Jasper van Kuijk concluded the event:

Do not prozify
Have a goal
Or none at all
Electrify

Build, tinker
Create life, and nurse it
Seek beauty in complexity
Find elegance in calculations
Caress a book
Listen
But never to design briefs

Think upside down
Become an astronaut
Democratize, power the people
Feel, don’t deny your emotions

Compose
Take fiction out of science fiction
Make it rain
Make music
Hold on to your dreams
Go beyond the current context
Make things

Highlights TEDxDelft 2011: TEDxDelft in just over 5 minutes

Photos 2011

All videos of the 2011 edition of TEDxDelft

Leo Kouwenhoven – That’s a one centimeter step for man, a giant leap for mankind
Leo Kouwenhoven (10 December 1963) is professor Quantum Transport at Delft University of Technology. Quantum mechanics is the theory of atoms and elementary particles. Man itself is made out of atoms as well so quantum is the basis of our existence: life as we know it. He states that even large objects act quantum like existing in two places at the same time. Leo lets us feel, smell and hear this for the first time. This may be the first step into making instantanious transportation over large distances possible. That’s a one centimeter step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Job van de Kieft – How electric driving can set you free
Job van de Kieft (@JobvandeKieft) was driver of the third Nuna solar car and crossed the finish line in a record time. This record still holds, so Job is world champion solar car racing. In 2007 he wrote a book about what it takes to build a winning solar car. Consequently, he developed a new segway-like vehicle concept called Qugo in 2009, together with partner Maarten de Bruijn (designer for Spyker cars).

Musetta Blaauw – I do not accept fate as society defines it
Musetta Blaauw (1983, The Hague. @musjes), mother of three, woke up in the middle of the night, eight days after giving birth to her third child, bleeding. After being rushed to the hospital for a curettage, she woke up at the IC 15 hours later; finding out that her dream of having a large family was shattered. Read more

Erik Meijer – Wisdom of the cloud
Erik Meijer (born 18 April 1963, Curacao) is a Dutch computer scientist who is currently a software architect for Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio and the NET Framework. At Microsoft he heads the Cloud Programmability Team. Erik previously worked within Microsoft Research. Before that, he was a teacher at Utrecht University. He received his Ph.D. from Nijmegen University in 1992. Erik will do his first (18 minutes) speech as a professor in the Netherlands on 7 November 2011, during TEDxDelft.

TTYPP – iPhone jam, Max Kisman (animation), Peter Mertens and Donald Beekman (music).
Their shared interests culminates in their TTYPP iPhone Jam project, creating instant animation and music.

Sabine Roeser – Emotions should play an important role in debates about risky technology
Prof.dr. Sabine Roeser (1970, Haan, Germany) is professor of political philosophy and ethics of technology at Twente University and associate professor of ethics at Delft University of Technology.

Sabine Roeser’s research aims to show that emotions should play an important role in debates about risky technologies, as emotions help us to understand ethical aspects of risk. Explicitly addressing concerns, worries but also enthousiasm about risky technologies can contribute to developing morally better technologies that improve human wellbeing in a fair and responsible way.

Lodewijk van den Berg – How a chrystal growth scientist became an astronaut
Lodewijk van den Berg (born March 24, 1932) is a Dutch American chemical engineer, specializing in crystal growth, who flew on a 1985 Space Shuttle Challenger mission as a Payload Specialist. He was the first Dutch-born astronaut.

Theo Jansen – A new breed of beach animals
Theo Jansen (born 14 March 1948) is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals that are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company television commercial Jansen says: “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.” He strives at equipping his creations with their own intelligence to manage avoiding obstacles, by changing their course when one is detected, such as the sea itself. Theo will show a new generation of the beach animal at TEDxDelft.

Huba de Graaff – A preview of the TomTom opera
Huba de Graaff is a composer. She studied sonology in Utrecht and composition at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. Huba works with computers from the early eighties.

She performs with live-electronics, dynamic sound-sculptures (sounds are launched and tumbling around from moving loudspeakers), movement that translated into sound. She plays a computerviolin, performs with a tin-dress with 768 piezokeramic elements (above the audience), robots with speakers for heads etc etc etc.

At TEDxDelft she performed a preview of her TomTom opera: making music with navigation devices and let navigation devices sing.

Michiel van Haersma Buma – Building dikes is not always the answer
Michiel van Haersma Buma (Terneuzen, 18 april 1951) is Chairman of the Delfland Water Board (Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland). What happens if you use the method of ‘thinking the other way around’ to find a solution to cope torrential rain, yearly flooding, and not enough public space to use standard simple measures in a beautiful ancient city like Delft? Is it possible to find possibilities and viable solutions to prevent canals bursting their banks, swamping homes and closing roads?The method of ‘thinking the other way around’ requires the flexibility and ability to recognise that effective solutions are not necessarily new solutions, but solutions that are surprisingly effective if used in a totally different area or way. To find these solutions we sometimes have to ‘think the other way around’, thus enabling us to Create History.

Felienne Hermans – What Archimedes has to say about spreadsheets
Felienne Hermans (@Felienne) is PhD student at the Delft University of Technology in the Software Engineering Research Group. She works in the PerPlex project which focuses on bringing together business and IT, in particular on extracting and visualizing information from spreadsheets.

Kas Oosterhuis – Towards a new kind of beauty
Kas Oosterhuis (@KasOosterhuis) is professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, as well as director of Hyperbody and theProtospace Laboratory for Collaborative Design and Engineering. His teaching and research is in the areas of interactive architecture, real time behaviour of buildings and environments, living building concepts, collaborative design, file to factory production and parametric design.

Tim Zaman – Buy a balloon, put helium in it, attach a camera and let it go
Tim Zaman (@tim_zaman) is a 22 years old student Mechanical Engineering. He is mastering in Biorobotics at the Technical University in Delft. He’s into camera’s, software, finance, programming, electronics and working. In his spare time he sends balloons up in the air. We plan to send one up on 7 November.

Maria van der Heijden – Creating jobs for 1 million women in India
Maria van der Heijden (@MariavdHeijden) founded Women On Wings in 2007 because she wants to share her richness in life with many others. Not in the materialistic way of richness, but in the way of having freedom. Making her own choices, being aware of the endless opportunities of the universe. Very often, she realizes the possibilities are even bigger than she could have imagined. Just in exploring and co-creating.

Women on Wings strives to create employment for 1 million women at the bottom of the pyramid before 2017. In global terms, there are four billion people who live on less than $2 per day, specifically in developing countries. Women On Wings does do not see these people as poor and miserable, but as value based consumers and potentially creative and energetic entrepreneurs. Based on economic principles we support entrepreneurs to create more business and generate more jobs.

Bauke Steenhuisen – A summary more wise is poetry in disguise
Bauke Steenhuisen (1980) won the TEDxDelft Award competition. “The universal force of poetry is as stunning as its utter absence in any serious report. Consultants, organizations giving vent to plain ideas should be the first to try poetry. Reports can be concise, steal our hearts and renew our eyes using poetry”.

Rolf Hut – I am a tinkerer
Rolf Hut (@RolfHut) is MacGyver scientist (80′s television series about a scientist/Bomb technician). He is a resourceful agent able to solve complex problems with everyday materials he finds at hand, along with his ever-present duct tape and Swiss Army knife).

His main interest and source of a fun is using existing technology in a new and innovative way to measure the earth’s weather and climate. He likes to take apart machines and see what he can do with the components in it. The results of this MacGyvering is proof of concept testing of new measurement devices. The results of these efforts are used in the various projects that he is involved in, such as the Trans African Hydro Meteorological Observatory and Climate City Campus.

Irma Boom – A manifesto for the book
Irma Boom (born 15 December 1960 in Lochem, Gelderland) is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer specialising in book making. With her use of unfamiliar formats, materials, colors, structures, and typography she makes the book into a visual and haptic experience.

Her design for ‘Weaving as Metaphor’ by American artist Sheila Hicks was awarded ‘The Most Beautiful Book in the World’ at the Leipzig Book Fair. Her books have been shown at numerous international exhibitions and are also represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Marcel Kampman – What would the dream school of today look like?
Marcel Kampman (@happykamping) is an advisor and inspirator to companies, organizations, agencies and brave individuals. He helps them with their mostly complex (creative) challenges and innovation, design and communication issues. To do that, he often taps into his extensive network to assemble or to be part of a team with the requisite variety and depth to frame and solve a specific client problem.

Progression Stunts – Freerunning in the auditorium
Progression Stunts is the largest group of specialists in the field of parkour, freerun, acrobatics, tricking, stunts and handbalancing in the Netherlands. They appear in advertisements, demo’s, stunt-doubling, television shows, movies and lots of other places. Progression stunts entered the “Holland’s got talent” show in 2011.

Lowie Vermeersch – Beautiful mobility
Lowie Vermeersch was design director of Pininfarina, Italy until early 2011. Born in Belgium on May 9, 1974, Lowie Vermeersch grew up in the Flanders and is part of the 3rd generation of a prominent artistic family. After graduating at the Delft University of Technology he joined Pininfarina in 1998 as a designer and became Design Director in 2007.

Print media coverage 2011

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Blogs about TEDxDelft 7-11-2011