By: Amy Karr
“Deep design is the concept of combining deep insights, materials and a metaphysical approach to problem solving.” – Rachel Armstrong
Rachel Armstrong is a sustainable innovator. Her talk on Tuesday opened the “Inspire Me for The Future” session with an intriguing look into the world of synthetic biology and how living materials can improve lives. Rachel showed the crowd examples, including how algae grown in your shed can fuel your car, which is one of many possibilities in the future of synthetic biology.
“Creativity is the ability to think outside the loop.” – E Roon Kang
E Roon Kang lead us through the mundane loop of life that is easy to get stuck in, and explained how creativity is the ability to think beyond the loop.
One incredible example of this E Roon Kang’s logo redesign for MIT Media Lab. Rather than go with a traditional logo, he used an algorithm that can create 40,000 logo shapes in 12 different color combinations, providing the Media Lab an estimated 25 years’ worth of personalized business cards.
Meklit Hadero provided the crowd with an incredible performance of Ethiopian folk songs. Her beautiful voice had the crowd wow’d as she sang about a farmer on the Blue Nile River.
“Complexity isn’t a problem, it’s a spark for creativity.” – Eric Berlow.
Eric Berlow, a complexity scientist, starts with a fantastic question, “how can we democratize data?”. Eric believes that the democratization of data and creativity can solve challenges that we face in the world today. We must identify the challenges where creativity is needed and use it’s complexity to give creativity proper constrains.