After last years experience at TED I really wish this post was coming from me, but instead it is coming from our TED Global competition winner Salomé Galjaard.

While most people buy tickets for TED more than a year in advance, I only learned that I was going two weeks before the start of the event. By winning a ticket in an internal Arup competition, I got the opportunity to experience TED in real time, after seeing many of the presentations online. On Monday 12 July, there was an Arup tour through London that people could sign up to and that lead us the Royal Courts of Justice, the Darwin Centre and the Royal Albert Hall: a great way for a group of international TED visitors to already get to know each other.

When arriving in Oxford the same evening, the TED atmosphere was already present: hundreds of interesting people gathered, dying to get to know each other and share ideas. It was almost impossible to stop for a minute and think (and have some dinner) since there would always be someone who recognized you from the online attendees list, who was secretly trying to read your badge or who just came up to you for a chat. To me, this was really the most impressive part of TED: all these people that are truly interested, who have amazing stories to tell and who are an wonderful source of inspiration. It was, from the beginning on, truly a mind blowing experience. And the presentations didn't even started yet!

Tuesday began with TEDUniversity, in which people who were not one of the main presenters got the chance to tell their story and share their ideas. Chris Luebkeman was one of them, with a story about context, and it got a lot of positive responses!
The afternoon started off with the first of an enormous amount of TED lectures. The dozens of talks were divided into 12 groups and would continue until Friday afternoon. The sessions were called for example 'Found in Translation' featuring data journalist David McCandless, 'Human System' featuring Matt Ridley describing what happens When ideas have sex, and the research of Tan Le who can learn a computer what our brainwaves mean (very useful to control for example an electric wheelchair).
All these presentations, and hopefully also the musical performances will be released on the TED website in the coming year.

Even though the TED-blues hit me pretty hard (as predicted by the organisation) I already know this has been a life changing event. The coming months will probably be spend on digesting everything I heard and experienced, which will definitely influence not only my personal life, but also my work at Arup. Take for example the story of Mohammed from Bangladesh: he has been invited as a TEDFellow (people who are doing extraordinary things, often in developing countries) to come to Oxford. He told me that the government has come up with the most horrible urban plan for his home town. It means that there will be too little space for everyone, no place for nature or good public transport. On his own, he's on a mission to come up with a better plan. He has launched an international design competition and will fight the authorities wherever he can to keep his city liveable. I believe that Arup can help him: not necessarily with money, but maybe with good advice and some local support.

Hopefully I will be able to help Mohammed, not only because his website could use some help from an interaction designer, but also by linking him to people within Arup.
I must admit though that some of my time will also be spend on figuring out how I can be a part of the TED-family again next year.

Many thanks Arup!

Salomé Galjaard.

It is 40 years today since Ove Arup presented the "Key Speech" in Winchester. I can remember reading it in late 1999 before I joined the firm and cynically thinking what a great leaders pitch. But within a year, and maybe through working on projects like the wobbly bridge, I observed that most of what he wrote is actually embedded in the culture of Arup.

Below are the aims (A), means (C) and results (B) which I find useful when trying to explain to others how the firm is organised. I try to avoid describing the matrix structure, or the markets, practices and businesses since I am not sure if that makes sense to others. But the points below give a sense of the song we sing as we head off on our daily endeavor.

A - The main aims of the firm are:

1. Quality of work
2. Total architecture
3. Humane organisation
4. Straight and honourable dealings
5. Social usefulness
6. Reasonable prosperity of members.

B - If these aims could be realised to a considerable degree, they should result in:

1. Satisfied members
2. Satisfied clients
3. Good reputation and influence.

C - But this will need:

1. A membership of quality
2. Efficient organisation
3. Solvency
4. Unity and enthusiasm.

Item A2 is probably very familiar to people in this century, but is one of the fundamental ways of working that has led to Arup organically growing to our position today:

The term 'Total Architecture' implies that all relevant design decisions have been considered together and have been integrated into a whole by a well organised team empowered to fix priorities. This is an ideal which can never - or only very rarely - be fully realised in practice, but which is well worth striving for, for artistic wholeness or excellence depends on it, and for our own sake we need the stimulation produced by excellence.

I like the Douglas Adams quote:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

(The Salmon of Doubt)

This speech was written before I was born and reflects what is normal in the way my world works [sometimes].

Half the team have spent this week in Jordan to launch the "National Campaign for Public Awareness on the Drivers of Change". The patron of the campaign is His Majesty King Abdullah II and our client is HRH Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, President of EHSC.

Royal Scientific Society's Science Week was themed around "change"

We are advising El Hassan Science City (EHSC) on the design and implementation of the campaign which is going to be delivered by an all Jordanian team. This has been very interesting for us on many levels (the politics, the protocols, the language...) but has also meant that we are developing a process to support the running of Drivers of Change workshops by others. The plan is to run 50-100 workshops with local communities across all levels of Jordanian society from Amman to remote villages in the regions. The objective of this first phase of the campaign is to understand what is driving change in Jordan, what the implications are, and what the government and local communities can do about it - to build a sustainable, positive future for the country.

FB choreographing workshop through translator booth.

As part of the official launch of the campaign we hosted a series of workshops during the Royal Scientific Society's Science Week to engage key stakeholders, train the campaign team, and trial design elements of the workshops before taking them out into the various communities of Jordan. The four workshops were attended by community partners, ministers, academics and and members of the Royal Scientific Society. Next step will be to deliver the mechanisms for collecting all the data generated in the community engagements, process it, and make it available to the participants and the people of Jordan. There are some really interesting opportunities here for an "open data" project.

Delegates using iPad during coffee breaks.

We also had a really interesting iPad application at the conference to solicit feedback from delegates on what they thought was driving change. The app used the eight sets of DoC cards. We collected over 400 responses with the themes of Water, Energy and Poverty emerging as the primary categories. Next up we will be delving into the data further to identify the specific issues which came out on top.

Screen shots of the iPad application.

The iPad certainly attracted some attention and helped in getting people to play with the voting application but the Jordanian students who were doing the polling did a fantastic job asking delegates for their input. The iPads also ended up on the stage during the opening ceremony with two students presenting HRH with a screen with a "large red button" to start a countdown clock to mark the start of the project.

The launch of the campaign - the countdown clock starts.

More photos on flickr

Press coverage - 'The 18-month campaign launched yesterday entails holding workshops for citizens from all sectors across the Kingdom including universities, business, banking, civil society, academia, the Jordan Armed Forces, ministries and public agencies among others. "The campaign seeks to increase the involvement of citizens in the decision-making process and start a nationwide debate on issues of top priority to the Kingdom," Bashir said.'

We recently finished the last leg of a great project we had been working on for the World Economic Forum. Our task was to create an online presence for the SlimCity knowledge cards we had produced in 2009. The aim was to make the cards accessible to a broader audience than those at the SlimCity workshops. As such, all the cards are accessible via the SlimCity website where they can be read online, browse the relationships between the cards, download a pdf version or leave comments on the themes raised by the cards.

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Arup has been a knowledge partner of the World Economic Forum's SlimCity initiative which is just coming to a close. SlimCity provided a global, risk-free platform where cities and the private sector could exchange best practices to deliver resource efficiency at the city level. One of SlimCity's major deliverables was the SlimCity Knowledge Cards, researched and produced by Arup (managed in our team by Marcus Morrell).

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The cards, which follow a similar format to the Drivers of Change cards, were targeted primarily at City Mayors as well as CEOs from relevant sectors. They differ from Arup's Drivers of Change cards in that they offer practical solutions to many of the problems facing cities, rather than raise questions and issues. In compiling the cards, Arup's researchers selected content on the basis that any Mayor could ask the question "Could we do this in our city?" The were given access to the Forum's membership and network and carried out in depth-in interviews in addition to desk research.

Spent an interesting day at Curve, Leicester speaking to the Amplified Leicester (@AmplifiedLeic #ampleic) crowd via an invite from Sue Thomas @suethomas.

The aim of their project is to:

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking key connectors across the city's disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project enabled by social media. Our objectives are to:

• Develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city's grassroots innovation capacity through connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• Provide practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

They were keen to get an insight into how Arup approach thinking about the future so I introduced Arup, our approach to foresight, innovation and research, and the Drivers of Change research. The presentation is on slideshare.

At the end of the session I asked each participant to try and list out some of the drivers which they think will affect Leicester / their lives. Copies of the cards are on flickr with some highlights below:

• homes designed for 2.3 kids
• is there enough work for everyone
• reduced public - funding doing more with less
• breakdown / change in "the family"
• constant quest for growth
• combining cultures and cohesion
• data security
• less professionalism
• credit crunch
• aviation and the extended Leicester family

As a note to self, had a couple of interesting chats over cakes on how the cards / research tools had been used in schools and the community. Quite a few teachers have asked about using the cards in schools - might be an idea to set up a schools group on the ning site to share how schools have been using the cards - would be great if others could share how they have / would like to use the cards with kids at different ages. Sharon was thinking of using them in a school project linking a Leicester school to one in India... On the latter re community there was an interesting discussion about how "tag cloud" like tools could be used to canvass opinion from the local community in addition to the traditional community meetings by the Police.

Was a pleasent surprise to be speaking the excellent Curve Theatre in Leicester (an Arup job with architect Rafael Vinoly). I had read about the "inside out" theme but was impressed with how well it had been done. The 32 tonne acoustic shutters around the stage were raised when I was there meaning that you really could see all the inner workings of the theatre. Excellent. More photos are on flickr.

Just back from my first TED. Have watched the videos over the past couple of years and have heard first hand accounts from past participants, so was looking forward to living it in real time.

We organised a workshop in parallel to the TED U(niversity) sessions. The new Drivers of Change cards were one of the gifts given to the 700 participants and the aim of the workshop was to introduce people to the cards and how they could be used to help people generate ideas worth spreading. The feedback on the day was excellent and we have several people to follow up with post event. The results of the TED group voting are on the DoC voting application with details of the voting and photos on flickr.

Thanks to the TED guys for showing the results of the Drivers of Change workshop votes on the main stage at TED Global. Bruno gave an excellent overview of the results and mentioned the pointer to the open voting set at vote.driversofchange.com/ted-global-2009/

I went native at TED and reverted to pen and moleskine so below are a few notes which act as reminders for things i want to chat to people about and talks that i want to come back to when they are online. They are listed time linear since that is how my moleskine works.

Stefan Sagmeister - two things stuck in my mind - the very cool Casa da Musica dynamic identity, take a look at Brand New's explanation and his approach to the seven year (itch) sabbatical which he justifies by describing how he is pulling forward 5 years worth of retirement and interspersing it in yearly blocks (the sabbaticals) into his work life. Great idea - but how to reintegrate with clients upon our return?

Gordon Brown was surprise speaker and has generated much discussion in the media (and at the event). His talk was very polished, he made the woman next to me cry, and he got a standing ovation. He also got slated for insincerity and auditioning for his next job. Either way "the power to communicate across borders" enabled by the photograph and the increasingly convergent phenomena of the internet in making these stories told in real time was an interesting theme.

Evan Grant, seeing the sound of nature as patterns in the sand - excellent talk, well worth watching again when on-line. He introduced me to Cymatics and had my mind racing with applications I want to try.

Rory Sutherland - an ad man at Ogilvy, he usually speaks at "TED Evil". A fun presentation to watch - he suggests that engineers should not have spent 6 billion to build CTRL to reduce journey times but should have invested in making the journey so enjoyable that people would not notice the time they spent on the train. His suggestions included using the 6 billion to pay for super models to serve free champagne to all! Great story about the new Diamond Shreddies.

Mathieu Lehanneur - showed a great piece of product design where a kids asthma device inflates over night so that the kid has to take his medicine in the morning to "look after" the inhaler.

Rebecca Saxe - fires a magnetic pulse into her brain to deactivate a group of neurons that controls her moral perspective of other peoples actions. The Pentagon are calling but she is not taking their calls...

Henry Markram - "the drugs developed today are largely emperical" he is building a model of the brain so that they can start to simualate how the brain works. Need to watch this one again to figure out how this "actually" works and am interested in the implications for the Artificial Intelligence community.

It was good to see Manual Lima presenting visualcomplexity and Candy Chan had an interesting talk on community information architecture experiments - unseen conversations in neighbourhoods - worth a look for those interested in urban information systems.

One of the really inspirational talks for me was 89 year old Elaine Morgan making a compelling case for questioning facts that we assume to be correct. She wants the academic world to reconsider the aquatic ape theory.

Another great Urban Info project was the Mannahatta Project presented by Eric Sanderson. They have geo referenced historical data of 17th century Manhattan to bring into focus the ecology today and "plan for the urban ecosystem of the future". Great presentation, bought the book.

Architect to watch Bjarke Ingels showed two great projects which stuck in my mind - Danish pavillion for the Shanghai expo (they are flying out the mermaid) and a local housing development that creates a little mountain in the flat landscape - note to self, pick up a copy of YES IS MORE / AN ARCHICOMIC ON ARCHITECTURAL EVOLUTION (ISBN 8799298805).

Itay Talgam - what kind of leader are you? - an excellent presentation using clips of conductors showing different styles of leadership. It needs the visuals to explain - one to watch on video.

ones i need to watch again are:
Loretta Napoleoni
Misha Glenny
Parag Khanna

Came across this whilst doing some convergence research. Fantastic.

"Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the "Daily News", a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn't afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand."

The World Economic Forum on Africa are using our Drivers of Change voting application to solicit public opinion prior to the event on the challenges African countries need to be the most prepared for in the coming year. The highest ranked Drivers of Change will be used in a session during the event. 1200 votes had been cast by with one week to go before the public vote closes on Thursday 11th.

A global call to action and an invitation to urban dwellers to describe through photography the places and things they love about their cities, and those that they could do without.

Cutnpastecities launched this week out of the foresight team at Arup. The brief is to capture through photography what you really like in a city, what makes it tick, and what you would like to see more of in the future. They can be spaces or services, aspects of everyday life or temporary events. Alternatively, describe something that should be removed from the city, a building you could do without, a service that just doesn't work. These are a CUT. Things you like are a PASTE.

The project will culminate with an exhibition of curated insights, stories and speculations based on the images.

To get started all you need is a photo you have taken with a few keywords that highlight what is special about that place or aspect of the city, along with a description of what you would CUT or PASTE.

How do I submit a photo?

If you are a Flickr user add them to the cutnpastecities group. Or if email is easier then just send them to photo@cutnpastecities.com with the following information:

* is it a CUT or a PASTE?
* what you like or dislike, specifically
* add some tags that describe the content of the photo
* describe the location (address or city or geocode, adding to the map)

Any rules?

The photo must be one that you have taken, and one that we can use with your permission. The photo remains your intellectual property; cutnpaste cities will credit you as you wish. Any size and resolution is accepted.

To keep track of progress visit the flickr group or http://www.cutnpastecities.com/

Last month we were asked to pull together a short thought piece for an internal Global Buildings event at Arup on the "Future of Design". The pre-recorded piece was being used alongside feedback from clients on their view of the value of design. Both pieces provided the introduction for break out groups to think about 4 plausible scenarios for Arup in the years ahead.

The ideas in this video have been distilled from a number of issues raised in the Convergence Drivers of Change cards which I am currently working on. Any comments, reactions or suggestions would therefore be gratefully received. The five catalysts for thought were:

Design thinking - should we take a strategic role as designers
Collaboration - do we have design communities
Skills - do we nurture the top bar of T shaped people
Tools - should we share our toolmaking with the world
Complexity - which performance data streams do you use

Today's Future Designer from Duncan Wilson on Vimeo.

"The role of the designer in the business world is changing. With increased activity at a strategic level and the innate skills that support community and collaboration, the designer has the skill set to play a pivotal role in today's business. In addition, they have the desire to work with new tools and are experienced in making the complex simple. In a world where technological innovation has increased the complexity of both the products and services we consume, achieving elegance has become the hallmark of good design."

Great presentation by Saul Griffith at ETech this year. Two points stick. 25min 25sec in he compares his "low estimate" of his actual energy usage and it turns out to be much higher than all other footprints currently being used on the internet. The slide after then makes the point beautifully by suggesting the next Nobel prize for economics should be awared to the person able to accurately calculate our energy usage... The second point was 36min 40sec in. The list of what we as individuals can do was brilliant "these are all things we want to do anyway" - spot on. So why don't we do it.

I admire his goals for 2010 and really hope he obtains them.

Chris posted a link to the story of stuff 20 min video last week. I am re-blogging for two reasons. First it is a really well put together video and a great information piece covering many of the issues I hear the Drivers of Change researchers talking about in a CONNECTED way. Second, the story of stuff website is an excellent example of making it really easy for other people to use your work such as the section on *host a screening* or the provision of embeddable video like this:

Voting closed on the poptech voter after 4500 votes cast...

Chris was at Poptech 2007 last week. Great blog coverage at blogginglive and a nice post by Ethan Zuckerman. Chris used the DoC voting app to canvass opinion on current drivers. The top votes (today) with 85 are Peak Oil and Climate Change with US Fascism taking 59...