Held every October, in the beautiful seaside village of Camden, Maine the PopTech Conference brings together 700 influential participants for one of the world’sbest thought leadership events.
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is associate professor of science, technology, and society at MIT and visiting associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is working to establish interdisciplinary and applied STS programs to train the next generation of Africa’s policymakers, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs in inclusive, ethical, and context-specific tools of trade.
Kish’s organization, World Access for the Blind, trains the visually impaired to achieve greater freedom and mobility through echolocation, a technique that simulates a bat’s night vision of perceiving the environment through sound.
Dutch bulb grower, Pieter Hoff has an idea about how to make deserts bloom: capture the humidity in the air, store it in a box, and use that condensation to water plants. He calls this box the Groasis waterboxx and he thinks it can change how we feed the world and reduce greenhouse gases.
“What happens when science goes wrong?” asks psychology professor Kevin Dunbar. He studies how scientists approach the unexpected and learn from mistakes. Over the course of a year, Dunbar’s team examined the habits of four molecular biology labs. Watch his talk to discover their findings, including the surprising characteristics of successful labs.
Materials matter. Everything we touch, taste, wear, drive, drink, eat — all of it is connected to the use, re-use, and ultimate disposal of materials. The health of the planet and the prosperity of its inhabitants rest largely on how we extract and use materials.
In July 2010 at Harvard Medical School, the first meeting of the Ecomaterials Lab network brought together 40 of these thought leaders and stakeholders for a facilitated dialogue regarding the drivers, constraints, opportunities, and challenges surrounding next-generation sustainable materials (with a particular emphasis on textiles). The gathering unearthed new insights and areas of disagreement, and helped form a network around sustainable ecomaterials.
Alphachimp Studio Inc. was honored to be onsite for graphic facilitation support and graphic capture of the personal insight, passion and urgency expressed by this stellar group of material scientists.
Fast Company has included the results of this event in there list of 8 of the Most Exciting Developments in Material Sustainability!
Download the full report here:
Elizabeth Dunn conducts experimental research on self-knowledge and happiness with a focus on how people can use their money more effectively to increase well-being. Dunn determined that by rethinking how we spend our money, we can “change the world, increase our happiness, or win a game of dodgeball.”
Dr. Mukherjee’s fascination with cancer is rooted not just in how to fight it, but in where it originated. Discovering almost nothing on the subject, the cancer physician and researcher wrote The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer that explores the history of the disease that causes one-quarter of all American deaths.
Neuroscientist and best-selling author David Eagleman introduces the concept of Possibilianism, a new philosophy that simultaneously embraces a scientific toolbox while exploring new, unconsidered uncertainties about the world around us.
First inspired by the mysterious and mathematical qualities of a caterpillar’s crawl, artist Reuben Margolin creates large-scale kinetic sculptures that use pulleys and motors to create the complex movements and structures we see in nature. Margolin takes to the PopTech stage to share some of his extraordinary mechanical installations.
Reuben Margolin: On Kinetic Art from PopTech on Vimeo.
As a child, he started playing with stilts and was enamored with math. After going in a few different directions in school, he set out with a typewriter strapped to the back of a motorcycle to write poetry as he traveled across the country. This resulted in the creation of a mobile, which he drove for five months in order to have deep, meaningful conversations with people he met along the way.
Soon after, on a hike, he saw a transparent caterpillar that inspired him to try and replicate it as a machine. Although the finished product didn’t move as elegantly as a caterpillar in nature, it fueled his interest in examining movement in the natural world. Still seeking a way to perfectly capture the wave of a caterpillar’s motion, he demonstrated on the PopTech stage a much sleeker machine made of wood, thin rope and metal that did indeed undulate like caterpillar creeping. He’s now exploring applying this principal to giant circles, wooden frames and other forms.
Margolin ended his presentation by revealing a gorgeous, sparkling sculpture suspended from the Opera House Ceiling, which swung gently above the crowd as though wind was blowing through a giant, gilded glass net.
Margolin noted that there are two ways of looking at things: one is at the sparkle and the dawns and the beauty of the world, and one is at the structure and the meat and the math. His art brings both of these elements together in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually interesting.
Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, referenced the foolishness of certain actions (e.g. texting while driving), what he calls “small irrationalities” that we do every day. These can lead up to big problems. With our current model of labor, for instance, we reward people with rest. This doesn’t really capture what it is that engages people, what causes them to want to work.
Environmental journalist Mark Lynas reports from his global tour of climate change hotspots - documenting the dramatic effects that even one degree of global warming may have around the world.
Champion of the Earth honoree and biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus has transformed the way we think about innovation and design. Benyus challenges us to study nature’s best ideas, then imitate its designs and processes to solve some of our greatest human challenges.
Get inspired by Richard Alley’s optimistic view on global warming.This world-renowned paleoclimatologist does have some bad news about climate change, although he’ll convince you that we not only have the tools to solve the problem, but we can make money doing it too.
Join polar scientist John Priscu – and his autonomous robots - as he takes us miles below the Antarctic ice to search for living organisms that may have been cut off from the rest of the planet’s ecosystem for millions of years.
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