trevor haldenby / photographer

It was just over one year ago that I was last in Waterloo, for the local TEDx conference. For those not familiar with the format, TEDx’s are locally-grown spinoffs of the famed TED conference that takes place in a few venues around the world each year. The premise Chris Anderson has instilled into TED and all of its clustered iterations is that good ideas are worth spreading – and not just between the super-elite attendees of the annual mega-conference that takes over Long Beach each year.

There were about 300 people in attendance for last year’s TEDx Waterloo, and the word on the street was that the conference’s organizers wanted to ramp it up to almost three times that number in 2011.

This year also saw the move to a new venue – Kitchener-Waterloo’s Centre in the Square – and a genuine ramp-up in terms of the quality of speakers. There were people at this conference that I don’t know if I would have expected to see at the “big” TED… but here they were in Ontario, drawn out by the promise of an amazing group of people in the audience, and the incredible efforts of organizers Matt Gorbet and Ramy Nassar, Jennifer Janik, Maria Arshad, and Amy Vandenberg.

Let’s take a look at the speakers I had the pleasure of hearing yesterday, and a few images from the introductions and discussions taking place outside of the concert hall, where the real magic of TEDx takes place.

Vincent John Vincent – Gestural Technology Pioneer

I’ve crossed paths with Vincent a number of times in the past few months. He’s brought a lab at my school, OCAD University, into the process of innovation surrounding some of his company’s technology, and he’s got ties to one of the most recent digital storytelling prototypes developed at my alma mater, the CFC Media Lab.

In the 1980′s, Vincent really was one of the world’s earliest pioneers in gestural control systems for computers. His talk was about how our relationship with computers should mirror our relationship with other human beings a bit more closely… we understand each other in terms of body, mind, and spirit; and there’s no reason we shouldn’t understand our interactions with technology in the same way. This is what’s at the core of his company GestureTek’s business.

Vincent walked us through his story, and how he himself had transformed from mad scientist to visual artist, and from entrepreneur to holder of one of the most desirable patent libraries on the planet. Used a Kinect lately? How about an EyeToy? You’re using GestureTek’s innovations. Looking forward to the uncharted future, Vincent sees a world of increasing resolution and capability in 3D cameras, at price points that are now clearly acceptable to mass consumer audiences. Better get ready to phase out those subconscious tics and twitches, people – they’ll be controlling our computers in a few years’ time.

Michael Nielsen – Open Science Advocate

Michael Nielsen’s background is in quantum computing, but his real interests lie in the study of innovation and collaboration. After introducing Tim Gowers’ analogy of how using social media to do science is akin to driving a car rather than pushing it up a hill, Michael got down to business. His bread and butter is thinking about how we can use the internet to solve huge problems – amplifying our intellectual abilities similarly to how tools have allowed us to amplify our physical powers.

He’s passionate about open science, and how disciplines outside of the scientific realm can learn from the work being done in the field… and vice versa. His take on the theme of the conference, Uncharted, was that to really make headway in this brave new world of open science, we need to do a better job of highlighting its benefits, and its practitioners. Hug a scientist passionate about sharing his or her data, and offering opportunities for collaboration! Ask any scientists who don’t seem as passionate why they aren’t, and what they think the best ways in which they could embrace this new change might be.

Miriah Meyer – Data Visualization Expert

A founder of the Data Visualization Initiative, a partnership between Harvard and MIT, Miriah is clearly pretty passionate about her work. But unlike most folks that I’ve seen and heard speak about data visualization, she really does seem to be all about the process. She reeled the audience at TEDx in with an explanation of how she adapts her approach to match the scientists she works with across disciplines and environments, rather than with the flashy visual metaphors we have come to expect from the field.

What I appreciated most about her talk was how it was decked out with the language of design thinking – it’s iterative process and dialogue that will lead to the greatest advances in visualization, not just the power of computers and larger flatscreen monitors. Refreshing to hear someone speak so eloquently of their process in an age of arresting visuals… even if that’s what her work definitely results in.

Ben Grossman – “Experimental” Musician

Ben Grossman is a musician, what some might call an “experimental” musician. And while they’re right on the money with that label, it may not be for the reasons that Ben himself likes to use it. While he’s toured with such pop heavyweights as Loreena McKennitt and Thomas Dolby, he’s really interested in exploring what “experimental” means outside of the genre conventions that we have come to associate with it.

To Ben, experimental is not a genre… it’s a system or process by which you generate surprises. Musical artwork is about an opportunity to challenge ourselves emotionally and sensually, in the same way that science is a process set up to challenge ourselves intellectually. To demonstrate his process, Ben brought a hurdy-gurdy on stage – one of my favourite instruments, but one that I’d never had the pleasure of seeing played live… I got a good look at the innards of his, and will definitely be keeping my eyes open at garage sales and antique roadshows from now on. I’m sure I’ll have to scour a bit to find a garage salesperson peddling 600 year old eccentric instruments, but it’ll be worth it.

One of the interesting things brought to Ben’s presentation was a collaborative creation component – throughout the day, he was out in the Centre in the Square’s halls playing improvised pieces that were being documented on canvas by local artist Laurie Wonfor Nolan.

Shelley Ambrose – Canadian Conversationalist

Shelley Ambrose is the Executive Director of the Walrus Foundation, and the co-publisher of one of my favourite Canadian magazines, The Walrus. In her talk, she explored what it means to be a curious listener, both at home and abroad. Shelley admitted that as Canadians we’re sometimes fighting quite an uphill battle, trying to get our issues and ideas heard on the world stage. But she also explored how the quality of what Canadians put out – culturally, technologically, intellectually – can often help our work stand in the spotlight on the international stage…. we just need to remember to get people excited about the work, then remind them on the way out the door, with a smile, that it was Canadian-made.

Shelley has the unique distinction of being able to quote John Lennon accurately – she “is”, in fact, “the Walrus” – but her explanation about how the publication’s name came about was genuinely stirring. For centuries, Canada has been associated with the beaver. Why not choose to represent ourselves in our national conversation with a creature much larger, more brazen, and from one of our more “uncharted” regions?

Colin Ellard – Psychologist of Place

Colin Ellard seems to be on an interesting path of career change. Just a few years ago, he was the world’s leading authority on how the Mongolian gerbil calculates distance between rocks. But since then, and following a self-imposed relocation to Canada’s east coast, he has started to think about distance and place in fundamentally different ways.

His work now is mainly focused on why, and how, we human beings (and perhaps also Mongolian gerbils) get lost – perhaps you’ve read his book, “You Are Here: How we can find our way to the Moon, but get Lost at the Mall.” He’s been exploring the idea of locative epiphany for the last little while, a topic of particular interest to me and those that I attended the conference with. We had deliberately left our homes and workplaces in the city of Toronto to voyage to Kitchener-Waterloo for this TEDx event. While the draw of the speakers and friends in attendance certainly factored into it, we all agreed that what we really commuted across Southern Ontario for was a sense of adventure – what could we learn and think about in another city, that we couldn’t think about in the same way at home?

Colin’s work suggests that storytelling may in fact have originated as a tool for understanding, and passing on understanding, of the landscapes we live in and migrate across. While 21st century people seem relatively comfortable with long-distance geography and spatial awareness, we have significant advances in technology to thank for that… and in fact, the holes in our understanding of the scale of the world we all live in together may be responsible for some of the biggest mis-steps we’ve taken as a species.

When we’re everywhere, in the modern technological sense, are we actually nowhere?

JF Carrey – Youngest Canadian to climb Everest

Jean-François Carrey definitely took the prize for most number of slides causing me to get dizzy. In 2006, when he summited Mount Everest after years of training and personal struggle as well as the death of some of his friends, he became the youngest Canadian in history to do so.

His passion is infectious (he says moreso than H1N1), and it’s almost not hard to believe that he successfully convinced his mother that this was something he needed to do before his 25th birthday. While I got a bit nervous when he brought his pick-ax up on stage to wield for the crowd, the end of his talk featured a great emotional takeaway. When you climb a mountain as tall as Everest, he said, you only get to spend 20 minutes at the summit. The value of climbing the mountain is in the journey, the challenges often greater close to base camp rather than the peak, and the descent as challenging as the trek up. What you learn along the way is more important than where you end up.

Shawn Qu – Solar Power Guru

Shawn Qu’s presentation started off with a powerful image and story – him as a 10 year old boy, challenged to take his family’s last 14 yuan and turn it into something more.

His career in solar power technology has been an interesting one to follow – in the 1980′s he began working with Ontario Hydro as one of the first scientists in the country to try and directly address climate change. But while the work excited and satisfied him, the quest to determine what can really make solar power generation take off has been on his mind since then. After almost three decades, he’s come up with some real breakthroughs in technology and business, and has answered his own question to a certain extent.

Electricity is expensive not just because of the generation costs, but because of transmission as well – solar power’s success will depend on an infrastructural roll-out on the national scale, and the personal. More construction, better batteries for storing the electricity, and better financing for getting solar into people’s lives are the key variables at play in the future of power generation.

After exploring the war between Edison and Tesla (DC and AC power transmission) in the early 20th century, Shawn challenged the audience to imagine Round 2 of the “War of Currents” taking place in the uncharted future just ahead of us… in the next 5, 10, or 15 years, he imagines that advances in technology and economic infrastructure will make it possible for our approach to power generation and transmission to be completely reinvented. It’s easy to imagine from Shawn’s passionate articulation of vision that his company, Canadian Solar, will be leading the way.

Abby Sunderland – Sailor

You probably remember Abby Sunderland from her presence across global media last year. While trying to become the youngest solo circumnavigator of the globe, her ship was struck and nearly destroyed by a rogue wave. After an intense period of time spent over 2,000 kilometres from land and 400 kilometres from the nearest vessel, Abby was located in the Indian Ocean, and rescued.

While the message at the core of her talk was how we all face rogue waves at various points in our life; what I found most endearing was how a 16 year old could go through such an ordeal, including 60 knot winds and 30 foot waves for days on end, and describe her experience as “Amazing – I was having a blast!”

Perhaps it is the risks that we take in the face of the uncharted, ill-advised or necessary, that make us who we are.

Vicki Keith – Great Lakes Swimmer

In the summer I spend much of my free time on the Leslie Street Spit, a man-made park on Lake Ontario that has grown into one of the Greater Toronto Area’s most fascinating wildlife areas. At the very tip of the spit, out even further than the Toronto Islands, is a point with a lighthouse named after Vicki Keith.

When she swam across all five of the Great Lakes in 1988, she captured the attention of our nation; and when she attempted a double crossing of Lake Ontario she became the only person in history to successfully complete the 104 kilometre swim. She holds 16 world records in marathon swimming, and yet as a child was the kid no-one wanted on their team at school. One teacher even told her that she “walked like a horse.”

But instead of retreating from physical activity and challenge, this kind of provocation only motivated Vicki. Since childhood, she’s maintained that it’s only by setting Big Hairy Audacious Goals for ourselves that we can truly find out what we’re capable of.

Since retiring from marathon swimming the early 1990′s (which didn’t stick – she’s returned to set a few more world records since then), Vicki has been working as a swimming coach to athletes with disabilities, and in fundraising with kids who want to swim but don’t have pools in their neighbourhoods.

Some of the most touching moments of Vicki’s talk were in describing her relationship with Ashley Cowan, a young swimmer she was coaching who had both of her arms and both of her legs amputated following a perilously close call with meningitis as a child. While nobody thought that Ashley would be able to swim two lengths of a pool, she shocked the world by successfully completing a 14 hour swim across Lake Erie in 2001.

While most of us think of a dip in the lake as an enjoyable leisure activity, Vicki’s talk illuminates the gruelling side of marathon swimming – after 63 hours in Lake Ontario, you are shaking so hard from the chills that you can barely concentrate on moving your limbs; and in between the swells of the constant nausea you experience, there are only hallucinations to keep you company in the water. Even when you emerge from the water, it takes more than two weeks for your body to adjust – if you close your eyes any time in that period, you slip immediately into REM sleep.

Vicki Keith is truly an athlete who can inspire others to follow their dreams by showing them how hard it was to get people to believe in hers.

Roberta Bondar – Astronaut, Artist, Scientist

It’s difficult to know where to start when it comes to describing Roberta Bondar. She was Canada’s first female astronaut, the first neurologist in space, and perhaps most uniquely, holds a Guinness Record for vomiting across all of the world’s oceans.

Dr. Bondar’s talk was about how we change. As she sees it, we can either be pushed or pulled into change, we can stumble into it, or we can CHOOSE it for ourselves. After 18 years of university education (and not a single repeated class), she is happy to have spent much of her life deciding her own path and process of change. Her experiences at NASA and in her career as a physician have taught her that engaging the unknown is difficult for precisely one reason – little of what can go wrong is obvious in advance. Even if something seems suspicious, like a weakness in the O-ring seal on the Challenger’s solid rocket booster or bits of foam frequently breaking off and impacting the sides of the shuttle during launch, it’s very difficult to predict when that suspicion will turn to disaster.

Dr. Bondar insisted that there are only three particularly dangerous parts of a shuttle flight: takeoff, landing, and… everything in between. She reflected wisely that as interesting as it is in its own right, the great value of spaceflight is in being reminded that much of what happens even in our day-to-day lives is uncharted, and challenging.

Her mission now, at age 65, remains personally challenging. She wants to use the Roberta Bondar Foundation to infuse science with art and art with science. She wants to remind minds both young and old that three requirements to change exist: the disposition for it, the energy for it, and repetition – our brains are not computers, as much as they might resemble them conceptually… in order to learn something, we have to make sure we keep it in rotation. But most of all, Roberta Bondar wants to engage, enlighten, and be enlightened.

Edwin Outwater – Conductor, Rebel Musician

Edwin Outwater’s talk at TEDx Waterloo 2011 was one of my personal favourites. As Conductor of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Edwin is often assumed to be a bit of an old-school creative figure… but a quick look at his CV paints quite a different picture. When he’s not organizing co-creations with Dan Deacon and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire, he’s collaborating with neuroscientists like Daniel Levitin, and conducting the YouTube Symphony.

His talk was about “rebel music” – the music from generations past, present, and future that kindles our deepest spirits and makes us feel alive in a way that everything else in the cultural zeitgeist fails to. Rebel Music in his teenage years was hip-hop, rap, and punk rock. But today, in a musical landscape dominated by watered-down and commercialized iterations of those rebel sounds, he proposes an alternative… that classical music is the rebel music of this generation.

In contrast to what’s on the radio or your iPhone, classical is slow, serious, associated with secret knowledge, and is often acoustic. It’s the opposite of most of what’s around us, and in spite of genre, it seems to fit the bill for rebellion. If there is music that turns you on, and music that turns you off, rebel music is the stuff that flips the ON switch and gets you engaged.

To demonstrate how the music some associate with their grandparents can be considered “rebel,” Outwater invited Waterloo’s acclaimed Penderecki string quartet on stage to scream their way through a little Bartok. Bows were snapped, sweat poured from foreheads, and few in the audience could deny that they had been switched ON.

To finish his talk, Outwater invited everyone in the audience to imagine what the next soundtrack of rebellion would be, and how we could be a part of the conversation involved in its creation. For my money, it’s all about generative music… a form that eschews many of the traditions of the recorded music that’s dominated for the last century, but that still enables creators to leave their signature on a piece in brave and challenging new ways. What’s more, with each new engagement or interaction with a generative piece, the listener is taking a new voyage into the uncharted.

In Conclusion…

When hosts Matt Gorbet and Ramy Nassar came back on stage to bid us farewell, I was shocked to realize that a whole day had gone by. With such a fascinating array of speakers, and such an interesting context in which to explore their work, it should come as no surprise that the clock seemed to move too quickly.

Ramy’s final advice to us in the crowd was that we take away the ideas and challenges we encountered during the day’s sessions, integrating them into our own lives and work in a way that could help move the conversation forward. Based on the quick chats I had with dozens of people throughout the Centre in the Square that day, I have a sneaking suspicion that thinking and talking about what I’ve seen won’t be much of a problem.