During this year’s TEDActive, Nassim Assefi gave a rousing TEDYou talk on ululation, a high-pitched fusion of howl and trill used traditionally in her Middle Eastern culture as an expression of both great joy and sorrow. She is a TED Fellow, co-organizer of TEDxRainier and a co-host and co-curator for the session “World on Its Head” at this year’s upcoming TEDGlobal in Edinburgh, Scotland (June 10-14). She is also a novelist, a global women’s health advocate, a doctor and program advisor to TEDMED.
Given her expertise in weaving stories –whether it be through curating or writing — we asked her to come up with a playlist on her favorite TEDTalks on a subject of her choice. “In my 3 minute TEDFellows talk in 2009, I suggested new diagnostic criteria for courage, a playful melding of my medical and writing worlds. In it, I illustrated courage by sharing the stories of 3 women from Afghanistan all named Malalai (I could add a fourth now, since Malala Yousafzai, who is from the Pakistani border of Afghanistan in Swat). So I thought it would be fun to curate a TED Playlist on courageous women.” Stay tuned for her complete Q&A on her TEDActive experience and on tips on how to cultivate passion and curate a great speaker program.
Measuring impact, fostering communication, eliminating silos, harnessing innovation – good ideas lie behind these phrases, but their unspecific overuse often reduces them to meaningless buzz words.
It should come as no surprise that TEDActive’s student interns breathe new life into the phrase “reducing siloed communication.” Maybe it was because they were referring to free pizza. Or maybe it is because – among the students I spoke to – their TEDActive projects are living on post-conference, improving the daily lives of their fellow students.
A little background for those unfamiliar with TEDActive Campus Takeovers:
TEDActive “Interns”University of Washington unwraps their Takeover Kit
Students’ responses ranged from a microsite with an interactive visualization depicting the diverse backgrounds of Southern Methodist University students to an internal, standardized assessment among NYU student organization leaders, designed to measure the impact of their own projects and find areas of overlap or openings for collaboration.
RISD students brainstorm ideas
RISD students take Notes
Infographic of TEDActive NYU Takeover
TEDActive at NYU
TEDActive@Ohio State University
TEDxSMU
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Griffin Dooling, who is also a TEDxNYU organizer, described how it allowed “all of these different groups to coalesce around TED, which helped galvanize support for their own projects.” He added that this was the “first event at this scale with so many organizations” on board participating.
Julia Columbro felt similarly excited by how TED acted as a catalyst for Ohio State’s student groups to work together. Her time at TEDActive in Palm Springs “was really inspiring, and reaffirmed to me that social change is possible and something that I want to pursue.” Back at Ohio State’s campus, she helped set up an RSS feed that allows students to promote their on campus events and meetings – especially meetings that served free pizza. This live feed helped promote the event “A Taste of OSU,” a food fair thrown by another student organization and associated with the Local Project. Due to its promotion, over 4,000 students attended the fair.
Taste of OSU
As Brandon Lazarus from SMU said, “Among our student organizations, we share a lot of commonalities, and can share resources and ideas. It’s not a competition when your goal is impact and social good.” At SMU, TEDActive challenged students to a hackathon – they had to prototype a mobile app in six hours to solve an on-campus problem. The winner was an app that helped students avoid construction sites in order to make it to class on time.
Or maybe the winner was the Harlem Shake video that they made during a break:
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Inspired by their prompts and TEDActive, student interns were able to lasso the creative energy of their many campus organizations, and demonstrate how they could map out efficient ways to work together.
After a long debate and a heavy amount of research, we’re very sad to say that our beloved red beanbags will no longer be a choice for seating at TEDActive 2014. It was a difficult choice to make but we believe this decision will be healthier for our backs, spines and posture.
According to the World Organization of Ergonomic Design (WOERD), a beanbag is the least ideal seating choice for health and productivity. In their most recent study on the ergonomics of seating options, the beanbag was ranked 99 out of 100 right above the water bed. Dr. Robert Weinstein, a member of the WOERD board, says, “It’s no surprise the beanbag is one of the least healthiest seating options. We’re looking at a slow-motion car accident here. When you’re in a beanbag, your spine is contracted and manipulated into something unrecognizable. The neck basically has no support and less oxygen is flowing to the brain. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
InternetMD, a notable health site, polled 5,000 beanbag users and found that 70% of beanbag users reported a deeper curvature in their spines, 87% users had back pain after use and 90% users reported feelings of listlessness, dizziness and fatigue. We conducted our own survey this year with many of you and found that these symptoms were frequently occuring.
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Also, WOERD’s 2013 study on creativity output based on seating shows that the beanbag user creates a drastically low amount of output, compared to the kitchen chair user or the ergonomic ball user. Even someone using a hammock is more productive than someone using a beanbag.
In lieu of this recent data, we’ve decided that we no longer want to put your health at risk. We are exploring new forms of seating and would love to hear your input.
TEDActive Blog 
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