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.
 |
Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, explores how resiliency can empower even the most destitute and vulnerable communities. “When the World Bank was planning to invest $100 million dollars in upgrading the slums in Nairobi, these slum-dweller leaders were represented at the table.” |
 |
Steve Lansing, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, discusses the Byzantine system for the distribution of water from a volcanic lake in Bali to over two hundred farming villages. It’s worked since the 12th century, it’s egalitarian and it’s still-sustainable. “It’s one of the few functioning, ancient democratic institutions that we know about. It’s kind of beautiful.” |
 |
Economic commentator and author Tim Harford presented a creative, challenging perspective on financial systems, drawing upon examples from oil rig explosions to nuclear disasters to make his point. He believes that by studying the triggers of major engineering accidents, we can draw lessons on how to help prevent crises in the financial world. |
Joy Reidenberg, a fast-talking, energetic anatomist captivated the PopTech audience with her talk, “Why Whales are Weird.” With one amazing fact after the next (Whales evolved from deer-like creatures! Their spinal movement is more like galloping in the water! They don’t actually spout water! They have mustaches!), she took us through the story of evolution using whales as a model. She explained that evolution is the process to mediate resilience and thus, survival.
Silja Ómarsdóttir was one of 25 people tapped to rewrite Iceland’s constitution after the country’s financial meltdown in 2008. Ómarsdóttir explains the constitution creation process and what it meant to overhaul the constitution, with considerable public input, in four months.
Anne-Marie Slaughter shares her insights on the transformation of state and non-state actors. Whereas we used to exist within a world of nation-states, billiard balls knocking against one another, we now live in a network of modular, ad hoc organizations—both governmental and non-governmental.
Anand Giridharadas, child of Indian parents who immigrated to the United States, returns to live in India as an adult. He encounters a culture shifting from traditional and collective values to a me-centric individualism. Giridharadas asks if the “American Dream” is better represented in places like the New India, rather than in our own increasingly calcified class system with limited upward mobility.
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.
In honor of Earth Day, check out David de Rothschild's incredible story about how he and his team built the Plastiki, a boat constructed from 12,000 plastic bottles. De Rothschild and his crew sailed halfway around the world to bring greater public awareness to the devastating impact of oceanic plastic pollutants and the need to reuse discarded plastics.
Tom Darden is the Executive Director of the Make It Right Foundation, an organization founded by actor Brad Pitt to build 150 green, high design homes in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Darden said he wants to take what has been a local conversation about green construction to the national level.
“Is water still running?” is perhaps the most important question when considering water initiatives worldwide, concludes Water for People CEO Ned Breslin. He’s tired of seeing broken hand pumps and taps litter Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These signs of failed projects underscore the critical need to overhaul water aid for real impact.
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:
Adaptation is the basic idea that we get used to stuff and interpret signals. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely explores how these types of signals relate to pain and social adaptation. How does our previous exposure to pain alter how we experience it now? How is it that we all appreciate the pinnacle of beauty in the same way, but we’re drawn to partners with a level of attractiveness similar to our own?
Designer Orlagh O’Brien gave a simple emotion-specific quiz to a group of 250 people. Asking respondents to describe five emotions – anger, joy, fear, sadness, and love – in drawings, colors, and words, O’Brien ended up with a set of media she used to create Emotionally}Vague, an online graphic interpretation of the project’s results.
Alphachimp LLC is a visual learning company based in Houston, Texas.
Through drawings, animations, and the design-thinking process we help people understand complex situations and make better decisions.
We provide a cluster of inter-related services in the area of visual learning, graphic facilitation, problem-solving, and innovation.
COPYRIGHT © 2022 ALPHACHIMP, LLC
ALPHACHIMP® and ROCKSTAR SCRIBE® and DOODLES IN MOTION® are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
