Fostering ideas

The goal is to get people out of their silos and ‘ to engage, think outside the box, dream a little’

What drives the world’s largest tech, entertainment and design conference — plus TED, A to Z.

Every few years, anthropologist and explorer Wade Davis has pencilled out a week in March, hopped a plane to California, and spent time in the company of a group of wildly disparate people needing to rejuvenate and open their minds.

As a longtime attendee at TED, the technology, entertainment and design conference, Davis has long understood why people will travel from all over the world to the event. It is at its basic level, he said, a place that breaks with orthodoxy and strives to reinforce “that despair is an insult to the imagination.”

On Tuesday, Davis will introduce the 1,200 attendees to TED’s new home in Vancouver with what he calls a whimsical and amusing welcome.

“It is a sweet little talk on how landscape affects the Canadian spirit,” said Davis, a B. C. resident and National Geographic Society “explorer in residence.”

Davis is keeping the details of his four- minute talk under wraps, but he says it may help the attendees, mostly Americans, understand that Vancouver is more culturally complex than they may think.

“I will probably point out that they will hear for the first time at the beginning of the conference this tradition we now have of acknowledging the Coast Salish and the fact TED is being held on unceded territory ,” he said.

After three decades as a largely U. S.based phenomenon, TED is entering middle age. It hasn’t entirely lost its geeky element, and likely always will be a place where you can find speakers who, even in this age of instant digital infamy, would otherwise remain obscure or generally unexposed.

That is largely TED’s bread- and- butter attraction as something of a crossroads for academia, technologists and scientists, and the just plain quirky.

In moving to Vancouver, it is transitioning through another of what its curator, Chris Anderson, says is a natural, if necessarily uncomfortable, process. The weeklong event opens Monday, and already he is hinting that TED’s initial two- year commitment to Vancouver may be extended.

“I think it needs to grow and to reinvent itself and to never get comfortable. That doesn’t mean it needs to change location,” Anderson said in an interview Thursday. “I would love to be in Vancouver for a very long time. It has so much going for it.”

As Anderson offered a brief tour of the David Rockwell- designed theatre under construction at the Vancouver Convention Centre, he paused in front of the floor- to- ceiling glass windows to watch a float plane take off .

The facility is just what TED needs to reinvent itself, he said.

“This is a combination of both scale and intimacy that we think is really special, both in the way that the theatre is designed and the specialness of Vancouver itself,” he said. “If you want people to come and engage and think outside the box, dream a little, imagine a little, having this setting is crucial. It just takes your breath away.”

If the loyal TED community is anything to go by, that may not be a hard sell. The move has been greeted favourably by most, and all of the tickets, starting at $ 7,500, were quickly snapped up last year.

• TED has its detractors — from Canadian media who sniff at what they say is the event’s elitist structure ( you have to “apply” for entry and even media access is tightly controlled) to those who say the almost speed- dating style of its talks trivialize the gravitas of the speakers’ subjects.

In a somewhat ironic reinforcement of TED’s own willingness to expose people to different ideas, Benjamin Bratton, an associate professor of visual arts at the University of California, used a TEDx franchise event in San Diego last year to slag TED, suggesting it “stands for middlebrow, megachurch infotainment.”

“If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff ( history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions),” he said. “Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation. Instead of dumbing- down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us.”

Ron Burnett, president of Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design, couldn’t disagree more. Burnett has attended every TED event in California since 2009, and is going to the inaugural Vancouver event, as well.

“I am a strong supporter of bringing education and knowledge out from all the very cloistered places in which it is exchanged,” he said. “I see it as a way of investing in the opening of ideas to the world. I think the criticism of TED — and I saw the TEDx presentation that has this negative view of it — has its place and that is what discussion is about. But I would describe my own experience as one of tremendous learning and exposure to really interesting people.” Anderson laughs off the criticism. “I had some great advice from ( Amazon’s) Jeff Bezos last year. He said there is an easy way to stop being criticized. Stop being relevant. So we actually take it as a compliment,” Anderson said.

“You get it from people who think we are too far left or that we are in the service of corporations. They kind of balance themselves out.”

Michael Green, the Vancouver architect who gave a TED Talk last year on tall environmentally sustainable wooden skyscrapers, thinks critics fundamentally misunderstand TED’s aim. “To me the power of TED is not to answer all questions ,” he said. “It is a way to bring to a much broader audience really provocative ideas and hopefully help people twist and shake up their own way of thinking of the problem they are trying to solve.”

He also wonders why people criticize TED as elitist when it offers its videos to the public for free.

“I struggle with the fact that there is criticism over something that really fundamentally is a charity, that involves charitable giving to fund a lot of ideas that are really positive and that are designed to be helpful to society,” Green said.

“I think the piece that people sometimes misunderstand is ( that it is supposed) to address what to me feels like a real tragedy. You’ve got all these amazing ideas out there in the world somewhere, and they are siloed .

“How bad is it that you have a person who honestly knows how to solve one of the world’s problems but no one is listening to them?”