April 16 marked the arrival of TEDx in Sacramento, bringing a “TED-like experience” to our area.

What is TED? TED stands for “Technology, Education, Design.” It is a small nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” Started in 1984, its purpose has spread to include an annual U.S. conference in Long Beach as well as a TEDGlobal conference in the United Kingdom, a TEDTalks online video site, an annual TED Prize, a nationwide local program called TEDx and more.

Per TEDx Sacramento, “The TEDx Conference provided a license and general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.”

Brandon Weber, TEDx Sacramento curator, said the local team wanted to create a special event to “lay the foundation for a strong TEDx presence in Sacramento…to contribute to the dialogue of ideas and encourage creativity, innovation and action in our beloved city.”

The event was held at the Hinde Auditorium at California State University, Sacramento, to a packed house of several hundred registrants, and the program was recorded for subsequent online viewing.

Weber started the program by saying TEDsters are in a class of their own, that TED conferences are a mix of things and that we would be watching live video from other TEDx conferences in addition to live multimedia presentations.

The first presentation was a video called “Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?” The focus of the video was that sometimes we have to go to the other side of the world to realize assumptions that we didn’t realize we had. Whatever brilliant ideas you have – the opposite may also be true. An example was shown of how addresses are determined in the United States versus in Japan. U.S. blocks don’t have names, streets have names. In Japan, blocks have names and the streets are the unnamed places between the blocks. Street numbers are based on when the homes were built.

Next was a live presentation titled “David Mogavero: An American Frontier.” Mogavero is senior principal at Mogavero Notestine Associates, with special expertise in the areas of ecological building, environmental planning, infill development, urban design and energy-efficient design.

Mogavero said the suburbs are a unique American institution, generating vast amounts of appreciation and scorn. Suburbs are the most inefficient form of human habitation ever done on earth, and an important place for focusing on environmental change in America, he said.
He started his practice by doing passively heated homes for people moving back to the land, mostly hippies. He realized that if he was going to be an ecoarchitect he had to work in the fabric of the community. He has done infill work in Sacramento and throughout Northern California.

The quantity of issues relative to urban sprawl are immense. People are moving back to urban America in large quantities, mostly in central cities. This has both limitations and opportunities for capturing infill growth.

In Sacramento, we build on average about 10,000 homes per year. Sacramento can only handle 19,000 new units – about two years of growth. The opportunity is tens of thousand of acres of underutilized areas such as parking lots, vacant housing and shopping center spaces, which can be eliminated for hundreds of thousands of houses and apartments.

When you have to design in these kinds of situations, you take the perspective of “do no harm.” You’re trying to instill more density but have an industrial complex that causes you to be creative. As an example, there is a commercial district in Yuba City – an opportunity to put people in a place with a services available now.

For Mogavero this is like jazz, which emerged from a convergence of cultures. Architectural development design is fascinating and fun for him for reasons like this: With a 10- or 15-acre site in the suburbs, you can integrate food into the project through agriculture. A community can be involved in the growing of food. There is also an opportunity for technology, which is more challenging in the city. Holistic integrated systems flowing back and forth continuously are possible in such areas. This is one of the most exciting venues in American building culture.

Next shown was a video titled “David Gallo: Underwater Astonishments.” Diving into the deep sea is a dark black world. We’ve only explored about 3 percent of the oceans. We don’t know much about this planet at all.

We are learning lots from the shallow water, which is full of predators that can change color & texture to match surroundings, but the deeper water still leaves much to be explored.

The Gallo Video proved a good precursor to Sacramento guitarist Ross Hammond, who received the Best Area Jazz Musician award for 2008 and 2009 from “Sacramento News and Review.” Hammond gave a spirited performance that integrated sound system issues that would affect the evening’s musical interludes.

The music was followed by another video, this one titled “Kirk Citron: And Now, the Real News.” The top story of this year was the economy. What kind of stories might make a difference for the future?

Some include the invasion of the nanobees, China’s rising, food shortage, the age of discovery, an ant mega-colony taking over the world or self-directed robots making discoveries. With or without us, life will go on.

For Citron, the top story was that water was found on the moon. In the long run, some stories will be more important than others.

Next was a live presentation titled “Ron Vrilakas: The Great Green City.” Vrilakas is an architect who likes buildings. He is working on what he loves, which is trying to build a great green city. He comes from West Sacramento, a place that has failed to solve how housing and commercial roads should come together. He spent eight or nine years avoiding going to Sacramento. He learned some things along the way about what makes cities exciting and green. We have been out of sync building cities over the past number of years, he said.

Once there was a way – we knew how to build the Great Green City. We used to build communities commonly, but technology got us away from earlier ambition and we turned in another direction. Things were cut off from each other by highways. Simple basic community-oriented buildings were changed. Places to gather and take pride in your city became places like retail with parking lots.

In 50 or 60 years, we’ve lost the ability to build things like McClatchy High School. We couldn’t do now what was done then on six sheets. He showed a picture of a bicyclist who will hopefully survive the Freeport Bakery parking lot.

An urban memory – he tries to find ways to reintroduce these things into our environment. Streets need to be for people. Emptyness in a block is a bad thing. Menacing facades are an embarrassment.

Preserving the past is something Vrialas said he believes strongly in. We need to cherish historic landmarks, adapt for activity, create the unexpected (alleys in Sacramento can become a network of interest within our grid) and resist demolition. Underutilized places need to be identified. Single-use is not good – everything must be a mixed-use environment. Empty spaces need to be change to active places.

History forward – Vrialas said he believes we find the identity of our city in the past. Getting to know oneself is how you make something. San Francisco has its identity, as do Seattle, Berkeley, Boston, Portland and Paris – all of the best of an urban life put together. In Sacramento we have a real history to build upon.

He looks to buildings for stories. We’ve been building cities for thousands of years, but we’ve only been building in a suburban manner for past 60 years, and we’ve been getting it wrong. We don’t have to look for a technological fix. We can have the fix in the way we organize ourselves – an urban design ethic that is important for human civilization.

Next came a video titled “Dean Ornish: Your Genes Are Not Your Fate.” The video offered encouragement for a healthy lifestyle. When you eat better, exercise and love more, the benefits can be measured. Topics covered things to do to grow your blood cells and things to make it worse. You age less quickly when you change your lifestyle. Arteries become notably less clogged, you can stop breast cancer, change prostate growth and even change sexual potency.

You can change genes, turn on the good genes and turn off the disease-promoting genes. We all have genetic profiles, but our genes are not our fate. We can also change how our genes are expressed.

It was now time for another musical performance, this one from Autumn Sky, who said, “My name is Autumn Sky. Really.” She and her guitar ,which she has named Samuel Taylor, performed and sang whimsically.

Next, it was back to the green theme, with a video titled “Catherine Mohr: Building Green.” Mohr explores energy usage depending upon what she uses to wipe up a spill. Sometimes the things you least expect have the greatest effect.

Mohr wanted to know how to achieve a green lifestyle. The average house has 300 megawatts of embodied energy. Some ideas she explored were deconstruction of the house, putting in a rainwater catchment, alternative roofing and framing, if putting aluminum windows will double the energy use and others.

Following that, it was time for another live presentation, “Chris Schuring Recycles Carbon.” Schuring's company, Ternion Bio Industries Inc., grows algae in a controlled environment to reduce carbon.

Schuring asked, “Why do you do what you do? Why do we want to build better cities, to go green?” He said he believes it’s because we inherently want to do better in our lives, be smart and leave a better legacy. There is a sense of camaraderie, of community. It’s me and you in the solutions we come up with. He did it because he thought reducing greenhouse gases and carbon footprints would be great.
Lots of people don’t want to do these things. People won’t care about what you do until you care about why. If we come together as humans, we can bring communities together to effect change.

Schuring has a personal goal to help 100 entrepreneurs start businesses to effect change in the next 18 months.

Next came a very cute video titled “Rives: Mixed Emoticons.” Rives – star of the Bravo special, "Ironic Iconic America," told a typographical fairy tale that was short and bittersweet.

After this short bit of comic relief came another live presentation titled “Robyn Waxman: F.A.R.M.” Waxman is an award-winning designer, activist, farmer, educator and founding member of graphic communication program at Sacramento City College.

Waxman looked at design’s role in the last 10 years. Moving more into letting other people design for themselves as the role of the designer seems to be the direction the industry is headed. She produced a 56-page tabloid on how to make your own farm. Millenial farmers have built Farm Davis on eighth and K streets. They have donated more than 100 pounds of food, or half of their production. The other half they ate. The farm runs on a gift economy without a budget. The space is on a privately owned front yard.

A similar Sacramento farm is coming May 2010 at 13th and C streets in Alkali Flats.

Up next was another video, titled, “Julian Treasure: 4 Ways Sound Affects Us.” Treasure said he wants to transform our relationship with sound, which has become largely unconscious. There are four ways sound affects us:

Physiological – an affect on breathing, heart rate and brainwaves.

Psychological – musical has the greatest effect. Music and bird sounds are reassuring.

Cognitive – you have to choose what to listen to. We have limited bandwith to decide which sound to listen to. People are one third as productive in open rooms as private rooms.

Behaviorally – move away from unpleasant sounds and toward pleasant sounds.

Most retail sound is unpleasant, with retailers losing 30 percent of their business because the sound is so dreadful. Treasure's company has developed a SoundFlow to design soundscapes. Music is powerful. Every brand is making sounds right now. Several well-known brand jingles were used as examples. There are four golden rules for commercial sound:

Make it congruent

Make it appropriate

Make it valuable

Test it, and test it again

We can achieve sound living through good use of sound

Another video followed, titled, “Alan Siegl: Simplifying Legal Jargon.” It takes a blizzard of paperwork to get benefits or a business loan. Siegl has been simplifying things for 35 years. He didn’t see why we couldn’t have a simple one-page consumer credit agreement, so he created one.

He seeks to define terms in plain English. Plain English is about changing the content. An agreement for IBM was received very favorably by businesses. IRS letters are pretty unintelligible, and he proposed changes to the IRS.

We must make clarity, transparency and empathy national priorities. We should not do business with those using unintelligible provisions.

It was then time for another musical interlude, this time from Sacramento musician Julie Ann Bee, titled “Sea of Bees.” Bee’s first full-length album is about to be released by Davis-based Crossbill Records. She performed two songs.

The next live presentation was titled “Scott and Julie Brusaw: Solar Roadways”, and was presented by Scott, an electrical engineer with more than 20 years of experience who hails from northern Idaho. They have spent years working on the concept of a solar-powered roadway system.

The Brusaws spent a lot of time together 30 years ago. His favorite toy then was a slotcar. He thought, “What if we made real roads electric?”

They discussed how there is no easy solution to global warning and other issues, including that 65,000 children die each day because they can’t get clean drinking water.

Couldn’t you make electric roads out of solar panels? Could they make solar panels you can drive on?

They said they believe so. There are some problems, but they aren’t insurmountable. We can’t let snow build on it, so he put heating element on the surface. He put LEDs on there to light it up, a microprocessor so all panels can talk to each other even with cars traveling overhead. The system can even warn drivers of animals on the road.

Storm water spills right into a nearby body of water. What if we could route that to a filtration system and send it for reuse? We can put power cables on the shoulder instead of in the air. We can grind up recyclables to use.

Brusaw started a website, and Treehugger.com picked it up. He received an e-mail from Booz Allen Hamilton – one of the biggest consulting firms in the nation. They now have four sample panels in their lab.

Brusaw has received a research grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and has built a 12-foot-by-12-foot prototype. He said panels could be used in playgrounds and parking lots. See more at solarroadways.com.  

Up next was another live presentation, “David Garibaldi: Paints with Passion and Purpose.” Garabaldi throws paint around and sweats profusely. He started about six and a half years ago. It was graffiti, and it was illegal. During his junior year of high school, he was introduced to animation. By senior year he wasn’t able to graduate on time. He was creating art out of the environments he was in.
Garabaldi called his show “Rhythm and Hue.” He created pop icon paintings on blank black canvas. Santana popped up behind him at halftime at a Golden State Warriors game.

In March 2005, he asked if his art could do more than entertain. Can it benefit and inspire others? He has been able to help raise $500,000 for charities and organizations through spending $200 and painting on stage. He changed why he was doing it.

Each of us has passion and purpose. We can be creative, charitable, profitable and grow algae. He said we all need to keep going to put bigger purpose behind our passion.

Finally, a video titled “Derek Sivers: How to start a movement,” was shown. The video made its point showing a group of young adults in action. A leader needs the guts to stand out and show everyone else how to follow. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. Then comes a second follower. New followers emulate the other followers, not the leader. As more people join in, it’s less risky to join in. Eventually, all who don’t join in would be subject to ridicule.

Nurture your first few followers, he advised. Leadership is over-glorified. It was really the first follower who transformed the first nut into a leader. Have the courage to follow, and show others how to follow. TED is the perfect place to do that.

All in all, this was an extremely varied, educational and entertaining multimedia extravaganza. It was also announced that there are plans for another event in November, so stay tuned.

More information about TED can be found at ted.com, and more about TEDx Sacramento can be found at tedxsacramento.com.