My favorite TED talks posted in 2009

Another year of many TED Talks has passed by. Just like last year, I list here my favorite talks split into several categories. For each I imposed on myself to limit the amounts of talks to one or two. This was a rather hard task, as the talks visibly (and audibly, for that matter) improved over the past years.

Brilliant: Willie Smits restores a rainforest

Insightful: Paula Scher: Great design is serious (not solemn)

Entertaining: Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man

Hands-on:

  1. Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see
  2. Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects us

Several of this year’s talks came as a pleasant surprise. For this reason I added another category to my list: the surprising one. This year it features two talkssmall note:

Surprising:

  1. Bill Gates on mosquitos, malaria and education
  2. Gordon Brown: Wiring a web for global good


small note Both talks surprised me in a very pleasant way, as I did not expect the speakers to deliver in the way they did. I discovered with this occasion that, in a way, I fell into the trap of the single story described so vividly by Chimamanda Adichie (even if the talk of Chimamanda Adichie did not quite make it in my above list, I still felt compelled to mention it somehow)

Posted by Tudor Girba at 29 January 2010, 11:48 pm with tags presentation link