zdj. Miastamaniak

Unfortunately, the data speaks for itself: cities occupy only 2% of the Earth’s surface, but they are home to half of the population of our planet that is responsible for as much as 75% of energy consumption and up to 80% of CO2 emissions. These factors are significantly impacting our cities and our lives forcing us to adjust and find new ways to happily live in this new reality. Krakow, just like any large city,  has its problems. Smog, traffic jams, public transport, bicycle paths are only a small representation of what we face as residents of Krakow. Fortunately, we live in a city where people are not afraid to express their opinions and fight for what they believe in. An increasing number of organizations and social movements is an example of that. “Such organizations have an increasing impact on the lives of the city, they are able to convince other people to believe in their case, as it happened in the case of the Olympic Games . We can also see that these different movements are working together, like the newly established Cracovians Embassy on ul. Stolarska where organiztions can meet and work on joint projects,” says Rafał Sanecki, the organizer of the June’s TEDxKrakówCinema. “Committed residents are the greatest treasure that a city can have” he adds.

Rafał himself is passionate about cities and runs a blog related to this topic. “I write about ideas for a better life in the city and I want to inspire and mobilize Polish cities to make similar improvements,” adds Rafał.

At the June edition of TEDxKrakówCinema, Rafał will show us different solutions from cities around the world that improve the lives of their residents. We will talk about sustainable energy, waste management, smart solutions, transport, cars, bikes and urban design. And with this global perspective in mind, we’ll focus also on challenges for Kraków and our region.

TEDxKrakówCinema will take place on June 3 at Klub Pauza at ul. Florianska 18 (IN THE BASEMENT, NOT ON THE SECOND FLOOR AS BEFORE); registration is required. We will start at 18.30 with icebreakers, then  at 19.00 we will begin the official part of watching curated TED Talks followed by discussions, and at 20.30 we will move to Klub Pauza (1st Floor) for less official discussions. The TED talks are in English but the discussion will be in Polish. The main partner of this event is Malopolska Region.

TED’s 30th anniversary conference is set to better understand how the most significant developments from the last 30 years will shape our future.  “The Next Chapter” brings some of the most intriguing speakers of all time to TED’s main stage as well as to five special All-Stars sessions during which these speakers will expand on their ideas and join audience in breakout groups for further discussions.

TEDxKraków will stream two of the sessions on Wednesday, March 19. In addition, in the spirit of bringing positive change to our local community, we also prepared some fun activities for Wednesday’s afternoon. We will start at 4pm at Klub Pauza with an activity designed to select local nominees for the TED Prize. At 5pm, we will stream Session 4: Wish. The speakers for this session include Zak Ebrahim, peace activist inspiring to reject path of violence; Charmian Gooch, activist against corrupted exploitation of natural resources; Bill and Melinda Gates, two philanthropists and founders of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and Sting, composer, singer, author, actor, activist.

After this session, we will have another TEDxKraków activity and at approximately 7:45pm, we will stream one of the All-Star sessions: Beauty and the Brain. Here, you will hear from a 14-year old nuclear scientist that wants to save our seaports from nuclear terror, a Harvard psychologist researching true happiness, an advertising guru designing cutting-edge interactive campaigns, and many more.

This will be one truly inspirational afternoon! The entry is free, but the number of seats is limited so please register at: https://tedxkrakowlive.evenea.pl/.

During registration you can order a TEDxKraków KeepCup. Krakow’s cafes are partnering with us to provide discounts to anyone that uses a TEDxKraków cup…stay tuned for more details.

TEDxKraków 2013 took place on October 25 and was a true celebration of the maker culture. We had fantastic speakers from all over the world come to Kraków to show us how baking, coding, teaching, dancing, singing or innovating changes the world around us. It was one-of-a-kind event that inspired over 600 people in the audience and more that tuned in through the live stream. Here are our 2013 speakers and short descriptions of their presentations:

Adam Karcz shared his story of how he rebuilt a lunar excavator in just a few days just to compete at a NASA competition.

Agnieszka Stach made law understandable to the average Joe.

Anna Nacher talked about the unofficial flow of information around a city.

Catherine Bracy talked about how technology has mobilized grassroots movement and allowed for creating open governments around the world. She also helped launch the Polish movement to open government called Open Malopolska – a hackathon that took place after our live event.

Gever Tulley talked about how children should be respected and trusted with all sorts of objects especially the “too dangerous” ones.

Janusz Makuch demonstrated that you can do anything you want if you put your heart and soul into to, just like he did starting the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival.

Jeroen Beekmans showed us how cities are collections of ideas rather than buildings and that there are many options nowadays to make your city a better one.

Krakowski Teatr Tańca – KTT (Cracow Dance Theatre) demonstrated what love making is about.

Michał Żołnowski demonstrated how he built an observatory in Italy and manages it from Kraków.

Ralph Talmont taught us how smiling is important to our health and that we, Poles, really need to smile more.

Recycling Band showed us how you can make music out of anything, including trash.

Richard Satava talked about how new ideas generated and how he revolutionized operating rooms.

Roger Antonsen taught us that mathematics is more about communication than equations.

Steve Crawshaw talked about how impossible can become possible and that any regime can be overthrown simply by the strength of individuals joining forces to fight back.

Trine Hahnemann not only cooked lunch for us, but also taught us how to bake bread and why rye is so important to health.

Waldemar Domański showed us modern patriotism celebrated through singing.

We hope you enjoyed them. Again, we’d like to hear what you thought, so give us thumbs up, comment and share these talks via Facebook or Twitter!

-TEDxKraków Team

First session (9:30-11:00): Making Places

Anna Nacher is fascinated by the unofficial flow of information around a city. Information can inspire you, expand your horizons and simply make an impact. It can also encourage you to want to share it with others, which in effect creates gossip. Kraków is a city with a very special energy: time flies by slowly here despite the fact that it’s busy with new events constantly happening here. Many of them attract large crowds even though no promotion was involved. How does that happen?  For example, TEDxKraków doesn’t promote itself on billboards or posters, but yet attracted over 600 people to part take in today’s conference. Anna says that is all happens because of the existence of the urban underground information movement, where information flows naturally. Cities are live organisms that have multiple centers where energy gets accumulated. We are inherently attracted by Facebook, fliers, popular groups, and popular events and join these  naturally. So next time you are thinking of promoting something – think of people as groups and rather than separate by their individual demographic characteristics such as age or gender. Groups have more power!

Jeroen Beekmans believes that cities are collections of ideas rather than buildings. There is a radical change going on in cities and their architecture and how we interact with all that. In Amsterdam for example, Vietnamese bars have become hubs for social interaction. Activities and soft sides of a city are as important as hard sides of a city and at times you can have great things happening in really boring places.  Cities, architecture as well as human relationships are all becoming flexible. If the world is so fluid, how to you design cities to accommodate this radically changing world? The answer is that anyone can and should impact city design. Bloggers, street artists, cooks, poets and companies all are becoming city makers. You have the power to improve public bathrooms, walkways or even zebra crossings. One thing that helps make a change in a city is blogging about the cool things that happen at other cities and get inspired from those ideas and then implement them locally. Remember the large, boring billboards that used to annoy all of us? IBM came up with an idea to create billboards that positively impact a city and created some that served as sitting benches or as rain shelters, creating a new layer of excitement and building a brand directly connected to the public. There are many options and ways to create better cities and you can make an impact on that!

Catherine Bracy mobilized grassroots movement to create a government in the United States that would allow it to run like the internet. Technology has revolutionized the way we do things. Nowadays we rarely go to a bank to deposit a check; it all happens online. However, government is one area that has not advanced together with the rise of technology despite the fact that plenty of creative people work for it. It is just how they are structured: risk averse and not open to new ideas. Catherine works with city governments to make them better and more empowering. One project she worked on was rebuilding a website for Honolulu and what they created was a site with a search function only: simple and smart. The users could type in their questions and find exactly what they were looking for and easy to understand as the answers were written by the citizens of that city. Those people formed a citizen volunteer program for all people interested in actively shaping their government. That’s just one example, but there are others and more and more countries and cities are following this grassroot movement to creating open governments. It is crucial to our future to have open governments – the long term cost of underlying distrust lasts for a long time and is very hard to undo. Part of the Polish movement to open government, Open Malopolska, is the hackathon that is happening tonight. We encourage all interested hackers, designers and citizens to participate!

Krakowski Teatr Tańca – KTT (Cracow Dance Theatre)
We’re sure most of our audience needed time to cool down after the salacious performance by KTT. Ten dancers, all dressed in skimpy white clothing demonstrated what love making is about. Love, passion and attraction are all equal regardless of sexual interest, whether it is between two men, two women or a man and a woman.

Second Session (11:45 – 13:15): Get your hands dirty

Richard Satava believes that the future is not what it used to be and with that in mind he actively rethinks healthcare. But how are new ideas generated? By doing things exactly the opposite way that they were originally done.  Finding the outliers and then solving for them is key to innovation.  Working for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Richard helps build robots that revolutionize the operating rooms. Having these robots in operating rooms makes the doctors turn into an information managers when operating on a patient. The possibilities of that are endless. Imagine a world where you can be operated anywhere, where combated soldiers are treated in seconds, and where chips implanted in brains help a paralyzed person control a computer or a prosthetic hand by only using his thoughts. We are already there and technologies to do that exist. Cloning and genetic engineering already impact lives of people affected with genetic diseases and can help them not pass those diseases to their newborns. Is it ethical you may ask? The decision is really up to you.

Adam Karcz knows that failure is not an option. Him and his team were invited for the NASA competition, being the only European team to advance to the finale of the 2013 NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition. However, when they got to Florida it turned out that the most important element of their presentation was not there – the robot was missing! Having only five days to rebuild a lunar excavator, a robot that is capable to extract and move a 10kg Moon rock, him and his team got right at it and tirelessly focused on making it happen. Even though the original robot took them a whole year to build, they did it! They didn’t win the competition, but the Kennedy Space Center recognized their hard work with the Perseverance Award. It’s very inspirational what people can do with great teamwork, some persistence and a belief that failure is not an option.

Recycling Band made rubbish sound really cool today. Who would have guessed that instruments made from recycled materials can sound so good and yet draw the attention to a global environmental issue of waste at the same time?! This band is really something! We encourage you to listen to them online and like them on Facebook to learn more about their upcoming concerts.

Trine Hahneman is probably the most passionate-about-rye person you will ever meet. Rye can make more than flour or bread but also some other delicious and healthy meals…plus it’s full of vitamin E! It’s traditional to Europe, although originally was brought from the Middle East. Anyone can learn how to bake bread, but to make a really good loaf is a craft. It takes trial and error to learn all the little details of how a tasty bread is made. However, she encourages everyone to try and learn this craft. Food is something that brings us together, something that builds a community. Therefore we should never give up local bakers, butchers and others that create jobs in our communities as well as form the atmosphere in our cities. Let’s face it – Facebook or Twitter does not replace the sense of community and local sense of belonging. Let’s bring it back to our cities and ensure that we make a connection with our food and the people around us…outside of social media.

These ideas and trends impacting cities are things that inspired Jeroen to co-found a blog called The Pop-Up City. The thought of the blog came during a trip to Berlin that he took with his now business partner Joop de Boer in 2008. Inspired by the various events, designs and art around the city, they decided these ‘cool things’ were something worth sharing with the rest of the world. Today, The Pop-Up City is curated by Jeroen and Joop, has city-minded readers around the world, as well as whole team of international reporters adding content to it on a daily basis.

Jeroen also co-founded an Amsterdam-based urban design and creative agency called Golfstromen that does marketing campaigns and events, web development and publishing as well as interaction and urban design for clients such as Hewlett Packard, Rotterdam Police Department, and Philips. In 2011, their project Gentrification Battlefield has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You can see some of their other work here.

During his TEDxKraków talk, he will discuss the worldwide shift from ‘city-planning’ to ‘city-making’. Let’s see what inspirational ideas he finds in our city of Kraków!

Passionate about many things including juggling, mathematics and puzzles of all sorts, he finished his PhD in computer science, but ensured to expand his horizons during his studies by taking humanities courses in philosophy, art, latin, and culture. Currently, he is involved in science communication projects and as part of one of his projects, he developed juggling balls that had Arduino inside them. When the balls were juggled, they would lighten up and send data back to his computer. This was to demonstrate that math can be fun.

Through his talks, shows and projects, Roger says he “wants to do science communication in a different way, in order to inspire a new generation of thinkers and remove the common misconceptions about mathematics and computer science.” The larger the number of young people understanding science and technology and developing a passion for it, the better will the world around us become. The creativity of young people is endless; it just needs to be inspired.

Roger currently works as a senior lecturer at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he teaches logic, works on his first book, and runs the departmental makerspace.

That is exactly what Adam Karcz and his colleagues did. They were the only European team to advance to the finale of the 2013 NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition. For their final presentation, all teams were to present their “lunar excavators” – robots capable to extract and move a 10kg Moon rock in only 10 minutes. It took an entire year for this Warsaw Polytechnic team to build the robot, called Husar, for this competition, but upon their arrival in Florida for the competition finale, it turned out that the courier delivered only one of two packages they shipped. The most important elements of the robot, the construction and most of the electronics, were unfortunately missing.

Faced with this tough reality, Adam and his team quickly decided that failure was not an option and decided to spend the next few days rebuilding the robot. The support for this team came from all over: the other contestants made their parts and tools available to them, the judges moved forward their presentation date, and all of the Kennedy Space Center cheered for them. And it worked – Adam’s team rebuilt Husar the robot. Even though they didn’t win the main prize, they were recognized for their work and received the Perseverance Award.

This was the last year for the international edition of NASA’s Lunabotics Competition. Starting in 2014, only American students will be able to participate. Team Husar, however, is not giving up and is thinking of organizing an international lunar robotics competition in Poland.

By the way, the missing package containing Husar, the robot, is nowhere to be found.

The Queen of Nordic cookery, Trine Hahnemann, is coming back to Kraków. This time to talk about her “Rye Bread Project,” a movement started three years ago to reintroduce heritage rye grains to the North-East region of the United States. The project’s first initiative, the ‘Smørrebrød Table‘, organized in the New York City brought together specialists from different fields including organic local farmers, bakers, chefs, international government officials, ecological planners, public health experts, educators and parents in an attempt to collaboratively solve important food issues ranging from health to ecology. Last year, the Rye Bread Project reached a significant milestone when 24 varieties of heritage rye seeds were generously donated to the purposes of this project by the Norwegian-based Svalbard Global Seed Vault and later were distributed to the American farmers to start a long-term testing process.

In addition to bringing rye bread back to our homes and lives, Trine shares her love of food through cooking on television shows such as Good Morning Denmark, writing for Denmark’s leading women’s magazine column, tweeting, founding new projects, advocating for sustaining regional farming, and writing cooking books. As if that was not enough, she also teaches cooking classes and organizes workshops focused on sustaining the food culture.

Trine’s fascinating background includes having an on-tour catering company and cooking for artists such as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Soundgarden, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Tina Turner, Rolling Stones, as well as many Danish bands. She also founded a company that runs in-house canteens and staff restaurants for large corporations and government organizations, including the Danish House of Parliament.

As part of her Kraków visit, Trine also plans to organize a rye bread baking workshop and teach us about the value of rye bread and whole grain meals. We are all very excited to have Trine back in Poland in October!

‪Gever is the founder of the Tinkering School – a week long, sleepaway summer camp for children, where kids learn by doing. Some of the projects built by students include a three-story tree house and a roller coaster. Gever argues that allowing children to do things conventionally has been considered to be dangerous, but in reality it teaches them creativity and helps them explore the environment and learn how to safely function in it.

In his book 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), Gever included some of Tinkering School program’s curriculum: tree climbing, boiling water in a paper cup and deconstructing an appliance. Who doesn’t want to try these things? The book is an attempt to persuade parents who are overly protective of their children that preventing kids from doing these things suppresses their innate curiosity and sense of exploration. Gever believes that whether we consider something to be dangerous or not, it is the result of our upbringing and the influence of the society that we live in.

Gever is no stranger to TED as he has spoken at TED twice as well as at multiple TEDx events.

Gever will  be coming to TEDxKraków with two of his students who will tell us about life doing dangerous things. You can learn more about Gever’s projects from their websites:Tinkering School and Brightworks.

Maybe not a simple as it sounds, but proven to be doable by a Polish musical band called the Recycling Band. Consisting of Kamil Kędzierski (water bottle guitar, instrument creator), Marcin Nenko (water bottle bass guitar), Dominik Stankiewicz (“waste” drums), and Piotr Bolanowski (selfmade keyboard).

The idea of creating recycled instruments started in 2011 with a want to draw attention to a global environmental issue of waste and the importance of recycling as well as a need to make a bass guitar cheaply but effectively on a student budget. This band was able to accomplish both in a very short period of time by performing on street and stages around Europe and even advancing to the finals of the fifth edition of the Polish version of Got Talent.

The backgrounds of Recycling Band’s musicians are quite unique as Kamil Kędzierski is a metallurgy alumni from Krakow’s University of Science and Technology (AGH), Marcin Nenko and Dominik Stankiewicz are students at Krakow’s Music Academy, and Piotr Bolanowski is a musician/instrumentalist and an alumnus of Nowy Sącz’s National Music School.

They have performed using bass and acoustic guitars, ukuleles, drums, trumpets, violins and a keyboard made out of materials such as old wooden door, tables, water bottles, mattresses, combs, and paint cans and buckets. Maybe they will create some new special instrument for October’s TEDxKraków, you never know!