“As a kid I was (and still am) big fan of macgyver, but even him can’t do an airplane with this devices. But give me a one battery and we can talk. (Trust me, I am an engineer.)”
–
“Insane banana thrower.”
–
“An exercise toy for my pet monkey.”
—
“Banana-bikini.”
—
“A banana yoyo you can write with.”
—
“A swing for a parrot.”
—
“I’m allergic to bananas which is why it won’t be anything to eat. I guess if I could peel off banana and wrap up peel with string and connect it to the pencil (it’s a nice string-construction, you should see it), eventually it would be a great umbrella for my dog. Of course if it would fit her style, I’m not pushing anything.”
—
“A Viking ship”
—
“http://www.wikihow.com/Peel-a-Banana”
—
“A bananacopter”
—
“I’d have a party. Always bring a banana to a party.”

And while those suggestions are brilliant, this video response takes the (banana) cake for sure:

Bananombie!

On behalf of the entire TEDxKraków Team (whose smiling faces you can see above), we would like to thank everyone who took part in TEDxKraków 2013, whether you were with us in person at the amazing Stara Zajezdnia venue, or at the student viewing party, or attended Maker Weekend workshops throughout the weekend, or were simply one of the thousands of people livestreaming the conference on Friday.

We can proudly say this was the most amazing TEDxKraków yet, and a huge part of that is thanks to everyone who participated, mingled, made electronic jewellry or brush racers or 3D objects, tinkered, shared their ideas, came up with new ones, and in general made TEDxKraków an event worth working on for the previous 11 months. We would also like to thank our partners, whose innovative presentations were visible throughout the conference and made all of this possible, as well as our media partners, bloggers, and our invaluable team of yellow-shirted, high spirited volunteers.

But just because this year’s conference is over doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do but wait till the next one! Every first Tuesday of the month you can join us at TEDxKrakówCinema, where we meet on a much smaller scale to watch TED Talks and hold lively discussions. There will also be plenty of events throughout the year, so be sure to keep an eye on our events page, our blog, and our Facebook and Twitter feeds to find out what’s going on when, and we’ll see you again soon!

Our final session, Making Makers, is starting with a surprise guest, Ralph Talmont, who thinks Poland is seen as an unfriendly and pessimistic nation. Now, we can either deny this, or do something about it – but how? Well, it will take a lot of effort, but it is worth doing for several reasons. Smiling is not only good for the health, it’s good for business, because friendly people are seen as more trustworthy, thus get more work in a virtuous cycle. The good news is, you don’t need a reason to be happy. Happiness can come first, and success will follow.

Up next is Agnieszka Stach, one of our youngest speakers today, whose aim is to make the law understandable to the layperson. It all started when she was a law student and was getting fed up with all of her friends constantly asking her for legal advice (for free, no less). She decided to make an algorithm for dealing with everyday legal questions people face. And then she made another… and another. Eventually, she combined her passion for music with law and began writing about intellectual property in a way that artists could use. From this she learned that any specialist knowledge you have is worth sharing, even if you’re just a lowly law student.

Three years ago, Michał Żołnowski, a doctor by day and astroid hunter/astrophotographer by night, was sick of the less than ideal conditions of his Krakow-based observatory and decided to build one in the Italian Alps. Of course, you don’t order an observatory on eBay – you have to build it, piece by piece, which in his case took months of hard work. Once his observatory was built, he set about an even harder task: finding asteroids, otherwise known as the tiny barely visible rocks flying through the night sky, generally obscured by starlight, but nevertheless perfectly capable of wiping out existence as we know it. Together with an astronomer partner, they decided to look at parts of the sky the big telescopes were missing, and so far have found 107 asteroids – one of which will soon be named TEDxKraków!

Wow, we’re at our last speaker already… how quickly it went by (probably because we were having so much fun).

Gever Tulley believes children should be respected and trusted with all matters of objects most modern parents would find “too dangerous” for them. Just like there are negative experiences children may have that damage them as adults, kids can have positive experiences that influence them throughout their entire lives. Gever himself had such an experience, mostly because he was largely left to his own devices as a child and soon was teaching himself code, working on an Apple II and coding medical equipment by the age of 16. Some time later, he made “the best mistake of his life” – imagining a hypothetical summer camp where children were expected to be competent and build real things. Thus began the Tinkering School, and he’s been encouraging kids to play with power tools ever since.

First up, journalist and human rights campaigner Steve Crawshaw talks about the impossible coming true, based on his own residency in Poland in the 80s, where he witnessed the achievements of Solidarity up close. Back then, without our benefit of hindsight, what Wałęsa and Solidarity were up against seemed impossible. And yet, even once martial law came in and tanks were rolling down the streets of Warsaw, small and large acts of defiance of courage and mischief continued – and worked! “Fear turned to euphoria” as the regime backed down due to the sheer strength of the individuals who came out to protest. This pattern continued throughout the Soviet Bloc, until the fall of the Berlin Wall was nothing but inevitable. This example has been repeated over and over throughout history and around the world, from Burma to China and the Middle East.

The next speaker, Waldemar Domański, could just be one of those people who bring about change through small acts of resistance that Steve described. His medium is song, a way of bringing rhythm and discipline to an idea, in this case patriotism and celebrating historical events in a less depressing way than was the case in Poland. It’s also a good way to introduce humor in other aspects of daily life, such as dealing with the Polish railway system or city bureaucracy. Oh, and most importantly: don’t waste time with the administration! Just do something worth doing and the funding will come…

Roger Antonsen loves science. However, grade school made him hate science and mathematics, and it wasn’t until he began studying logic in college that his love was reborn. That was when he realized that mathematics is not just doing equations, it’s communicating through symbols – finding simple rules that describe complex behavior. Since then, his mission has been to communicate this understanding of math to others, through telling stories and making science and math fascinating, relevant and interactive.

Finally, Janusz Makuch began his adventure with Jewish culture due simply to an overwhelming desire to do something – anything. The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is a mirror held up to Janusz as much as to Jewish culture, and as he says, “I am the festival, the festival is me”. Because he was born in this strange country obsessed with history, full of myths and stereotypes and Rabbis and anti-Semitites and scholars and heretics, a country built in part by Jews but whose Jews were all but gone after the Second World War, this goy has also been the director of the world’s largest Jewish festival in the world for 25 years – and Kraków is the only place where this is not only possible, but probable.

Doors open: 8:30 -09:30

Session 1 – Making Places: 9:30 -11:00
ANNA NACHER
JEROEN BEEKMANS
CATHERINE BRACY
KRAKOWSKI TEATR TAŃCA

Coffee Break 11:00 -11:45

Session 2 – Get your hands dirty: 11:45 -13:15
RICHARD SATAVA
ADAM KARCZ
RECYCLING BAND
TRINE HAHNEMAN

Lunch 13:15 -14:30

Session 3 – Making together: 14:30 -16:00
STEVE CRAWSHAW
WALDEMAR DOMAŃSKI
ROGER ANTONSEN
JANUSZ MAKUCH

Break 16:00 -16:30

Session 4 – Maker power: 16:30 -18:00
RALPH TALMONT
AGNIESZKA STACH
MICHAŁ ŻOŁNOWSKI
GEVER TULLEY

Afterparty @ FORUM: 20:00

Over a thirty-year career in visual communications, Ralph has produced some thirty books on subjects ranging from the world’s largest yachts to winemaking and tribal mythology, has made retail multimedia products, designed music packaging, produced marketing communications for global brands, directed documentary videos and staged collaborative arts events. He has helped corporates such as Siemens, Nike and Commercial Union tell their stories, while his photographs have illustrated the pages of leading magazines (Time, National Geographic Traveller, GEO Saison).

Today, using a combination of skills from photography and film to writing, design, presentation craft and team leadership, Ralph uses his innate ability to connect people and concepts and communicate ideas to build value for a variety of online and offline projects. He is a founding partner in the strategy and innovation consultancy PerfectStorm and regularly coaches companies and organisations on creativity and communication.

At TEDxKraków Ralph will talk about whether Poles smile enough, and how to increase the country’s “smile quotient”. Ralph will show us his brand new project that aims to “up Poland’s friendliness baseline”.

First, there’s the TEDxKraków@Students viewing party at the Regional Public Library on Rajska Street, which will feature its own speakers, including our distinguished guest and two-time TEDxKraków alumni, Professor Jerzy Vetulani. If you can’t make that either, though, you can still watch our event in real time right from our homepage (yes, the very one you’re on now). We begin the livestream at 9:30 am (7:30 am GMT) and will continue throughout the entire event.

With that in mind, we have decided to give our conference participants the opportunity to test their dexterity in our first ever MakerSpace, which promises to be full of amazing things to do.

During breaks between sessions this Friday at Stara Zajezdnia, our attendees will be able to take part in special mini-workshops prepared by the best maker initiatives in Kraków.

Here are some of the things you’ll be able to make as well as the makers behind them:

Laser & Fab WORKSHOP gives people the opportunity to bring their ideas to life as well as being experts on different materials used for construction.

During the conference, participants will use prepared materials to construct a miniature world. They will have different sized tiles to use that will allow them to build various structures as well as supports. Afterwards, the constructed world will be used as the setting for a game, which will involve slinging balls with a slingshot to hit specific structures (a la Angry Birds).

Maker Space Kraków offers methodological and technical support to multidisciplinary design teams. This maker community welcomes people who like design, technology and manufacturing things. On the day of the event, workshop participants will have the opportunity to see how the revolutionary Makey Makey system works. Participants will have a blast discovering that almost anything around us can be converted into a controller.

Do you know what a homopolar motor is? Wytwórnia is a creative space in the city center, with an open workshop and studio combining the ideas of the Fabrication Laboratory and co-working spaces, and during the event they will show us how they work. Just a simple battery, a magnet, a piece of wire and a good idea is enough to create a small toy in a short amount of time. During Wytwórnia’s workshop, participants will learn the principles behind how a homopolar motor works and will be able to show off their creativity in the creation of the most interesting constructions.

Hackerspace Kraków is a laboratory open to the local community, which includes electronic workshops and meetings between hackers, people interested in technology and tinkerers. They have prepared four different workshops especially for TEDxKraków:

1. Elementary building workshop with an electric brush.
2. Electronic jewelry consisting of tri-color LEDs (RGB, able to shine in virtually any color), batteries and a small controller, which workshop participants will be challenged to sew into material and create a bracelet, earrings or something else entirely.
3. Stellaris LaunchPad is the same as Arduino. After the workshop on programming the device, each participant will be able to take their creation with them along with instructions on what else it can do.
4. Soldering basics and a musical pencil. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to learn how to use a soldering iron and built their first musical pencil that plays while you write.

The final initiative is Materialination, known from last year, and is the largest community of 3D printing fans in Poland. For TEDxKraków participants Materialination has prepared a workshop to create a simple, custom 3D model. During the event, they will print all of the designs created by participants, which they will then use to form a single, common, long TEDx chain.

Our partner for MakerSpace is CapGemini, thanks to whom we are able equip our workshops with the necessary tools and gadgets!

We will be posting up the results of TEDxKraków participants’ tinkering via our Facebook as well as our blog!

Stay tuned!

All In UJ’s Viewing Party will consist of four sessions: we’ll watch a livestream of one session of the TEDxKraków conference, followed by a presentation by prof. Jerzy Vetulani, one of our favourite past speakers, followed by student presentations.

The second half of TEDxKraków@Students will feature the following student makers:

The AGH Racing Team – This team of students will tell their story of the race car they built and raced at Silverstone and in Hungary. The project to build a Formula Student car is the result of the cooperation between the Mechatronix research group and the AGH Racing Team. The makers behind the car are a group of motoring enthusiasts from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics at AGH, who initiated the whole project at the beginning of 2012.

Martyna Jaworska – A 22-year-old student at the Jagiellonian University’s Medical College who decided a few months ago to organize a charity concert to raise money for poor communities in the Andes, and used the collected funds to buy antibiotics, bandages and vitamins, and then embarked on a medical and humanitarian expedition to Peru! Last year she took part in a similar expedition to the island of Java. Her biggest dream is to become a doctor for Doctors Without Borders. At TEDxKraków@Students she will talk about her travels and why you should do something for others!

Magdalena Tekieli – A student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków’s Department of Industrial Design. Magda is an industrial and graphic designer and the founder of the design studio Magdalena Tekieli Design as well as the Paper Love brand. She embodies many facets of design. She’s also a two-time scholarship recipient from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and studied abroad on scholarship in Ljubljana. She was also a finalist in the youth competition organized by ELLE Decoration. Magda will tell us how everyday objects can be both practical and beautiful!

Mateusz Ilba – A PhD student at AGH’s Department of Surveying and Environmental Engineering, Mateusz won first place at the 3D graphics competition of the Be Awards Bentley Students Design Competition. Mateusz is mainly interested in computer graphics, film and animation, and his dream is to create his own short 3D film with a good story and entry in film festivals. He will introduce us to the world of not only computer graphics but also geomatics, a topic that is completely unknown to most!

Registration for TEDxKraków@Students begins October 1st. Everyone is invited!

Organizer – All In UJ
Main Sponsor – Aon Hewitt

TEDxKraków @ Students
25 October 2013
Regional Public Library – Arteteka
Ul. Rajska 1
11:00 am – 4:00 pm