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”.

As a Kraków councilor and the director of the digital Library of Polish Songs, Waldemar is quite knowledgeable about both the nation’s history and its proud tradition of song, which according to him is the best medium for ideas. In 2007 he set up the Library, which now has over 60,000 records, including over 2,000 biographies of writers and their music, as well as the stories of bands and performers and the origins of the songs. The culmination of his activities led him to be named Kraków’s Man of the Year 2011 in a poll by the Gazeta Krakowska newspaper. For the past two years, Waldemar has also been running a project called the Małopolska Musicians List in cooperation with the City Council. Its aim is to revitalize the music market in the city, as well as to create a professional and accurate database of musicians, bands, orchestras and choirs performing in the region.

At this year’s TEDxKraków, Waldemar will speak about being a local leader and maker based on his experiences of working with municipal governments as well as other members of the community. People come from near and far to take part in the Singing Lessons, and they come away with an experience of social community and togetherness. Waldemar’s goal is to promote modern patriotism and community through songs and singing. As he says: “It doesn’t have to be all about suffering”.

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.

Our speaker leads a nomadic life between the Carpathian Mountains, Krakow and the rest of Europe. She is addicted to the mountains, especially those over two thousand meters above sea level. Passion for nomadic life is reflected in her academic and artistic activity that resembles a constant journey between her many interests. Radio listeners will know the voice of Anna’s broadcast “The negatives of pop culture.” Experimental folk lovers – from Magic Carpathians CDs or concerts, which started our as a musical project created in 1998 with Marek Styczyński. Her students will know her from her classes on cyberculture, media theory, cultural studies, gender issues, anthropology and audio-visual concepts, as well as research of sound.

Anna is an assistant professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University and co-author of the research project titled “Urban Culture – nodes and flows.” She studied different forms of communication in the city’s social ecosystem as part of her research. As she says “the deeply hidden element of urban culture ” are the things that determine the atmosphere or magic of the city.

In her TEDxKraków talk, she’ll suggest new ways of thinking about communication within Kraków; rather than treating the audience as a scattered unit belonging to different categories based on age, education or identity, it is worth thinking about groups, nodes and associations, that are linked together in very complex networks. You can learn more about Anna’s work from her blog and also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

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!

During his TEDxKraków Talk, Janusz will tell the story of the transformation that took place in a young Pole who discovered his personal Atlantis – the Jewish world – many years ago. This story entails entering a world of cultural pluralism, in which the most important trait is mutual respect for all differences, and in which it’s sometimes necessary to be a heretic marching against the tide of history, because there is no progress without heresy. In short, his own story.

As a fifteen-year-old, Janusz discovered that half of the pre-war population of his family home of Puławy had been Jewish. This fact took him by surprise and sparked his curiosity. He began to study the subject – the history of the Jews, their language, customs, Jewish philosophy – and the more he read and understood, the more he could not believe that such a great and splendid culture, which was once an integral part of many Polish towns and cities, had not even left a trace.

It was only a few years later that Janusz, then a young graduate of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, founded the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków together with Krzysztof Gierat. The first edition was held in 1988 in a small cinema and was the first attempt to bridge two cultures: Polish and Jewish. Even this small step took great courage. After all, in the eighties the word “Jew” was still considered derogatory, if it was considered at all.

Throughout its 25-year history, the Jewish Culture Festival has led to the rebirth of Jewish life in Kazimierz, and is now one of the biggest and most important festivals of its kind in the world. It features Jewish folk music and traditional Klezmer, synagogue and Hasidic music, as well as modern fusion experiments such as Hebrew jazz, rap, gospel and afro-beat, as well as film screenings, debates, workshops, multimedia and art exhibitions and performances by and centered around the Jewish community in Poland and abroad. Most significantly, it draws a largely non-Jewish, Polish audience that is able to witness the rebirth of Jewish culture in Krakow.

When you look at Richard’s accomplishments – active flight surgeon, a US Army astronaut candidate, DARPA employee, and an inventor of cutting edge technologies to create the next generation of medicine, it probably would never cross your mind that he believes all of his accomplishments stem from failure.

Richard says that science is currently experiencing a crisis because it cannot explain all the phenomena occurring in the universe. New technologies are mushrooming and the current scientific methods we’re using aren’t leaving room for truly innovative thinking. Richards says that we are on the verge of a revolution – and if it happens, it might have a greater impact on us than the emergence of the Internet.

Currently, Richard is working as a surgeon using technology and tools that look like something from a science fiction movie. If you’d like to find out more, have a look at his presentation on Reaching For Innovation, One Failure at a Time from the Business Innovation Factory Conference. We’re sure that Richard will convince you to his groundbreaking approach to the world!

‪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.