Chicago Ideas Week: Do You Know TED?

Do you know TED? It’s not UAL’s failed low-cost airline. Nor is it the Left 4 Dead video game survivor, Chicago Ted.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, its slogan is “Ideas Worth Spreading” and the regional focus, TEDxMidwest, is in Chicago on Thursday. 

 

TEDxMidwest is a locally and independently organized TED-like event. Once a year, TEDxMidwest brings influential speakers together who aim to challenge, move and inspire in a series of 18-minute talks, or videos and talks combined. As Ariana Huffington puts it, “TED is brimming with innovators, people less interested in figuring out how to prop up the collapsed economy of the last century than in creating an economy for the 21st century.” 

 

For example, Thursday’s CIW event features these speakers:

• Pablos Holman, IT Expert and Renowned Hacker: Inventing for the World’s Biggest Problems
• Edie Weiner, Futurist and Author: Not Recession but Transformation
• Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit:  How to Make the World Suck Less
• Dean Kamen, inventor: The Future Belongs to the Innovators
• Wes Craven, filmmaker:  The Nature of Fear

 

Watch one of Thursday’s speakers, Kevin Bacon, talk about how he turned his “punchline of a joke” status with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon into the Network for Good. 

 

Combined with late Thursday afternoon’s events, Friday’s TEDxMidwest event will bring 1,000 people to The Oriental Theatre.

It’s been going on since 8 a.m. and runs through 7:30 p.m. (reception included) so there’s still time to catch more of this and other speakers by visiting Chicago Ideas Week.