TEDxYouth@Nueva

This past weekend we attended TEDxYouth @ Nueva an student run independently organized Ted Event where we heard from a group of amazing and inspirational speakers across countless fields. Here are a few summaries of some of the incredible speeches. The one of the first speakers was Dan Makowski (VP of design at CapitalOne, Former Head of Design at Google ATAP, Founder of Project Ara and Designer of the original Microsoft Surface) He started his presentation off with a very powerful slide that said: "We are at the beginning of a creative revolution". Which set the framework for his entire speech about creativity, where he talked about a “disrespect for what's possible”, the “ability to believe that you can do anything you want” and how he discovered the power of youth using creative skills to change the conversation through performing arts. Dan noticed that his kids -- like many teenagers throughout the developed world, were spending an insane amount of time on their electronics, so he and his wife made the decision to limit them to 2 hours of non-academic electronics a week. And came up with the concept that they had to use their electronics to “create instead of consume”. His kids went on to use technology for their benefit, learning from videos, apps, and programs proving the experiment successful. Later on in his speech Dan asked us a hard-hitting questions “What would you do if you knew that you couldn't fail” which he used as a transition to one of his most recent projects: Project Ara. Project Ara started off when Dan wanted to build a lego-like phone, in which no two were alike and they catered specifically to the needs of the user. In order to gauge public opinion he had a van equipped with tools like 3D printers, laser-cutters, laptops and other innovative building technologies and drove across the US bringing innovation and creation to universities and public spaces across the country. If you want to read more check out their website: http://www.projectara.com/

After that we heard from Autumn Carter (Executive Director of California Common Sense) She talked to us about how a good government should be three things: “transparent, accountable, and effective” and “work for us, not against us, or in spite of us.” Autumn talked about how it is important for a government to be transparent because we (as citizens) want to know what is going on in our country, she continued saying that is it important for them to be accountable because we need to know that they are working for our betterment and not their personal gain. And finally, that they are effective so that they can “deliver our services on time without breaking the bank.” Her company envisions a future in which the government can keep up with the changing technology and use the many new inventions to its advantage. They plan to do this by “incentivizing long term thinking over term based thinking” so that politicians are thinking about what is best for our country as a whole and not what will get them elected to another term in office, next she wants to make data “fun and intriguing” by taking multi media and social media and flipping/combining them. Read more about California Common Sense here: http://cacs.org/