I am glad that I ended up being a volunteer for my first TED event as opposed to paying 100 bucks to actually buy a ticket, cause it did turn out to be a more involved experience.
So technically, this is not an actual TED event. TED does have a few conferences globally each year organized by official TED folks. However, as the concept of spreading ideas via inspiring speeches become more and more popular, especially with the wide sharing of exciting TED videos all over Youtube, people started to doing independently organized TED events locally. They are called TEDx events. We know our lovely San Francisco is never left out for independent and inspiring activities like this, especially with the never exhausted creativity coming from the whole bay area. TEDxSF is actually one of the earliest TEDx organizations (now there are thousands of TEDxSF organizations around the world).
After writing a few blog posts analyzing the presentation structure of some TED speeches, the moment i saw this upcoming TEDxSF event, my only reaction was “i have to go!”, and i did 
Even though It was a rainy Saturday, not a typical Saturday in early June in the bay area, but maybe quite typical for SF though About 700 hundred people gathered in Yerba Buena Center. All these black and red logos just made the whole TED experience stepped out from the online virtual environment, and itself has become so #ALIVE to me.
The theme for this year’s TEDxSF event is “ALIVE – Maximize living as a human.” Intuitively you would think it’s health related, as a big component is to live a healthy life. Well, it is about that: there are speakers like Arlene Samen who founded the “one heart” program to help mothers in indigenous communities such as Tibet and Nepal, to help them give birth and raise their young children, or Andrés Torres, a SF Giant baseball player, who embraced the biological limitation of himself and strived his way to the major baseball league in the states.
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But not only the “health” concept, what does it mean to live as a human, and more importantly, what does it mean to maximize this process and how can we do that? When it comes to “how”, especially if you’ve lived in the bay area long enough, technology is something you couldn’t miss. To some extent, the question becomes how can technology help people maximize their living (in a healthy way). TEDxSF organizers definitely want to inspire the audience by showing how technology turns impossible into possible. Eythor Bender, a professor from Berkeley presented how mechanic equipment like eLEGS can help disabled people like stand up again. Watching Amanda Boxtel, a former ballet dancer who lost her legs in a skiing trip when she was 24, was able to stand up and walk again on the TEDxSF stage with the help of eLEGs, it’s a truly moving moment. All audience were on their feet at the end of the speech, both for Amanda’s courage and the magic brought by eLEGs.
But my favorite speaker (I only sat through half of the talks though, half of the time i was ACTUALLY volunteering LOL) is from Dr. Roz Picard from MIT’s media lab (yeah, i just couldn’t stay away from the concept of HCI after being “trained’ for 2 years by my dear Mr. Birnholtz). So her speech was more of how to improve one’s mental health via technology. Her team in MIT used technology to measure people’s emotional response with electrodermal testing and face expression recognition. The concept of “affective computing” is not new in the field of HCI, but most research done in this field uses users’ self reported data, in other words, very qualitative oriented. A lot of research projects done in Cornell’s social media lab on topics such as emotional contagious used surveys and interviews. In Dr. Roz Picard’s case, the measurement is more “tangible” and technical. By looking at the electronic signal shown on the screen, you can tell if a person’s emotional status, happy or sad, or even a person’s concentration level, either deeply engaged, or being distracted. She showed a short video recording her conversation with another professor, and the electronic signal clearly showed how she was highly concentrated at the beginning, then as the other prof just kept on talking and didn’t give her too much time to digest the information, the “level of concentration” just dropped 
What’s more interesting to me was that, her team did some research on the emotional and concentration level change of audiences who attend presentations. The findings were, whenever there’s a new speaker comes onto the stage, whenever there’s a live showcase, whenever there’s child or an animal on the stage, the audience’s concentration level will raise. However, whenever the powerpoint slide show begins, there’s gonna be a dramatic attention drop LOL, which to me, means a whole lot of work can be done to improve the UX of presentation and slides 
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So what else besides technology?
Again, this is San Francisco, a city full of diversity, freedom and artistic minds! I always thought there’s no better way of maximizing one’s living, by broadening one’s horizon and exploring different people’s experience and various possibilities of living. To get to that, art’s no doubt a shortcut. Intense expressions of experiences and emotions give you a taste of the width and depth of living. Art performances, or art work showcases are always an important component of TED events, including this #ALive TEDxSF event. Just check out the photos below featuring artists Carey Perloff, James Mollison, Nina Wise and more… All audiences were on their feet dancing with an Indian girl who started her own dance troupe in SF. It’s like a 700 hundred people party!
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Being a volunteer means, you got to come early and see all the set-up process(and help with some of it). This #Alive event attracted all kinds of sponsors ranging from healthy food suppliers such as Whole Foods to Automobile companies Lincoln. So you got to taste fruit cups, have healthy fruity drinks (literally as much as you want), eat SF local chocolate, play jenga, drink local california coffee producer’s TEDxSF blend, take funny photos in the personalized photo booth, and etc. etc.!
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I remember having this discussion in my graduate school communication theory seminars about, the reason to go to a live concert, or why you choose to go to a stadium as opposed to sit in front of television to watch a sports game, or why go to cinema. I was asked before deciding to attend this event “why go to see all these speeches in person when you can watch them online later FOR FREE.” My answer bafore going to the event was mostly about how this was going to help me approach what I envision myself to do in the future and the networking part. Now looking back, although those reasons are still valid, none of them was as important and as true as the reason that, being there, see not only how speakers maximize their livings on the stage but also how audiences fully engaged themselves, experiencing all those laughers and tears, feelings and inspirations, and being part of the TED community can be truly inspring. The “being there” experience itself is irreplaceable.
Maybe that’s why i work for a company that focuses so much on improving people’s experience.
When San Francisco banned plastic bags 2 years ago, my whoops of joy could be heard across the Golden Gate in Marin. Having grown up in the developing world I grew accustomed – sadly – to seeing plastic bags everywhere they shouldn’t be: the streets, clogging drains, polluting rivers, the ocean, even stuck on phone lines. Everywhere except in garbage cans. You can be sure that I for one wasn’t going to miss their absence at all.
So imagine my surprise when last week my local Delano’s bagger put my groceries in one of these:
That’s funny, I could have sworn that plastic bags are illegal in San Francisco. So unless I’m missing something, this shouldn’t be allowed.
On second look, the makers of the bag have done their utmost to convince everyone that this is anything but a plastic bag with the liberal use of clever marketing copy. Phrases like “no trees were harmed in the making of this bag”, and a cute little “nutrition” box highlighting exactly how it hasn’t hurt trees are nice tries – but belie the fact that eventually this bag will no doubt end up in a dump, where it most certainly will hurt a tree.
I get what the folks behind the bag are getting at: we have so many bags in production already that it certainly makes sense to train people to reuse them, thereby preventing more bags from ending up in landfills. Indeed, these particular bags do seem more durable than their crappy white plastic counterparts, so I could definitely imagine using them for more than one grocery run – but let’s face it: I can count on one hand the number of people I know who bring eco bags to the store every time they go. Heck, I have 3 such bags in the trunk of my car, and I still manage to forget them each and every time.
As luck would have it, these bags have an answer for our laziness, too – a message nudging us to take them to “participating stores” for recycling. Good idea in principle, until my roommate tried it: turns out our local Delano’s isn’t one of those stores.
Go figure.
Castro plaza
Here’s an interesting look at the use of prototyping and “agile” development in a field outside the realm of software: urban development. The project in question is the re-purposing of part of an intersection in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, part of the City’s “pavement to parks” program.
I think it’s interesting to see the evolution and migration (or osmosis) of design principles from the software world into the real one. IDEO’s “design thinking” revolution is perhaps the most commonly cited example of a non-software process employing agile (not necessarily Agile) methodologies, but there are certainly many other examples out there, from Principle 5 of The Toyota Way to basic prototyping approaches used in industrial design more generally.
I love that the City of San Francisco has taken some of this to heart as well, and is flying under the political radar by “piloting” (“prototyping”) projects before actually rolling them out. I’m not sure if the City conducted any user research to see if there is any demand for the plaza (top-down management being a slight problem in government bureaucracies and all that), but I sure hope they conduct user research from here on out to figure out what kind of Castro Plaza, if any, we actually want.
I think I’ll float this idea by the team here at EchoUser to see if we can come up with some time to do some guerrilla research… Gavin Newsom, here we come!
Thanks Christine, as it’s you and the whole committee’s hard work that has brought us such a great experience!
Sally Tang
Thank you, your reflections and write up makes the work just that much more worth doing. Christine and the TEDxSF organizing committee
Christine McCaull