00:12
Design is a slippery and elusive phenomenon, which has meant different things at different times. But all truly inspiring design projects have one thing in common: they began with a dream. And the bolder the dream, the greater the design feat that will be required to achieve it. And this is why the greatest designers are almost always the biggest dreamers and rebels and renegades.
00:38
This has been the case throughout history, all the way back to the year 300 BC, when a 13-year-old became the king of a remote, very poor and very small Asian country. He dreamt of acquiring land, riches and power through military conquest. And his design skills -- improbable though it sounds -- would be essential in enabling him to do so.
01:05
At the time, all weapons were made by hand to different specifications. So if an archer ran out of arrows during a battle, they wouldn't necessarily be able to fire another archer's arrows from their bow. This of course meant that they would be less effective in combat and very vulnerable, too. Ying solved this problem by insisting that all bows and arrows were designed identically, so they were interchangeable. And he did the same for daggers, axes, spears, shields and every other form of weaponry. His formidably equipped army won batter after battle, and within 15 years, his tiny kingdom had succeeded in conquering all its larger, richer, more powerful neighbors, to found the mighty Chinese Empire.
01:54
Now, no one, of course, would have thought of describing Ying Zheng as a designer at the time -- why would they? And yet he used design unknowingly and instinctively but with tremendous ingenuity to achieve his ends. And so did another equally improbable, accidental designer, who was also not above using violence to get what he wanted. This was Edward Teach, better known as the British pirate, Blackbeard.
02:23
This was the golden age of piracy, where pirates like Teach were terrorizing the high seas. Colonial trade was flourishing, and piracy was highly profitable. And the smarter pirates like him realized that to maximize their spoils, they needed to attack their enemies so brutally that they would surrender on sight. So in other words, they could take the ships without wasting ammunition, or incurring casualties.
02:51
So Edward Teach redesigned himself as Blackbeard by playing the part of a merciless brute. He wore heavy jackets and big hats to accentuate his height. He grew the bushy black beard that obscured his face. He slung braces of pistols on either shoulder. He even attached matches to the brim of his hat and set them alight, so they sizzled menacingly whenever his ship was poised to attack. And like many pirates of that era, he flew a flag that bore the macabre symbols of a human skull and a pair of crossed bones, because those motifs had signified death in so many cultures for centuries, that their meaning was instantly recognizable, even in the lawless, illiterate world of the high seas: surrender or you'll suffer. So of course, all his sensible victims surrendered on sight.
03:44
Put like that, it's easy to see why Edward Teach and his fellow pirates could be seen as pioneers of modern communications design, and why their deadly symbol --
03:58
there's more -- why their deadly symbol of the skull and crossbones was a precursor of today's logos, rather like the big red letters standing behind me, but of course with a different message.
04:11
Yet design was also used to nobler ends by an equally brilliant and equally improbable designer, the 19th-century British nurse, Florence Nightingale. Her mission was to provide decent healthcare for everyone. Nightingale was born into a rather grand, very wealthy British family, who were horrified when she volunteered to work in military hospitals during the Crimean War. Once there, she swiftly realized that more patients were dying of infections that they caught there, in the filthy, fetid wards, than they were of battle wounds. So she campaigned for cleaner, lighter, airier clinics to be designed and built.
04:54
Back in Britain, she mounted another campaign, this time for civilian hospitals, and insisted that the same design principles were applied to them. The Nightingale ward, as it is called, dominated hospital design for decades to come, and elements of it are still used today. But by then, design was seen as a tool of the Industrial Age. It was formalized and professionalized, but it was restricted to specific roles and generally applied in pursuit of commercial goals rather than being used intuitively, as Florence Nightingale, Blackbeard and Ying Zheng had done.
05:33
By the 20th century, this commercial ethos was so powerful, that any designers who deviated from it risked being seen as cranks or subversives.
05:44
Now among them is one of my great design heroes, the brilliant László Moholy-Nagy. He was the Hungarian artist and designer whose experiments with the impact of technology on daily life were so powerful that they still influence the design of the digital images we see on our phone and computer screens. He radicalized the Bauhaus Design School in 1920s Germany, and yet some of his former colleagues shunned him when he struggled to open a new Bauhaus in Chicago years later. Moholy's ideas were as bold and incisive as ever, but his approach to design was too experimental, as was his insistence on seeing it, as he put it, as an attitude, not a profession to be in tune with the times.
06:34
And sadly, the same applied to another design maverick: Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was yet another brilliant design visionary and design activist, who was completely committed to designing a sustainable society in such a forward-thinking way that he started talking about the importance of environmentalism in design in the 1920s. Now he, despite his efforts, was routinely mocked as a crank by many in the design establishment, and admittedly, some of his experiments failed, like the flying car that never got off the ground. And yet, the geodesic dome, his design formula to build an emergency shelter from scraps of wood, metal, plastic, bits of tree, old blankets, plastic sheeting -- just about anything that's available at the time -- is one of the greatest feats of humanitarian design, and has provided sorely needed refuge to many, many people in desperate circumstances ever since.
07:38
Now, it was the courage and verve of radical designers like Bucky and Moholy that drew me to design. I began my career as a news journalist and foreign correspondent. I wrote about politics, economics and corporate affairs, and I could have chosen to specialize in any of those fields. But I picked design, because I believe it's one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to improve our quality of life.
08:07
Thank you, fellow TED design buffs.
08:11
And greatly as I admire the achievements of professional designers, which have been extraordinary and immense, I also believe that design benefits hugely from the originality, the lateral thinking and the resourcefulness of its rebels and renegades. And we're living at a remarkable moment in design, because this is a time when the two camps are coming closer together. Because even very basic advances in digital technology have enabled them to operate increasingly independently, in or out of a commercial context, to pursue ever more ambitious and eclectic objectives.
08:54
So in theory, basic platforms like crowdfunding, cloud computing, social media are giving greater freedom to professional designers and giving more resources for the improvisational ones, and hopefully, a more receptive response to their ideas.
09:12
Now, some of my favorite examples of this are in Africa, where a new generation of designers are developing incredible Internet of Things technologies to fulfill Florence Nightingale's dream of improving healthcare in countries where more people now have access to cell phones than to clean, running water.
09:32
And among them is Arthur Zang. He's a young, Cameroonian design engineer who has a adapted a tablet computer into the Cardiopad, a mobile heart-monitoring device. It can be used to monitor the hearts of patients in remote, rural areas. The data is then sent on a cellular network to well-equipped hospitals hundreds of miles away for analysis. And if any problems are spotted by the specialists there, a suitable course of treatment is recommended. And this of course saves many patients from making long, arduous, expensive and often pointless journeys to those hospitals, and makes it much, much likelier that their hearts will actually be checked.
10:17
Arthur Zang started working on the Cardiopad eight years ago, in his final year at university. But he failed to persuade any conventional sources to give him investment to get the project off the ground. He posted the idea on Facebook, where a Cameroonian government official saw it and managed to secure a government grant for him. He's now developing not only the Cardiopad, but other mobile medical devices to treat different conditions.
10:45
And he isn't alone, because there are many other inspiring and enterprising designers who are also pursuing extraordinary projects of their own. And I'm going to finish by looking at just a few of them. One is Peek Vision. This is a group of doctors and designers in Kenya, who've developed an Internet of Things technology of their own, as a portable eye examination kit. Then there's Gabriel Maher, who is developing a new design language to enable us to articulate the subtleties of our changing gender identities, without recourse to traditional stereotypes.
11:23
All of these designers and many more are pursuing their dreams, by the making the most of their newfound freedom, with the discipline of professional designers and the resourcefulness of rebels and renegades. And we all stand to benefit.
11:38
Thank you.
00:12
设计是一件难以定义，难以描述的事。 在不同时期，它的意义也不同。 但所有真正有启发性的设计作品都有一个共同点： 它们始于一个梦想。 梦想越是宏远， 所需要的设计技艺就越大胆 而这就是为什么最伟大的设计师总是 最大的梦想家、叛逆者和革新者。
00:38
这样的例子在历史中比比皆是。 300 公元前， 一个十三岁的孩子成为了 一个偏僻贫穷的亚洲小国家的君主。 他梦想通过武力征服 得到土地，财富和权利。 而他的设计能力 对他实现梦想必不可少， 尽管这听起来不可能。 那时， 所有武器都是手工制造以至于规格都不同， 所以当一个弓箭手在一场战争中射完了所有的箭， 他们不一定能用自己的弓 射出其他弓箭手的箭。 这自然意味着他们在战斗中将缺乏战斗力， 也很容易受伤。 嬴解决了这个问题。 他坚持所有弓和箭都要设计得一模一样， 这样它们就能被交换使用。 他也统一了短剑，战斧，矛，盾 及其它各种形式的武器。 他武装精良的军队打赢了一场场战斗。 在15年里， 他的小国家成功攻占了 所有更广阔，更富饶，更强大的邻国， 成为了强大的秦（中国）帝国。
01:54
如今，当然没有人 会想到把嬴政描述成那时的设计家—— 他们为什么会呢？ 但是赢在不知不觉中本能地 运用了非常巧妙的设计 实现了他的目标。 还有另一个听起来不可能，却偶然造就的设计家。 他也是用武力得到了他想要的。 他就是爱德华•蒂奇，作为英国海盗以黑胡子闻名。
02:23
这是海盗的黄金时代， 海盗威慑公海。 那时殖民贸易繁荣， 海上劫掠很是有利可图。 像蒂奇这样更加聪明的海盗意识到， 为使利益最大化， 他们要残忍地攻击敌人， 以使敌人一见到他们就投降。 也就是说， 他们可以不费一枪一弹， 不伤一兵一卒地夺取船只。
02:51
所以爱德华•蒂奇变得残忍无情， 重塑自己成为了黑胡子。 他穿沉重的外套，戴很大的帽子以突显他的身高。 他留浓密的黑胡子以模糊他的面容。 他把手枪背带搭在肩上。 他甚至把点燃的火绳系在帽檐上， 这样在海盗们准备攻击时， 火绳就会威胁着咝咝作响。 就像那个时代的很多海盗一样， 他在船上挂一面印有可怕标志的旗， 旗上有人的骷髅头骨和一对交叉着的骨头， 这些图案几百年来在很多文化中都代表着死亡， 所以即使是在公海这没有法制，没有文化的世界， 它们的含义立刻就能被理解： 投降，否则你会受到惩罚。 因此，那些明智的受害者一看到他就投降了。
03:44
这样看的话， 就很容易理解为什么 爱德华•蒂奇和他的海盗朋友们 能被当作现代传播学的设计先驱， 以及为什么他们的死亡标志
03:58
还有—— 为什么他们头骨和交叉骨头的死亡标志 会成为现今标识的前身， 而不是我身后立着的大的红色字母。 当然，这些字母传播着不同的信息。
04:11
设计也被一个同样聪慧， 同样看似不可能的设计家 用于更加崇高的目标， 她就是十九世纪的英国护士，弗洛伦斯•南丁格尔。 她以为所有人提供良好的医疗护理为使命。 南丁格尔生于英国的一个名门富有之家， 当她志愿在克里米亚战争中的军医院工作时， 她的家人都感到震惊。 一到战地医院，她很快意识到 很多病人不是死于战争受伤， 而是死于在肮脏恶臭的病房中的感染。 所以她主张设计和建造 更干净、更明亮、更通风的诊所。
04:54
回到英国后， 她发起了又一次运动， 这一次是为了建立平民医院， 并坚持使用同样的设计准则。 这所南丁格尔医院 几世纪来都对医院设计起了决定性影响， 一些原理沿用至今。 但是从那以后， 设计就被当作工业时代的一种工具。 它变得正式和专业， 但也受到了局限， 它被普遍地用于商业追求， 而不是被自然地使用， 就像被弗洛伦斯•南丁格尔，黑胡子，和嬴政的做法一样。
05:33
到二十世纪， 这种商业思维非常强大 以至于任何背离了它的设计家 都冒着被看作怪人或颠覆者的危险。
05:44
他们中有一个我崇拜的伟大设计家， 杰出的拉兹洛•莫霍利•纳吉。 他是匈牙利艺术家和设计家， 他关于科技对日常生活影响的著名实验 依然影响着 我们在手机和电脑上看到的数字图像设计 在二十世纪二十年代的德国， 他使包豪斯艺术学院变得激进， 然而几年后当他在芝加哥 努力要建一所新的包豪斯时， 他之前的一些同事都躲着他。 莫霍利拥有前所未有、大胆敏锐的想法， 但是他的设计方法太具实验性， 就如他坚持见证他的想法一样，用他的话说， 这是一种态度，而不是合时宜的一种表达。
06:34
遗憾的是，另外一位特立独行的设计者 理查德•巴克敏斯特•富勒也有同样遭遇。 他还是一位优秀的的设计预见者和设计活动家。 他致力于设计一个可持续发展的社会。 这种设计思维那么具有前瞻性， 以至于在二十世纪二十年代 他就开始讨论环境保护在设计中的重要性。 虽然他如此努力 但他一直被很多人嘲笑为设计领域的怪人。 诚然， 他的一些实验失败了， 比如从没有飞起来的飞行汽车。 但他用来建造紧急庇护所的设计方案， 也就是用木片、金属、塑料 小块的树木、旧毯子、塑料薄膜 几乎是那时任何可用的东西 建成的测量圆屋顶，是最伟大的人道设计之一 此后给在绝境中的无数人提供了亟需的庇护。
07:38
如今，巴克和莫霍利 这些激进设计家的勇气和热情 在吸引我深入设计领域。 我开始工作时是一个新闻记者和国外通讯记者。 我写政治、经济、商业事务 本可以选择专攻其中的任一领域。 但是我选择了设计， 因为我相信它是我们可以使用 以提高生活质量的最有力工具之一。
08:07
谢谢，同为TED的设计爱好者们。
08:11
就像我欣赏专业设计家 非凡绝妙的成就一样， 我同样相信 设计很大程度上受益于独创能力， 水平思考， 还有反抗者和叛逆者的足智多谋。 我们正生活在设计领域中引人注目的时刻， 因为这正是两个阵营正在越走越近的时刻。 因为甚至是数字科技中最基本的进步 已能使它们逐渐独立地运用于 追求更有抱负、更不拘一格的目标， 不管是否在商业环境中。
08:54
所以从理论上来说， 像众筹，云计算，社交媒体这样的基本平台 正在给专业设计师们提供更大的自由空间， 也给即兴设计师们提供了更多的资源， 同时希望能更加愿意接受他们的想法。
09:12
我最喜欢的一些例子在非洲， 在那里新一代的设计家们 正在开发难以置信的医疗设备互联网科技 以实现弗洛伦斯•南丁格尔改善医疗保健的梦想， 在这些国家中，人们能接触到手机的机会 比用到干净的自来水还要多。
09:32
这些设计师中就有亚瑟 张， 一个喀麦隆年轻的设计工程师， 他把平板电脑变成了Cardiopad， 一种移动心脏监测设备。 它可以用来监测偏远农村地区的病人的心脏。 数据通过蜂窝网络 传送到几百英里外设备齐全的医院 用于分析。 如果那里的专家识别到任何问题， 就会推荐合适的治疗方法。 这当然省去了很多病人 为去医院做的昂贵、无意义检查的长途跋涉 并使他们的心脏 其实更有可能接受检查。
10:17
张亚瑟八年前开始研究Cardiopad， 那是他在大学的最后一年。 但是他没能从任何传统途径 获得投资以启动项目。 他在脸书网上公布了他的想法， 一个喀麦隆政府官员看到了公告 并成功为他担保了一笔政府拨款。 亚瑟现在不仅在研究Cardiopad， 还有针对不同情况的其它移动医疗设备。
10:45
他并不是一个人， 因为还有很多其他激励人心富有想象力的设计家 在推行他们自己不同凡响的项目。 最后让我们看看其中一些。 有一个是Peek Vision。 这是在肯尼亚的一组医生和设计家， 他们开发出了自己的医疗设备互联网 用于便携式眼科诊断。 还有加布里埃尔•马赫， 他正在开发一种新的设计语言 使我们不用依赖传统形象 就能表达正在改变的性别认同的细微之处。
11:23
大量这样的设计家正在通过更多新获得的自由 追寻梦想， 带着专业设计家的准则 和叛逆者、革新者的足智多谋。 我们都从中获益。
11:38
谢谢。
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