Micheal Braungart told his story about cradle to cradle, I’d already seen the Tegenlicht episode about cradle to cradle so I knew the story. I think he is mostly trying to achieve a perspective change in the audience, although I thought it would have been nice to hear something of the progress of cradle to cradle, is Nike changing more shoes into cradle to cradle products?

The second speaker was a demolition expert, Mark Loizeaux, and he showed a very impressive video of buildings being blown up, but the most interesting thing about his talk was that they used a buildings hidden energy, for example a ceiling is being pulled down by gravity and kept in its place by support. If the support is taken out the ceiling will collapse using the energy already stored in the building. I can’t think of any other places where hidden energy can be used to accomplish a task, but it is a nice idea and probably applicable in other situations.

Dave Blank explained about nano technology and about it’s possibilities, certain materials properties can be changed completely by nano technology (for example by combining two materials at moleculair level). This could potentially help us deal with resource shortages.

Another interesting talk was a dutch architect (didn’t write down his name) who related declining social interaction in cities with how we have been building our cities since the second world war. Which is mainly focussing on the accessibility to cars, so his solution was a piramide city of 1 square kilometre in which 100,000 people could live and cars can only be used to reach the city center (underground or the city is above it) within the city limits no cars would be possible. Houses are situated at the top all around squares while shops and office buildings would be below the houses. The city could burn it’s waste to produce power. I think it is interesting to look at the impact of the car on our cities and how we expand them. It was however clear he was an emergency speaker and did not hve sufficient time to prepare his talk.

An origami artist, Robert J. Lang, explained the history of origami (it’s about 200 years old), how more recently mathematical formulea were found to help create shapes with origami. These could later be implemented in computer programs to allow the creation of even more complex origami creations. Now this didn’t seem all to interesting to me until he started talking about the applications of origami, it is currently being used in space flight to fold solar arrays for transportation and then unfold them in space, it can be used in medicine to insert small parts and unfold them in the human body and last, origami is used to calculate the best way to fold air bags, so they expand properly and take as little room as possible.

For the other speakers I had written down only a few things, there was a balance artist who balanced numerous wooden jungle leave thingies (seriously no idea how to call it), he kept them perfectly balanced until he removed the smallest one when everything collapsed, it made me realize how seemingly stable systems can so easily be brought out of balance. Someone else showed showed seemingly stable structures (figures) in flowing water. About languages we were told a lot are dissapearing and there are 6,000 languages left, this sounded as still way too many to me, so I actually think we can lose a few thousand languages still.

There were also a few personal stories, the most impressive was an american boy who lost his eyes to cancer at the age of two, had learned to understand his surroundings by making clicking sounds. He had learned to create a 3 dimensional world from sound instead of from vision as people with sight do.