Here’s a bit from us about the TEDxCanberra talk. Questions by David (currently overseas), to Jack and Michael.
First of all, here’s the video of the talk:
The full production script from the talk can be downloaded here.
David: How did this talk come about?
Jack: We had an email by Stephen Collins, the TEDxCanberra organiser, who very kindly offered us a spot on the bill. Not sure who nominated us but very grateful to whoever it was.
Michael: We’d also like to thank Dr David Newth and Dr John Finnigan from the CSIRO Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Research for their help in getting us focused in the early stages of scripting.
D: What was the approach to producing this work?
J: The first thing we looked at was areas where TED talks and our usual work met. We had to be careful to ensure that what we were doing was a performance rather than a talk, and that the focus was on interpretation rather than explanation. None of the research itself is ours – and most of it had to be ludicrously simplified to keep each section down to a minute – so the task was to identify a good progression of simple ideas which led to the conclusion – that ignoring complex systems will basically kill us all. Then we set to thinking about ways we could get creative in communicating those ideas.