I am no designer, nope, no way.
My dad was, which is kind of an interesting way to grow up.
I had to figure out what it is my dad did and why it was important.
Dad talked a lot about bad design when we were growing up, you know, "Bad design is just people not thinking, John," he would say whenever a kid would be injured by a rotary lawn mower or, say, a typewriter ribbon would get tangled or an eggbeater would get jammed in the kitchen.
You know, "Design -- bad design, there's just no excuse for it.
It's letting stuff happen without thinking about it.
Every object should be about something, John.
It should imagine a user.
It should cast that user in a story starring the user and the object.
Good design," my dad said, "is about supplying intent."
That's what he said.
Dad helped design the control panels for the IBM 360 computer.
That was a big deal; that was important.
He worked for Kodak for a while; that was important.
He designed chairs and desks and other office equipment for Steelcase; that was important.
I knew design was important in my house because, for heaven's sake, it put food on our table, right?
And design was in everything my dad did.
He had a Dixieland jazz band when we were growing up, and he would always cover Louis Armstrong tunes.
And I would ask him every once in a while, "Dad, do you want it to sound like the record?"
We had lots of old jazz records lying around the house.
And he said, "No, never, John, never.
The song is just a given, that's how you have to think about it.
You gotta make it your own.
You gotta design it.
Show everyone what you intend," is what he said.
"Doing that, acting by design, is what we all should be doing.
It's where we all belong."
All of us?
Designers?
Oh, oh, Dad.
Oh, Dad.
The song is just a given.
It's how you cover it that matters.
Well, let's hold on to that thought for just a minute.
It's kind of like this wheelchair I'm in, right?
The original tune?
It's a little scary.
"Ooh, what happened to that dude?
He can't walk.
Anybody know the story?
Anybody?"
I don't like to talk about this very much, but I'll tell you guys the story today.
All right, exactly 36 years ago this week, that's right, I was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in Pennsylvania, and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car.
But ever since then, the wheelchair has been a given in my life.
My life, at the mercy of good design and bad design.
Think about it.
Now, in design terms, a wheelchair is a very difficult object.
It mostly projects tragedy and fear and misfortune, and it projects that message, that story, so strongly that it almost blots out anything else.
I roll swiftly through an airport, right?
And moms grab their kids out of the way and say, "Don't stare!"
The poor kid, you know, has this terrified look on his face, God knows what they think.
And for decades, I'm going, why does this happen?
What can I do about it?
How can I change this?
I mean there must be something.
So I would roll, I'd make no eye contact -- just kinda frown, right?
Or I'd dress up really, really sharply or something.
Or I'd make eye contact with everyone -- that was really creepy; that didn't madeline68@example.org.
(Laughter) You know anything, I'd try.
I wouldn't shower for a week -- nothing worked.
Nothing whatsoever worked until a few years ago, my six-year-old daughters were looking at this wheelchair catalog that I had, and they said, "Oh, Dad!
Dad!
Look, you gotta get these, these flashy wheels -- you gotta get 'em!"
And I said, "Oh, girls, Dad is a very important journalist, that just wouldn't madeline68@example.org."
And of course, they immediately concluded, "Oh, what a bummer, Dad.
Journalists aren't allowed to have flashy wheels.
I mean, how important could you be then?" they said.
I went, "Wait a minute, all right, right -- I'll get the wheels."
Purely out of protest, I got the flashy wheels, and I installed them and -- check this out.
Could I have my special light cue please?
(Laughter) Look at that!
Now ... look at, look at this!
Look at this!
So what you are looking at here has completely changed my life, I mean totally changed my life.
Instead of blank stares and awkwardness, now it is pointing and smiling!
People going, "Awesome wheels, dude!
Those are awesome!
I mean, I want some of those wheels!"
Little kids say, "Can I have a ride?"
(Laughter) And of course there's the occasional person -- usually a middle-aged male who will say, "Oh, those wheels are great!
I guess they're for safety, right?"
(Laughter) No!
They're not for safety.
No, no, no, no, no.
What's the difference here, the wheelchair with no lights and the wheelchair with lights?
The difference is intent.
That's right, that's right; I'm no longer a victim.
I chose to change the situation -- I'm the Commander of the Starship Wheelchair with the phaser wheels in the front.
Right?
Intent changes the picture completely.
I choose to enhance this rolling experience with a simple design element.
Acting with intent.
It conveys authorship.
It suggests that someone is driving.
It's reassuring; people are drawn to it.
Someone making the experience their own.
Covering the tragic tune with something different, something radically different.
People respond to that.
Now it seems simple, but actually I think in our society and culture in general, we have a huge problem with intent.
Now go with me here.
Look at this guy.
You know who this is?
It's Anders Breivik.
Now, if he intended to kill in Olso, Norway last year, dozens and dozens of young people -- if he intended to do that, he's a vicious criminal.
We punish him.
Life in prison.
Death penalty in the United States, not so much in Norway.
But, if he instead acted out of a delusional fantasy, if he was motivated by some random mental illness, he's in a completely different category.
We may put him away for life, but we watch him clinically.
It's a completely different domain.
As an intentional murderer, Anders Breivik is merely evil.
But as a dysfunctional, as a dysfunctional murderer/psychotic, he's something much more complicated.
He's the breath of some primitive, ancient chaos.
He's the random state of nature we emerged from.
He's something very, very different.
It's as though intent is an essential component for humanity.
It's what we're supposed to do somehow.
We're supposed to act with intent.
We're supposed to do things by design.
Intent is a marker for civilization.
Now here's an example a little closer to home: My family is all about intent.
You can probably tell there are two sets of twins, the result of IVF technology, in vitro fertilization technology, due to some physical limitations I won't go into.
Anyway, in vitro technology, IVF, is about as intentional as agriculture.
Let me tell you, some of you may have the experience.
In fact, the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian.
I met the dude.
He's a great guy.
He carried this big leather bag full of sperm probes for all of the animals that he'd worked with, all the different animals.
Probes he designed, and in fact, he was really, really proud of these probes.
He would say, "You're right between horse and squirrel, John."
(Laughter) But anyway, so when my wife and I decided to upgrade our early middle age -- we had four kids, after all -- with a little different technology that I won't explain in too much detail here -- my urologist assured me I had nothing whatsoever to worry about.
"No need for birth control, Doc, are you sure about that?"
"John, John, I looked at your chart.
From your sperm tests we can confidently say that you're basically a form of birth control."
Well!
(Laughter) What a liberating thought!
Yes!
And after a couple very liberating weekends, my wife and I, utilizing some cutting-edge erectile technology that is certainly worthy of a TEDTalk someday but I won't get into it now, we noticed some familiar, if unexpected, symptoms.
I wasn't exactly a form of birth control.
Look at that font there.
My wife was so pissed.
I mean, did a designer come up with that?
No, I don't think a designer did come up with that.
In fact, maybe that's the problem.
And so, little Ajax was born.
He's like our other children, but the experience is completely different.
It's something like my accident, right?
He came out of nowhere.
But we all had to change, but not just react to the given; we bend to this new experience with intent.
We're five now.
Five.
Facing the given with intent.
Doing things by design.
Hey, the name Ajax -- you can't get much more intentional than that, right?
We're really hoping he thanks us for that later on.
(Laughter) But I never became a designer.
No, no, no, no.
Never attempted.
Never even close.
I did love some great designs as I was growing up: The HP 35S calculator -- God, I loved that thing.
Oh God, I wish I had one.
Man, I love that thing.
I could afford that.
Other designs I really couldn't afford, like the 1974 911 Targa.
In school, I studied nothing close to design or engineering; I studied useless things like the Classics, but there were some lessons even there -- this guy, Plato, it turns out he's a designer.
He designed a state in "The Republic," a design never implemented.
Listen to one of the design features of Plato's Government 4.0: "The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst."
Well, got that wrong, didn't we?
But look at that statement; it's all about intent.
That's what I love about it.
But consider what Plato is doing here.
What is he doing?
It's a grand idea of design -- a huge idea of design, common to all of the voices of religion and philosophy that emerged in the Classical period.
What was going on then?
They were trying to answer the question of what would human beings do now that they were no longer simply trying to survive?
As the human race emerged from a prehistoric chaos, a confrontation with random, brutal nature, they suddenly had a moment to think -- and there was a lot to think about.
All of a sudden, human existence needed an intent.
Human life needed a reason.
Reality itself needed a designer.
The given was replaced by various aspects of intent, by various designs, by various gods.
Gods we're still fighting about.
Oh yeah.
Today we don't confront the chaos of nature.
Today it is the chaos of humanity's impact on the Earth itself that we confront.
This young discipline called design, I think, is in fact the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question: What shall we do now in the face of the chaos that we have created?
What shall we do?
How shall we inscribe intent on all the objects we create, on all the circumstances we create, on all the places we change?
The consequences of a planet with 7 billion people and counting.
That's the tune we're all covering today, all of us.
And we can't just imitate the past.
No.
That won't do.
That won't madeline68@example.org.
Here's my favorite design moment: In the city of Kinshasa in Zaire in the 1990s, I was working for ABC News, and I was reporting on the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator, the brutal dictator in Zaire, who raped and pillaged that country.
There was rioting in the middle of Kinshasa.
The place was falling apart; it was a horrible, horrible place, and I needed to go and explore the center of Kinshasa to report on the rioting and the looting.
People were carrying off vehicles, carrying off pieces of buildings.
Soldiers were in the streets shooting at looters and herding some in mass arrests.
In the middle of this chaos, I'm rolling around in a wheelchair, and I was completely invisible.
Completely.
I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a looter.
I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a journalist, particularly, at least from their perspective.
And I didn't look like a soldier, that's for sure.
I was part of this sort of background noise of the misery of Zaire, completely invisible.
And all of a sudden, from around a corner, comes this young man, paralyzed, just like me, in this metal and wood and leather pedal, three-wheel tricycle-wheelchair device, and he pedals up to me as fast as he can.
He goes, "Hey, mister!
Mister!"
And I looked at him -- he didn't know any other English than that, but we didn't need English, no, no, no, no, no.
We sat there and compared wheels and tires and spokes and tubes.
And I looked at his whacky pedal mechanism; he was full of pride over his design.
I wish I could show you that contraption.
His smile, our glow as we talked a universal language of design, invisible to the chaos around us.
His machine: homemade, bolted, rusty, comical.
My machine: American-made, confident, sleek.
He was particularly proud of the comfortable seat, really comfortable seat he had made in his chariot and its beautiful fabric fringe around the edge.
Oh, I wish I'd had those sparkly wheels back then to have shown him, man!
He would have loved those!
Oh yeah.
He would have understood those; a chariot of pure intent -- think about it -- in a city out of control.
Design blew it all away for a moment.
We spoke for a few minutes and then each of us vanished back into the chaos.
He went back to the streets of Kinshasa; I went to my hotel.
And I think of him now, now ...
And I pose this question.
An object imbued with intent -- it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it.
An object devoid of intent -- it's random, it's imitative, it repels us.
It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away.
This is what we must demand of our lives, of our objects, of our things, of our circumstances: living with intent.
And I have to say that on that score, I have a very unfair advantage over all of you.
And I want to explain it to you now because this is a very special day.
Thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment, a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question, but the nurse was already there with an answer.
"You've had a terrible accident, young man.
You've broken your back.
You'll never walk again."
I said, "I know all that -- what day is it?"
You see, I knew that the car had gone over the guardrail on the 28th of February, and I knew that 1976 was a leap year.
"Nurse!
Is this the 28th or the 29th?"
And she looked at me and said, "It's March 1st."
And I went, "Oh my God.
I've got some catching up to do!"
And from that moment, I knew the given was that accident; I had no option but to make up this new life without walking.
Intent -- a life with intent -- lived by design, covering the original with something better.
It's something for all of us to do or find a way to do in these times.
To get back to this, to get back to design, and as my daddy suggested a long time ago, "Make the song your own, John.
Show everybody what you intend."
Daddy, this one's for you.
(Music) ♫ Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner ♫ ♫ but he was another man. ♫ ♫ Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona to attend a California bash. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ (Applause)
After breaking Ethic out of prison, Hedge flies them both towards a frontier settlement in the shadow of the Bradbarrier, the great wall that encircles the nation.
All the settlers there will soon gather for the monthly feeding.
The people of the wall spend their days gathering up works of art and literature, from all across the land.
On feeding day, the furnace-bots arrive, ravenous.
If they eat, the lights stay on, and the food gets delivered.
If they starve, the people do too.
Hedge’s fuel supply runs out just as he and Ethic reach the outskirts of town, and they come in for a crash landing.
Luckily, everyone is too busy preparing for the feeding to notice.
Today’s feeding is where Ethic can find the leader of an underground resistance movement.
This person knows the location of the first of three powerful artifacts.
The problem is, Hedge and Ethic don’t know the resistance leader’s name or appearance.
But Hedge has gathered the following information: The leader has green eyes.
If the leader has red hair, their name has at least one consecutive double letter.
If the leader wear glasses, their name has exactly 2 vowels.
Otherwise, their name has exactly 3 vowels.
There is exactly one person for whom these are all true.
As a fugitive, Ethic can’t sneak into the crowd without drawing attention to herself.
But she can give instructions to Hedge.
And one tool she has is what programmers call a conditional.
That’s a statement of the form “If A, then B.”
Flowcharts are great illustrations of how those work.
This conditional translates to: if A is true, carry out instruction B.
There are also conditionals that account for different possibilities.
This says, “If A is true, perform instruction B.
Otherwise, carry out instruction C.”
So what instructions does she give Hedge so he can find the resistance leader?
Pause now to figure it out for yourself.
With a problem like this, it can help to simplify first.
What if Hedge just has to examine this one person?
What information does he need to collect about her?
He might ask, “Does she have green eyes?”
What other questions should Hedge ask to find the resistance leader, and how can he track those answers?
Pause now to figure it out for yourself.
It may seem intuitive how you’d approach this problem as a human.
But Hedge isn’t a human, and so the challenge comes from needing to give him systematic instructions that will work in any scenario.
Hedge needs to examine the settlers, one at a time, until he discovers the right person.
In other words, like with the lock on the prison cell, this is a loop that repeats the same instructions.
Only this time the loop will involve a series of questions in the form of conditionals, and will end as soon as Hedge finds his target.
But first, you’ll want to organize your information.
Each person has a set of characteristics: Eye color, hair color, glasses, and name.
Does this person have green eyes?
If so, mark a check next to “eye color."
If not, mark an X there.
If they have red hair, does their name contain a double letter?
If so, mark a check next to “hair color.”
If they don’t have a double letter, mark an X next to “hair color.”
Anyone with red hair and no double letter can’t be the resistance leader.
But notice that if they have blue hair, Hedge will skip this question and go on to the next one.
For the last question, we can say, “If they wear glasses, does their name have exactly 2 vowels?
If they don’t have glasses, does their name have exactly 3 vowels?”
There will be people in the crowd with glasses and 1 vowel, or no glasses and 2 vowels.
But they’re not who we’re looking for, so they’ll get X’s.
The resistance leader must be someone with either check marks or blanks next to every question.
Blanks are ok, because if someone has blue hair, the rule about red hair doesn’t apply to them.
You could have Hedge ask every question about every person, and then choose the person with only checks and blanks.
But there’s a way to save yourself lots of time: as soon as Hedge marks an X, have him move on to the next person.
You don’t need to know the answer to every question; just one X means they’re not the target of your search.
Hedge buzzes through the crowd, and within minutes finds Adila, the resistance leader, and brings her back to Ethic.
Adila agrees to help them steal the first artifact— the node of power— but under one condition: that Ethic and Hedge jump-start the revolution by reprogramming the furnace-bots that terrorize the town.
And right on cue, the robots descend.
If you line up the entire text of "Moby Dick," which was published in 1851, into a giant rectangle, you may notice some peculiar patterns, like these words, which seem to predict the assassination of Martin Luther King, or these references to the 1997 death of Princess Di.
So, was Herman Melville a secret prophet?
The answer is no, and we know that thanks to a mathematical principle called Ramsey theory.
It's the reason we can find geometric shapes in the night sky, it's why we can know without checking that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head, and it explains why patterns can be found in just about any text, even Vanilla Ice lyrics.
So what is Ramsey theory?
Simply put, it states that given enough elements in a set or structure, some particular interesting pattern among them is guaranteed to emerge.
As a simple example, let's look at what's called the party problem, a classic illustration of Ramsey theory.
Suppose there are at least six people at a party.
Amazingly enough, we can say for sure that some group of three of them either all know each other, or have never met before, without knowing a single thing about them.
We can demonstrate that by graphing out all the possibilities.
Each point represents a person, and a line indicates that the pair know each other.
Every pair only has two possibilities: they either know each other or they don't.
There are a lot of possibilities, but every single one has the property that we're looking for.
Six is the lowest number of guests where that's guaranteed to be the case, which we can express like this.
Ramsey theory gives us a guarantee that such a minimum number exists for certain patterns, but no easy way to find it.
In this case, as the total number of guests grows higher, the combinations get out of control.
For instance, say you're trying to find out the minimum size of a party where there's a group of five people who all know each other or all don't.
Despite five being a small number, the answer is virtually impossible to discover through an exhaustive search like this.
That's because of the sheer volume of possibilities.
A party with 48 guests has 2^(1128) possible configurations, more than the number of atoms in the Universe.
Even with the help of computers, the best we know is that the answer to this question is somewhere between 43 and 49 guests.
What this shows us is that specific patterns with seemingly astronomical odds can emerge from a relatively small set.
And with a very large set, the possibilities are almost endless.
Any four stars where no three lie in a straight line will form some quadrilateral shape.
Expand that to the thousands of stars we can see in the sky, and it's no surprise that we can find all sorts of familiar shapes, and even creatures if we look for them.
So what are the chances of a text concealing a prophecy?
Well, when you factor in the number of letters, the variety of possible related words, and all their abbreviations and alternate spellings, they're pretty high.
You can try it yourself.
Just pick a favorite text, arrange the letters in a grid, and see what you can find.
The mathematician T.S. Motzkin once remarked that, "while disorder is more probable in general, complete disorder is impossible."
The sheer size of the Universe guarantees that some of its random elements will fall into specific arrangements, and because we evolved to notice patterns and pick out signals among the noise, we are often tempted to find intentional meaning where there may not be any.
So while we may be awed by hidden messages in everything from books, to pieces of toast, to the night sky, their real origin is usually our own minds.
My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago.
I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali.
And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic "The Mahabharata."
So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky.
Now we do the same with airplanes.
Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out.
Now we do the same with drills and machines.
The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery.
And this made me really sad.
I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe.
I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends.
And it felt like technology should enable magic, not kill it.
When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch.
And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me.
It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination.
So I felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming.
They stopped us from being inspired.
And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it.
I've been illustrating books since I was 16.
And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world.
It can know how we're holding it.
It can know where we are.
It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch.
Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial.
But what are we doing with it?
So I'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya, an interactive app for the iPad.
So it says, "Place your fingers upon each light."
And so -- (Music) It says, "This box belongs to ... "
And so I type in my name.
And actually I become a character in the book.
At various points, a little letter drops down to me -- and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS -- which is actually addressed to me.
The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities.
Now I've been talking a lot about magic.
And I don't mean wizards and dragons, I mean the kind of childhood magic, those ideas that we all harbored as children.
This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason, was always really exciting to me.
And so over here you need to tilt your iPad, take the fireflies out.
And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book.
Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble.
And so over here, each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device.
And it opens up a map.
All along, all fantasy books have always had maps, but these maps have been static.
This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book.
It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well.
So I'm just going to enter in.
Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary.
Over here, these are the Apsaras.
So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras?
These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book.
And so we're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children.
And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis.
(Music) Speaking of the environmental crisis, I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out.
But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology.
One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects.
When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells.
And somehow kids don't do that anymore.
So in bringing back this childhood ritual, you need to go out and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower and then tag it.
In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that.
And what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online.
A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, "Oh, I saw a fox today."
A child in India says, "I saw a monkey today."
And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you've actually taken.
In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities.
In the next book, we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality, you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that's outside your house.
At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves.
And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book.
We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together.
We're harnessing energy from the sun.
We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story.
Thank you.
(Applause)