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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
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Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Form follows social function
In rural India, over half of all households don't have electricity. To light households and power commercial equipment, villages use kerosene lanterns, which are both expensive and environmentally harmful. But there seems to be a smarter, cheaper, more sustainable alternative to electricity. Husk ...
Trypanophobia – the extreme, irrational fear of needles – is said to affect 10% of American adults. And then there are the merely squeamish ones, for whom getting a shot may not be a panic-attack-inducing experience, but is certainly an unpleasant one. Now, a new flu vaccine patch developed by ...
Whether or not there is a creativity crisis may be up for debate, but one thing is clear: Our current education system is failing to create an environment that truly fosters creativity and engages the various components of its making – play, collaboration, flexibility, multi-modal stimulation. Now ...
The average person flushes more than 7,000 liters of water down the toilet every year. With more than half of the world's population using flushable toilets, this amounts to trillions of liters of water per year practically wasted. British industrial design student Tom Broadbent is hoping to change ...
In 2008, filmmaker and activist Annie Leonard launched The Story of Stuff – an ambitious animated web film aimed at raising awareness about the various systems of consumption and creating an enlightened public discourse around ecological sustainability through a new kind of storytelling. Since then ...
If you knew exactly how much electricity your home consumed, would you be more mindful of your carbon footprint and adjust your habits to lower consumption? Textile designer Cecil Marcq hopes so in her Inconspicuous Matter project – an electro-reactive wallpaper that visualizes electrical energy ...
Brooklyn-based design studio Hyperakt operates under the admirable slogan of "Meaningful Design for the Common Good" – a commitment to only work with companies whose products and services create positive change in the world. Having worked with clients as diverse yet uniformly pro-social as the ...
We've covered various design solutions for the vision-impaired. But what about the hearing-impaired? While the sight is visual in nature and thus more organically linked to design, can the auditory sense be addressed through this inherently visual medium? Babelfisk , an ingenious concept ...
Every year, millions of women and children across Southeast Asia are being enslaved and exploited in the multimillion-dollar human trafficking industry. This is one of the largest-scale human rights violations in the modern world, with an estimated 600,000 to 820,000 people trafficked annually ...
Over the past few months, we've looked at how designers are addressing the vision-impaired – from low-cost eyeglasses to Braille-inspired obejcts for the blind to an innovative diagnostic test using a cheap cell phone. Today, we look at a design approach to a vision problem often perceived as much ...
In 2007, papermaker Stora Enso commissioned six leading designers – Paula Scher, Marian Bantjes, Christoph Niemann, Bruce McCall, Michael C. Place and Winterhouse – to create a series of posters around the word "sustainability." The six took wildly different approaches, from the aesthetically ...
A new partnership between design hotshop IDEO and furniture-maker Steelcase aims to address one of the biggest design challenges of traditional classrooms – the static, linear and restrictive nature of face-forward teaching, which makes for passive, one-way learning. Introduced at this month's ...
2010 is barely halfway through and it's already been the most disastrous year in modern history. Suddenly, disaster relief becomes not just a playground of humanitarian agency manifestos but a real, palpable point of life-or-death difference. There is hardly a greater test of design than in ...
Last month, we looked at a design vision for sight – how designers are revolutionizing low-cost corrective eyewear. This month, a new device out of MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture group utilizes one of the most rapidly proliferating technologies in the developing world – mobile phones – to make the ...
Last year, betacup extended a challenge to the creative community to rethink the coffee cup from a sustainable angle that eliminates the 58 million disposable cups America tosses in the (non-recycle) garbage in an average year. This week, betacup announced the winner, which beat out 430 entries for ...