We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Form follows social function
The tragic reality of most sustainability messaging is that it hangs haplessly somewhere between forgettable and toothless. UK-based nonprofit Do The Green Thing is a bold exception. Founded by a team of creative industry expats, business leaders and environmental experts, DDGT aims to fight ...
Urban farming has been one of the biggest socio-environmental trends of late. But, so far, it's been a fairly high-commitment, high-maintenance game requiring a demanding amount of time, resources and knowledge. Now, Los Angeles startup Home Grown Micro Farms is offering urbanites the joys of a ...
Bottled water is one of the environmental movement's biggest scapegoats – and for a reason: Only about 10% of plastic bottles are recycled; the rest end up in landfills, or at their most tragic, as the gruesome killers of wildlife. Recycling, of course, is only a marginal solution, as it too ...
Every year, The Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards a $100,000 prize to a project that has the potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems and significantly improve human quality of life. The competition was inspired by the legendary architect and futurist's guiding principle: "To make the ...
Childbirth may be the miracle of life, but its practical reality is grounded in a set of rather utilitarian necessities that ensure the mother and baby's health and survival. While hospitals in the developed world have streamlined the childbirth process, from basic hygiene to postnatal care, in ...
What happens when an artist loses his or her creative currency – the capacity for self-expression? That's exactly what happened to legendary Los Angeles graffiti artist Tony Quan, a.k.a. Tempt One, when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease ...
Over the past decade, Creative Commons has been the most important link between creativity and copyright law, championing a new breed of licenses that use the law to propel, rather than hinder, creative collaboration and shareability. This week, the nonprofit launched The Catalyst Campaign – an ...
A few weeks ago, we looked at how designers were revolutionizing sight for the vision-impaired. Today, we focus on another kind of sensory disability -- can design make deaf people hear music? Previous efforts in this direction have taken the obvious approach -- leveraging one of the other ...
In March, Sunlight Labs announced Design for America -- a 10-week design and data visualization contest aiming to connect the creative community with the increasing amounts of public data produced by the burgeoning open data movement, making government data more accessible and digestible for the ...
As media and communication technology continue to evolve, the question on everyone's minds is how do we harness this innovation and its capacity to improve lives, foster social good and better the world? Change Connections , a new partnership between Nokia and The Feast social innovation conference ...
In the age of greenwashing and eco-everything, it's becoming increasingly hard to standardize and fairly assess what constitutes a green product. The USDA has attempted to do this for food with its organic labeling system and the architecture world has its LEED certification for buildings, though ...
There's hardly a feat of industrial design more emblematic of consumerism than the vending machine. But while vending machines may perpetuate a number of social ills – from conspiculous consumption to obesity to the cold commodification of goods – but it's hard to deny their extreme efficiency of ...
Today, we're doing something a bit different. Instead of focusing on a specific design-for-good product or idea, let's focus on why it's important to talk about these products and ideas in the first place. Over the past few weeks, some of today's smartest design writers have raised what is an ...
Over the past couple of years, marine sustainability has risen to the top of the environmental movement's concerns -- from sustainable seafood policies for retailers to cultural landmarks like $100,000 prize TED awarded ocean researcher Sylvaia Earle in 2009 for her efforts to protect the oceans ...
Earlier, we noted the paradox of brilliantly innovative design-for-good concepts that never materialize into the mass market. Today, we're turning to a new platform that seeks to battle precisely that: Kopernik , a new portal that connects innovative designs and technologies with the communities ...