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Design is a slippery and elusive phenomenon,
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which has meant different things at different times.
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But all truly inspiring design projects have one thing in common:
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they began with a dream.
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And the bolder the dream,
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the greater the design feat that will be required to achieve it.
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And this is why the greatest designers are almost always
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the biggest dreamers and rebels and renegades.
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This has been the case throughout history,
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all the way back to the year 300 BC,
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when a 13-year-old became the king
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of a remote, very poor and very small Asian country.
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He dreamt of acquiring land, riches and power
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through military conquest.
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And his design skills --
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improbable though it sounds --
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would be essential in enabling him to do so.
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At the time,
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all weapons were made by hand to different specifications.
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So if an archer ran out of arrows during a battle,
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they wouldn't necessarily be able to fire another archer's arrows
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from their bow.
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This of course meant that they would be less effective in combat
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and very vulnerable, too.
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Ying solved this problem
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by insisting that all bows and arrows were designed identically,
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so they were interchangeable.
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And he did the same for daggers, axes, spears, shields
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and every other form of weaponry.
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His formidably equipped army won batter after battle,
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and within 15 years,
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his tiny kingdom had succeeded in conquering
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all its larger, richer, more powerful neighbors,
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to found the mighty Chinese Empire.
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Now, no one, of course,
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would have thought of describing Ying Zheng as a designer at the time --
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why would they?
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And yet he used design unknowingly and instinctively
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but with tremendous ingenuity
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to achieve his ends.
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And so did another equally improbable, accidental designer,
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who was also not above using violence to get what he wanted.
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This was Edward Teach, better known as the British pirate, Blackbeard.
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This was the golden age of piracy,
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where pirates like Teach were terrorizing the high seas.
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Colonial trade was flourishing,
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and piracy was highly profitable.
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And the smarter pirates like him realized that to maximize their spoils,
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they needed to attack their enemies so brutally
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that they would surrender on sight.
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So in other words,
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they could take the ships without wasting ammunition,
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or incurring casualties.
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So Edward Teach redesigned himself as Blackbeard
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by playing the part of a merciless brute.
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He wore heavy jackets and big hats to accentuate his height.
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He grew the bushy black beard that obscured his face.
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He slung braces of pistols on either shoulder.
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He even attached matches to the brim of his hat and set them alight,
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so they sizzled menacingly whenever his ship was poised to attack.
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And like many pirates of that era,
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he flew a flag that bore the macabre symbols
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of a human skull and a pair of crossed bones,
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because those motifs had signified death in so many cultures for centuries,
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that their meaning was instantly recognizable,
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even in the lawless, illiterate world of the high seas:
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surrender or you'll suffer.
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So of course, all his sensible victims surrendered on sight.
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Put like that,
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it's easy to see why Edward Teach and his fellow pirates
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could be seen as pioneers of modern communications design,
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and why their deadly symbol --
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(Laughter)
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there's more --
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why their deadly symbol of the skull and crossbones
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was a precursor of today's logos,
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rather like the big red letters standing behind me,
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but of course with a different message.
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(Laughter)
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Yet design was also used to nobler ends
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by an equally brilliant and equally improbable designer,
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the 19th-century British nurse, Florence Nightingale.
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Her mission was to provide decent healthcare for everyone.
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Nightingale was born into a rather grand, very wealthy British family,
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who were horrified when she volunteered to work in military hospitals
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during the Crimean War.
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Once there, she swiftly realized
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that more patients were dying of infections that they caught there,
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in the filthy, fetid wards,
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than they were of battle wounds.
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So she campaigned for cleaner, lighter, airier clinics
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to be designed and built.
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Back in Britain,
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she mounted another campaign,
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this time for civilian hospitals,
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and insisted that the same design principles were applied to them.
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The Nightingale ward, as it is called,
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dominated hospital design for decades to come,
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and elements of it are still used today.
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But by then,
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design was seen as a tool of the Industrial Age.
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It was formalized and professionalized,
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but it was restricted to specific roles
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and generally applied in pursuit of commercial goals
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rather than being used intuitively,
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as Florence Nightingale, Blackbeard and Ying Zheng had done.
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By the 20th century,
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this commercial ethos was so powerful,
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that any designers who deviated from it
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risked being seen as cranks or subversives.
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Now among them is one of my great design heroes,
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the brilliant László Moholy-Nagy.
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He was the Hungarian artist and designer
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whose experiments with the impact of technology on daily life
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were so powerful
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that they still influence the design of the digital images
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we see on our phone and computer screens.
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He radicalized the Bauhaus Design School in 1920s Germany,
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and yet some of his former colleagues shunned him
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when he struggled to open a new Bauhaus in Chicago years later.
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Moholy's ideas were as bold and incisive as ever,
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but his approach to design was too experimental,
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as was his insistence on seeing it, as he put it,
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as an attitude, not a profession to be in tune with the times.
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And sadly, the same applied
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to another design maverick: Richard Buckminster Fuller.
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He was yet another brilliant design visionary
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and design activist,
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who was completely committed to designing a sustainable society
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in such a forward-thinking way
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that he started talking about the importance of environmentalism
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in design in the 1920s.
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Now he, despite his efforts,
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was routinely mocked as a crank by many in the design establishment,
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and admittedly,
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some of his experiments failed,
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like the flying car that never got off the ground.
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And yet, the geodesic dome,
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his design formula to build an emergency shelter
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from scraps of wood, metal, plastic,
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bits of tree, old blankets, plastic sheeting --
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just about anything that's available at the time --
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is one of the greatest feats of humanitarian design,
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and has provided sorely needed refuge
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to many, many people in desperate circumstances
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ever since.
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Now, it was the courage and verve of radical designers
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like Bucky and Moholy
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that drew me to design.
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I began my career as a news journalist and foreign correspondent.
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I wrote about politics, economics and corporate affairs,
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and I could have chosen to specialize in any of those fields.
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But I picked design,
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because I believe it's one of the most powerful tools at our disposal
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to improve our quality of life.
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Thank you, fellow TED design buffs.
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(Applause)
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And greatly as I admire the achievements of professional designers,
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which have been extraordinary and immense,
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I also believe
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that design benefits hugely from the originality,
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the lateral thinking
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and the resourcefulness of its rebels and renegades.
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And we're living at a remarkable moment in design,
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because this is a time when the two camps are coming closer together.
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Because even very basic advances in digital technology
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have enabled them to operate increasingly independently,
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in or out of a commercial context,
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to pursue ever more ambitious and eclectic objectives.
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So in theory,
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basic platforms like crowdfunding, cloud computing, social media
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are giving greater freedom to professional designers
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and giving more resources for the improvisational ones,
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and hopefully,
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a more receptive response to their ideas.
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Now, some of my favorite examples of this are in Africa,
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where a new generation of designers
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are developing incredible Internet of Things technologies
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to fulfill Florence Nightingale's dream of improving healthcare
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in countries where more people now have access to cell phones
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than to clean, running water.
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And among them is Arthur Zang.
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He's a young, Cameroonian design engineer
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who has a adapted a tablet computer into the Cardiopad,
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a mobile heart-monitoring device.
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It can be used to monitor the hearts of patients in remote, rural areas.
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The data is then sent on a cellular network
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to well-equipped hospitals hundreds of miles away
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for analysis.
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And if any problems are spotted by the specialists there,
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a suitable course of treatment is recommended.
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And this of course saves many patients
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from making long, arduous, expensive and often pointless journeys
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to those hospitals,
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and makes it much, much likelier
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that their hearts will actually be checked.
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Arthur Zang started working on the Cardiopad eight years ago,
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in his final year at university.
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But he failed to persuade any conventional sources
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to give him investment to get the project off the ground.
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He posted the idea on Facebook,
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where a Cameroonian government official saw it
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and managed to secure a government grant for him.
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He's now developing not only the Cardiopad,
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but other mobile medical devices to treat different conditions.
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And he isn't alone,
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because there are many other inspiring and enterprising designers
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who are also pursuing extraordinary projects of their own.
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And I'm going to finish by looking at just a few of them.
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One is Peek Vision.
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This is a group of doctors and designers in Kenya,
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who've developed an Internet of Things technology of their own,
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as a portable eye examination kit.
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Then there's Gabriel Maher,
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who is developing a new design language
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to enable us to articulate the subtleties of our changing gender identities,
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without recourse to traditional stereotypes.
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All of these designers and many more are pursuing their dreams,
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by the making the most of their newfound freedom,
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with the discipline of professional designers
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and the resourcefulness of rebels and renegades.
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And we all stand to benefit.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)