Name: 【TED】Alice Rawsthorn: Pirates, nurses and other rebel designers (Pirates, nurses and other rebel designers | Alice Rawsthorn)
Uploaded: 2017-05-16T11:24:57.000Z
Duration: 11 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Design is a slippery and elusive phenomenon,

which has meant different things at different times.

Adverbs of manner

But all truly inspiring design projects have one thing in common:

the greater the design feat that will be required to achieve it.

And this is why the greatest designers are almost always

the biggest dreamers and rebels and renegades.

This has been the case throughout history,

of a remote, very poor and very small Asian country.

He dreamt of acquiring land, riches and power

would be essential in enabling him to do so.

all weapons were made by hand to different specifications.

So if an archer ran out of arrows during a battle,

they wouldn't necessarily be able to fire another archer's arrows

This of course meant that they would be less effective in combat

by insisting that all bows and arrows were designed identically,

And he did the same for daggers, axes, spears, shields

His formidably equipped army won batter after battle,

his tiny kingdom had succeeded in conquering

all its larger, richer, more powerful neighbors,

would have thought of describing Ying Zheng as a designer at the time --

And yet he used design unknowingly and instinctively

And so did another equally improbable, accidental designer,

who was also not above using violence to get what he wanted.

This was Edward Teach, better known as the British pirate, Blackbeard.

where pirates like Teach were terrorizing the high seas.

And the smarter pirates like him realized that to maximize their spoils,

they needed to attack their enemies so brutally

they could take the ships without wasting ammunition,

So Edward Teach redesigned himself as Blackbeard

by playing the part of a merciless brute.

He wore heavy jackets and big hats to accentuate his height.

He grew the bushy black beard that obscured his face.

He slung braces of pistols on either shoulder.

He even attached matches to the brim of his hat and set them alight,

so they sizzled menacingly whenever his ship was poised to attack.

he flew a flag that bore the macabre symbols

of a human skull and a pair of crossed bones,

because those motifs had signified death in so many cultures for centuries,

that their meaning was instantly recognizable,

even in the lawless, illiterate world of the high seas:

So of course, all his sensible victims surrendered on sight.

it's easy to see why Edward Teach and his fellow pirates

could be seen as pioneers of modern communications design,

why their deadly symbol of the skull and crossbones

rather like the big red letters standing behind me,

by an equally brilliant and equally improbable designer,

the 19th-century British nurse, Florence Nightingale.

Her mission was to provide decent healthcare for everyone.

Nightingale was born into a rather grand, very wealthy British family,

who were horrified when she volunteered to work in military hospitals

that more patients were dying of infections that they caught there,

So she campaigned for cleaner, lighter, airier clinics

and insisted that the same design principles were applied to them.

dominated hospital design for decades to come,

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【TED】Alice Rawsthorn: Pirates, nurses and other rebel designers (Pirates, nurses and other rebel designers | Alice Rawsthorn)

extraordinary

applause

acquire

realize