We have several things to share with you: one bad, and three very good. Traditionally, we will start with the bad one:
Hansjorg Scherberger will not make it to TEDxGhent this year, but, and here comes the good news … Lieven Standaert and David Troch will present their talks on our main stage on June 13th.
Lieven Standaert is a coördinator and teacher at Fablab Brussels – an open-access prototyping lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He designed and built open-source CNC-machines at timelab, and is a long-time proponent of open-source hardware. Lieven also teaches a course in practical prototyping, and this year his students were asked to design and build a working Jenga-playing robot. This resulted in the first Robot Jenga competition held on May 21st 2015, and he will bring these robots to TEDxGhent for you to play with.
In his talk Lieven will explain why and how the 3D-printers, milling machines and laser cutters in his lab are lowering barriers to innovation for a wide range of disciplines, and what we can expect from low-cost, multidisciplinary innovation, design and engineering over the next couple of years.
David Troch is the city poet of Ghent. Besides poetry, he writes prose and plays. His poetry collections are called ‘Laatavondtaal’, which stands for ‘Late Evening Language’, and ‘Buiten Westen’ – ‘Unconscious’. With ‘Gezel’ (‘Companion’), the first poem from his second collection, he won the Herman de Coninck Award (de Herman de Coninckprijs) for best poem. Soon after, with the poem ‘Wij Waren Geen Jongens’ (‘We Were Not Boys’), he won another poetry prize – the Turing National Poetry (de Turing Nationale Gedichtenwedstrijd).
David believes that we are surrounded by poetry, and the world around us is a rhyme of words and the lyrics of sounds. We read poetry with every engagement with the nature that surrounds us. Thus, he will not buy the statement ‘I never read poetry.’
And to wrap it up, we are happy to announce that Lieven Scheire will host TEDxGhent again this year.
Well, if you have not gotten your ticket yet, we’re sorry to say, we are fully sold out! We look forward to seeing you all this weekend and Let’s Celebrate together!