Matt Diffee, a cartoonist for the New Yorker since 1999, talks at Cusp 2011 about how he designs jokes. Titled “Things You Might Not Think I Think About”, Matt shares his process for coming up with jokes and many of the tips and rules he uses. From the composing the visuals that maximize the comedic effect to the word play, there is no doubt that Matt is right as rain speaking at a design conference.

Yves Béhar talks at Cusp 2011 on his company’s projects including the Puma shoebox, NYC condoms, Herman Miller Sayl Chair, One-Laptop-Per-Child, and many others. With every project, Yves team strives to make long-term partnerships with their clients and are keen to strive for innovative, sustainable, and ethical designs.

Hans Rosling, famous for his lectures which explore enormous amounts of public data and presents it in a storytelling fashion, presents data on 200 countries in 200 years. Weatherman and sports commentators can step aside as Hans presentation style is both exciting and engaging and for the first time steps it up with the use of augmented reality. In this video Hans shares the story 200 countries have moved from being poor with low life expectancy to wealthy and high life expectancy using over 120,000 data points in the process.

Tom Wujec studies team dynamics and puts on workshops around team building and prepares groups to solve large and complex problems. During his workshops he gives teams The Marshmallow Challenge, an 18 minute challenge to build the tallest structure from a few items including spaghetti and marshmallows. Interestingly, kindergarteners produce some of the tallest structures. Tom chalks up their success to iterative prototyping and trying lots of ideas. On the contrary, business school students do the worst.

Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja and CEO of SCVNGR, a mobile start-up looking to build a game layer on top of the real world. In this TEDx Boston talk, Seth talks about the fact that the social layer (think Facebook) is now complete, and that the next step is creating a game layer. Games already exist in today’s world, be it credit card and frequent flyer miles, or the happy hour at your local bar, but they are not very well designed. Seth believes we can do better. Seth advocates using game dynamics for good, be it getting people to take their medicine on time, reconsidering the grading systems in schools, and organizing communities around common goals.

Ji Lee, Creative Director at Google, speaks at the 99% conference about his personal endeavor in 2002 to break out of the creative constraints of his advertising job by creating his own art project. Ji’s ad-spoofing Bubble Project entailed printing out stickers in the shape of word bubbles and sticking them on advertisements all around New York City. Ji would return later to document what people would write into the bubbles. Amusing, political, and esoteric, the bubbles were a hit and spawned campaigns by others. Ji now advocates for using personal projects to provide an outlet for personal creative freedom, create platforms for others to collaborate, meet new people, and to learn new skills.

Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, talks at RSA ( Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) about how people perceive time differently. This perception is sometimes faith based, geographically based, or may be indicative of one’s age. The result of which directs one’s behavior in the world. The presentation is fascinating to say the least and Philip recommends first recognizing how other’s perceive time and then take that into account to better understand where they are coming from. RSA has posted a brilliant 10 minute animated featurette, and the full 41 minute talk can be found after the break as well.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We’re trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
- Philip Zimbardo

Photo Credit: Manolis Thr

In an effort to counter the frequent aggression and violence against public service employees in the Netherlands, an interactive billboard has been created to inform otherwise casual onlookers on how to take action. The interactive billboard uses a pre-recorded clip of an aggressive act happening and combines it with a live camera pointed at those in view of the billboard. The final composition is both striking and effective at conveying the problem at hand and moving onlookers to take action.

Johanna Blakley studies the impact of the fashion industry’s lack of copyright and imparts many lesson on how other creative industries could flourish with a similar regard for copyright. Johanna discusses how the fashion industry is forced to constantly innovate to keep ahead of trends, obsolescence, and build brands. The fashion industry is only one of many industries who’s work is not copyright eligible. Other industries include food, furniture, magic, jokes, cars, databases, etc… The talk is thought provoking to say the least and will provide some fodder for your next discussion on issues of copyright.

Ian Glass, of “This American Life” fame, talks about the aspects of storytelling. Incredibly engaging, Ian discusses the building blocks of storytelling (part 1), editing your story (part 2), pursuing ambitions of good taste (part 3), and some of the common pitfalls (part 4). It is 100% worth the time to watch all four parts. Enjoy!