Innovation Lounge

Unique to TEDxPennQuarter is the Innovation Lounge. Building on the theme of REINVENTION, this creative workspace outside the main room where the TEDTalks are being held hosts innovators in music, entertainment, business and technology perfecting their craft in unique ways. Each group is tasked with creating a unique, TEDxPennQuarter specific work product by the end of the show that can then be shared with the attendees and all interested in TED.

Innovation Lounge 2011

Check back soon for more information on who’s going to be at this year’s innovation lounge.

Innovation Lounge 2010

TEDxPennQuarter sponsors Cynergy took their unique ThinkFirst motivational design process and applied it to a unique scenario with an unusual group of participants. Instead of using their process to design software for global brands, they used the process to push a group of young students to brainstorm and solve the Gulf Oil Spill Crisis. Kes Sampanthar, Executive Coordinator of TEDxPennQuarter and expert in motivational design, led this exercise with a group of local Washington, DC students.

Local music producer DJ Eurok and Grammy-nominated musician Kokayi produced a song for the event, creating the TEDxPennQuarter soundtrack in one day from start to finish. Attendees were encouraged to participate in the creative process with instruments, noisemakers, sampled sounds and ideas. The finished track is available here.

Austin Kleon is a writer, visual thinker, and one of the TEDxPennQuarter speakers. He showcased his unique talent by mind-mapping each of the other speakers as they presented.

Dave Wolf, Vice-President of Strategy for Cynergy and moderator of “Disruptathon: Innovation Discovered”, conducted a series of videotaped interviews with each speaker and other invited guests as they participated in the event.

Interface Media Group, the production wizards behind the webcast, provided an inside, behind-the-scenes look at how the event was being produced while it was happening.

Students from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts were in the middle of the room watching and interpreting the event. They painted, sketched, wrote and filmed the events of the day. It’s one thing to professionally produce the show with months of prep time. It’s quite another to do it in real time. We have challenged these future innovators from one of DC’s finest educational institutions to apply their skills to an on-the-fly artistic production. At the end of the day, their work was presented in a short session with Rory Pullens, CEO of Duke Ellington. Check out the video here.