Award-winning web designer Kerah Cottrell has some advice on how to design your life: “Find your passion, develop a support network, be kind to everyone, follow your heart… and you will be full-filled.” In this engaging talk, the designer of the iconic Google search page and Google News explains the art of simplicity and the importance of thinking outside the box while looking at the big picture in the quest for creativity.

Kerah introduces her fiancé, pop star Heath Hunter, who shares her passion for dance and life. Heath explains the importance of music and dance in life and the joy to be found in connecting them as he did with his song “Revolution in Paradise.” He encourages the audience to show their creativity and embrace technology that accelerates the spread of music to new places. Demonstrating their ability to bring people together, Heath and Kerah invite the audience onstage to learn the dance for “Revolution in Paradise.”

Adam Frankel was a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama for four and a half years. But one day Frankel felt that words weren’t enough—he wanted to be active in the topics he cared about, namely, education. Frankel became the founding Executive Director of Digital Promise, a bipartisan, public-private partnership chartered by Congress to advance innovation in education. Frankel and his team launched a national coalition of school districts who pilot, evaluate, and scale up some of the emerging technological innovations that work for them. From technology procurement to personalized learning, to curbing summer learning loss, no issue is too big to tackle. In this forward-thinking TEDxBeaconStreet talk, Frankel outlines how we can begin to accelerate positive change, the challenges we’ll face, and how technology can help redesign classes to meet 21^st century learning.

Humanistic roboticist and ethical innovator Daniel Theobald sees a changing world and he wants to give you the tools to help him make it better. In the technological Age of Automation only one thing is constant: change. The line between technology and robots is blurring and the nagging question of how we can survive the “robot revolution” keeps popping up. In this talk from TEDxBeaconStreet, Theobald explores what automation means for humanity and how the technology at our fingertips has made us more powerful as individuals than ever before. “We can all be superheroes instead of zombies,” says Theobald, and in a world that is changing faster and faster we must step up to create the type of world we want to live in.

Our media-centric culture drowns us in negative energy, says social worker Matthew Cooney. It has become all too easy to get flooded by despair and get lost looking for causes to support. In answer to that, Cooney encourages us to think about what impact we can have as individuals and to make a commitment to our communities. Drawing on his own experience as Executive Director of the Brookline Teen Center, Cooney reminds us that local action can be a huge step forward and communities can make great advances by focusing on the things within their control. “Don’t get stuck on large ideas. Change starts small,” he says. And even small ideas can push boundaries.

Can you explain the design process in eleven minutes and sixteen seconds?  If you’re designer Kevin Young, Managing Principal at Continuum, you can.  In this TEDxBeaconStreet talk, he reveals the formula for creating innovative designs that are sure to release a flood of endorphins.  Through a series of examples, highlighting both brilliant and disastrous ideas, Kevin opens a window into the mind of the designer and shares his insights into how to create a powerful emotional connection between people and objects.  Sharing his experience as manager of the One Laptop Per Child project at the MIT Media Lab, he explains both the process and the point of the successful endeavor and how it exemplifies the teamwork, creativity and attention to detail required to serve the needs of any given consumer.

Designer Jon Friedman, the Co-Founder of Freight Farms, explains how lateral thinking got its start and how this creative problem solving technique can help us all create a more sustainable society.  He illustrates how this can be done with the global food supply system, which accounts for a third of the carbon footprint humans leave on the earth.  All it takes is something that we already have, shipping containers!  By redesigning commercial agriculture to focus on people, planet and profit, his team at Freight Farms is turning a global food crisis into a global food surplus by re-purposing shipping containers.

Using trumpet, piano, and voice, David opens a window into his musical life and invites the audience to join him for a number of his songs, preceding each one with a short history.  Using music to tell stories, David delights and engages preschoolers and grandparents alike.  David Polansky claims to have never grown up but has been writing music for over 50 years and has performed it for thousands of delighted listeners who attend his concerts and listen to recordings of his songs.

Ashley Stanley founded Lovin’ Spoonfuls in 2012, based on her realization that the “There is Not Enough” model of food drives was inherently flawed.  While eating in a restaurant with her mother in 2010, Ashley suddenly became aware of just how much leftover food was going to waste.   A little research that included both Googling and knocking on the back door of Trader Joe’s to see what was being thrown away revealed that an unbelievable amount of usable food was being discarded.

Her dream of being a professional athlete might have ended with blowing out both of her knees, but it placed her on the path that led to her present work.  In the past 3 years she has brought the city of Boston together to fight hunger and food insecurity with fresh, healthy food and been honored by the Boston Business Journal and Oxfam International for her efforts.

The TEDx Global Music Project is a collection of the best live music from TEDx events around the world.  This initiative is to sound what TEDx is for the world of ideas;  namely, a genre-defying library of passionate performances curated locally from over 140 countries.  The TEDx Global Music Project is an opportunity for innovative musicians to reach a global audience and a chance for the world to redefine what music can be.

The TEDx Global Music Project is independently organized by a group of TEDx licensees around the globe, not created by TED.

Amy Robinson (@amyleerobinson) is the Creative Director of EyeWire, a game to map the brain from MIT.  She founded and runs the TEDx Global Music Project, a collection of the best live music from TEDx events, which can be found at https://soundcloud.com/tedxglobalmusicproject