阿拉伯世界的流行文化

How are you developing your work since TEDGlobal? Did you experience anything at TED that moved your work in a new direction, or perhaps reconfirmed your ideas?

TED was actually very interesting for me on a number of levels. Where do I begin? There was so much that spun out of TED for me. Certainly it was refreshing to meet people who were very interested and open-minded about the Arab region, and were very keen to interact. So, that's hardly a surprise. The people at TED are very international and very outward looking. But certainly the level of enthusiasm was very welcome.

One of the most tangible outcomes to emerge from the meeting was the fact that I met a number of people from Saudi Arabia and we are now working together -- Insha'Allah as we say, if God wills -- put on a TEDx event in Saudi Arabia next year. So that was very exciting. These are some young, dynamic, enthusiastic, international Saudi men who were very keen to put on a really great TEDx event, so it's a great pleasure to be able to work with them.

Another event which is, again, Insha'Allah, because it's always difficult to organize a conference if you don't have the sort of military precision of the TED operation (we have all these incredibly enthusiastic recruits.) The other thing we're working on now is to put together a TEDx event in India next year, and that will actually focus on failure. It's paradoxical, isn't it? Because obviously the TED story is such a stellar success. But the failure conference, or Fruits of Failure as we're calling it, really emerged from the idea that in a lot of other cultures there is a real stigma attached with failure. Once you sort of fall off the road of success, then it's very hard to get back on track. It's a problem, actually, if you want to foster an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture, which a lot of countries do.

A lot of countries in parts further east than America will say that "yes, we want to have startups, we want to have a knowledge economy," but there are cultural issues -- they're about being willing to take a risk and being willing to fail. And this conference is going to look at that. It's going to look at failure from a personal level, from a philosophical level, what do religions say about failure, and really to look at it from a variety of dimensions. And it's to the credit of TED and Lara Stein, who was very supportive of this. It's still in the very early stages. We're just sort of getting it off the ground now. But it's a testimonial to TED. And also the success of TED is it's willingness to take risks, and this is a good example of that.

So it was a really good event. I met Marc Koska, whose talk I see has been put up on the web now. He had the SafePoint syringe, and I've tried to put him in touch with some people in Egypt who might be able to help him manufacture and get it onto the market. Egypt has an interesting history. They have very high rates of Hepatitis C in Egypt, the direct result of really poor use of syringes in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. People were reusing syringes and they spread Hepatitis C through the population. Egypt is a great place which would really benefit from Marc's technology, and so I put him in touch and I hope something will come from that.

I have a number of other interactions and stories and that sort of thing. So certainly in terms of tangible connections, TED did exactly what it says on the label, which is, you go out, people are very willing to talk to strangers, and get down to quite detailed discussions very quickly. So that was terrific.

On a separate note, you asked me has my work changed. Well, the other thing that was really inspirational about TED is just the range of creativity on display. And in particular, what most impressed me, both among the Fellows, but also the speakers and the other delegates, was people who came from very different disciplines, visually-oriented disciplines, and the way that they negotiate the world through sound or pictures, but not through words, which is the way I work my way through the world. It was really inspiring and while I can't aspire to the heights of visual creativity that they've attained, it certainly got me thinking about how I present my work, and to try to think of more visual ways of getting ideas across. So that was immensely helpful as well.