Top 10 TED Talks Every Designer Should Watch

1. Three Ways Good Design Makes You Happy by Don Norman

“Emotion is all about acting; emotion is really about acting. It’s being safe in the world. Cognition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interpreting it — saying good, bad, safe, dangerous, and getting us ready to act, which is why the muscles tense or relax.”

2. How great leaders inspire action by Simon Sinek

“Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 peercent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do.”

3. Where good ideas come from? by Steven Johnson

“An idea — a new idea — is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It’s a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form?”

4. Happy Design by Stefan Sagmeister

“Try not to get stuck doing the same thing — or try not get stuck behind the computer all day. This is, you know, related to it: getting out of the studio. Then, of course, trying to, you know, work on things where the content is actually important for me. And being able to enjoy the end results.”

5. Simplicity sells by David Pogue

“Remember, if it doesn’t work, it’s not necessarily you, ok? It could be the design of the thing you’re using. Be aware in life of good design and bad design. And if you’re among the people who create this stuff: Easy is hard. Pre-sweat the details for your audience. Count the taps.Remember, the hard part is not deciding what features to add, it’s deciding what to leave out. And best of all, your motivation is: simplicity sells.”

6. How to build your creative confidence by David Kelley

“It would be really great if you didn’t let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives, like it’s some God-given thing, and to have people realize that they’re naturally creative. And those natural people should let their ideas fly. That they should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy, that you can do what you set out to do and that you can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake.”

7. Design and destiny by Philippe Starck

“There is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are so ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it.”

8. Finds Design in The Detail by Paul Bennett 

“One of the threads that seems to have come through loud and clear in the last couple of days is this need to reconcile what the Big wants — the “Big” being the organization, the system, the country — and what the “Small” wants — the individual, the person. And how do you bring those two things together?”

9. The Next 5,000 Days Of The Web by Kevin Kelly

“There’s only one machine, and the Web is its OS. All screens look into the One. No bits will live outside the Web. To share is to gain. Let the One read it. It’s going to be machine-readable. You want to make something that the machine can read. And the One is us. We are in the One.”

10. Pointing to the Future of UI by John Underkoffler

“Technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity, and we need to demand that, in fact. For some of this kind of technology, ground center is a combination of design, which is crucially important. We can’t have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start.”