Bringing our Game to TED – 6 Days and Counting

For the first time, RWJF and Pioneer are a sponsor of the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, kicking off next week in Long Beach, Calif. 

In exploring the opportunity, we thought a range of issues and people supported by Pioneer might be interesting to TED – what we landed on was a look at of the games for health field, how it might transform health and where it’s going in the future.

The intersection of video and computer games and health and health care boils down to a pretty interesting question: what possibilities open up when you approach health as a design challenge?  It’s one we’ll be digging in to at TED, as our luncheon event features world-renowned designer, researcher, artist and thinker John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design.  Joining him is Pam Omidyar, co-founder of the Omidyar Network and of HopeLab, the group that launched the sophisticated, fun and effective kids’ cancer game, Re-Mission.  We’re really honored to have them with us.

John and Pam will hand it over to Ben Sawyer of Games for Health to lead TEDsters through a mini-game jam.  Ben will be joined by game designers Noah Falstein of The Inspiracy and Larry Holland of Totally Games…they’ll lead TEDsters through a structured brainstorm process that lets the audience throw out ideas for where a game solution might really push progress on a big health or health care challenge. Then, for the next day and a half, the game designers will feed that input in to their creative process, rapid-fire sketching out pathways to solutions until they emerge with a compelling health game concept by the last day of TED.  We’ll also have a “Lab” space with an exhibit designed by the super-talented team over at Daylight Design, which will guide TED attendees through the Now, Near and Next breakthroughs in the health games field. 

I’m really excited by all that I’ll hear that I know I can’t begin to expect…the unanticipated connections to the kind of social change that RWJF and Pioneer is after.  Nancy Barrand, Paul Tarini and I will be there and posting daily updates to the blog – we hope you’ll join along for our first TED and shoot us some comments and questions.