TEDxEvansville Announces Speaker Lineup and How to Get Tickets
Ideas will explore the topic of renaissance – rebirth, renewal and revival
EVANSVILLE, IND. – TEDxEvansville is pleased to announce its lineup of speakers for TEDxEvansville 2015, which is centered around the idea of renaissance – rebirth, revival and renewal. The 14 speakers were selected for their thought-provoking ideas and ability to convey their ideas in a moving way. They will present their talks – each less than 18 minutes in length. Tickets will soon go on sale for TEDxEvansville, scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 13, at the Evansville Museum’s Koch Immersive Theater.
Confirmed speakers for the 2015 event include:
- Steve Burger
Vice President of Radio & Digital, WNIN, Tri-State Public Media - Public media’s role in the renaissance
- Rob Carroll
Principal, South Heights Elementary - What do Kevin Bacon, Alice in Wonderland, lying to kids and getting tattoos have to do with effective (school) leadership?
- Jodi Duncan
Jodi Duncan Designs - FlowerPowered
- Sean M. Georges
Senior Vice President of Human Resources and In-House Counsel, Shoe Carnival, Inc. - Servant leadership is the essence of authentic leadership
- T. Michael W. Halcomb
Conversational Koine Institute - Silent no more: Resurrecting dead languages
- Robin Mallery
Community Volunteer, Registered Nurse, Health Educator - Chocolate mindfulness exercise
- Lynn Miller Pease
Chief Executive Officer, Leadership Evansville, Inc. - How a picture book, markers and paper transformed my city from miserable to magnetic
- Matthew Rowe
Executive Director, Reitz Home Museum, Chairman, City of Evansville HistoricPreservation Commission - In my neighborhood: A primer on architectural styles in Evansville’s historic district
- Michael Strezewski
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern Indiana - The Mann Site: Indiana’s first capital
- Dan Sullivan
Web designer, father of five - Uniformity, monotony and creativity
- Charles Sutton
Librarian/Educator, Thinker/Tinkerer - Maker education: Empowering individuals to make a better world
- Sean Wallace
Owner, Windows of Opportunity – Barbed Wire Art - Second chance
- Scott Wylie, Esq.
Director, Vanderburgh Community Foundation - Intentional inclusiveness in community renaissance
- N. Ryan Zaricki
Founder and President, Whole Sun Designs Inc. - Transitioning to a clean energy future
TEDxEvansville received more than 100 written idea submissions from individuals interested in speaking at this year’s event. The TEDxEvansville curatorial team narrowed that list to about 30 individuals who were invited to audition in person, where they shared their ideas and discussed how they would deliver them in an impactful way.
Jenn Schultheis, TEDxEvansville Curatorial Team Lead, said, “Every application was based solely on the idea’s authenticity, relevance to the renaissance theme and originality as well as potential for community impact – not on who submitted it.”
The team reviewing applications had no access to applicants’ names or where they work to ensure the focus remained on the ideas presented. The curatorial team ruled out any speaker seeking self-promotion or an opportunity to market their business or organization from the stage.
How to get tickets
TEDxEvansville organizers will sell tickets in person at the Saturday, Sept. 12, Franklin Street Bazaar, located on the lawn of the West Library, 2000 W. Franklin St. Ticket sales will begin at 9a.m., an hour after the Bazaar opens. The 65 available tickets priced at $65 each are expected to sell quickly. Tickets will be sold one per person.
Viewing parties
Organizations and individuals interested in hosting a livestream TEDxEvansville viewing party for friends, colleagues and the community, may learn more on the TEDxEvansville website.
Stay up-to-date on TEDxEvansville
Those who want TEDxEvansville updates and happenings are encouraged to subscribe to emails from TEDxEvansville or follow TEDxEvansville on Facebook and Twitter.
Official Viewing Party at St. Mary’s Medical Center
In the spirit of TED and ideas worth spreading, St. Mary’s is hosting an official TEDxEvansville Viewing Party—a community gathering to view the webcast and share in rich discussion. There’s no cost to attend, but space is limited. The live broadcast is 1–5 p.m. Admission is on a first come, first served basis.
Amphitheatre
St. Mary’s Medical Center
3700 Washington Ave., Evansville
1:00–5:00 p.m.
Inspiration for the TEDxEvansville design
You’d think designing for a TEDx event would be fairly simple: Just stick to a red, white and black color palette and use Helvetica typeface. While those elements are certainly core to the design of any TEDx event, the TEDxEvansville communications committee, with help from the Evansville Design Group, a nonprofit organization comprised of local design professionals, faced these unique opportunities in the design process for TEDxEvansville.
- Make it unique. This is a universal challenge to anyone building upon a successful brand. How do you honor the original concept, while bringing something new and interesting into the fold?
- Build awareness. While people acquainted with TED have demonstrated universal excitement about the experience coming to Evansville, a large part of our community was unfamiliar with TED. We considered: What’s the best approach to introduce a concept that’s familiar to some, but completely unknown to many?
- Inspire through design. TED is centered around ideas worth spreading. We wanted our designs to excite the community and encourage enthusiasm around our community’s inspiring ideas.
Initial Brainstorming
Evansville is undoubtedly in the midst of a renaissance, so that became a perfect theme for the first TEDxEvansville. In our initial brainstorming, we noted the principle words used alongside renaissance – rebirth, revival, and renewal – all begin with “re.” In fact, we found more than 100 words beginning with “re” that all represent positive sentiments. Another interesting idea is that “re:” is automatically prepended to the subject line of all email replies and is intrinsically attached to continuing a conversation in the most prevalent communication method used today. That was the genesis of “re:naissance.”
Focusing on Awareness
We discovered TED and TED Talks are not widely known in this area. So while expressing the theme of the event was certainly top-of-mind, our primary task became to promote “TEDxEvansville” as a concept without any other complications. That meant keeping our message simple and distilling the promotional materials down to the name, date, location and website. That also meant holding back on the “re:naissance” theme until closer to the event to minimize confusion.
Finding a Key Visual
With our beautiful venue, the Evansville Museum, in mind, we narrowed key visual selection down to two interesting shapes found in the Eykamp Pavilion – the golden rectangle and an elongated diamond. The former is used throughout the space on tile flooring, windows and exterior panels, and the latter has a repeating pattern wrapping the Koch Immersive Theater.
Building a Design Language
With the key visual determined, we began defining the building blocks of our design language. In addition to the standard base of red/black/white, Helvetica and the TEDxEvansville logo, we introduced a repeating diamond pattern mimicking the Immersive Theater’s pattern. The tiling of the diamonds serve as a perfect boundary to separate visual elements and introduce implied Xs into the design.
These components serve as the basis for all TEDxEvansville promotional materials. The “re:naissance” element is critical to event materials, such as tickets, signage, badges, shirts, posters, etc.
The Result
Now, the fun part – sharing what we’ve been working on and getting it into the community. The remaining pieces will be rolling out over the next couple weeks leading up to the event. In fact, several elements are public already, including the website, our social media accounts, tickets, billboards, a promotional poster and a promotional flier.
If you’d like to promote TEDxEvansville around your business, organization or other public spaces, please download, print and distribute copies of the poster and flier, which are available as PDF files below. The flier is standard 8.5“x11” letter size and the poster is sized to an 11“x17” tabloid sheet, both formatted with margins for any standard home or office printer.
All of us behind the scenes are incredibly excited about TEDxEvansville and we can’t wait to share and participate in this experience with our community.