PopTech Blog

Ever had a monumental revelation, huge shift, or major turning point in life, love, career, or otherwise? We all have. Today's your chance to get an inside peek at the a-ha and uh-oh life-changing moments by writers and artists from the famous to the obscure. PopTech 2010 presenter, SMITH magazine founding editor, and Six-Word Memoir creator Larry Smith's newest book, The Moment is now available for your reading pleasure with stories from PopTech 2010 presenters Alan Rabinowitz and Jennifer Thompson as well as Dave Eggers, Diane Ackerman, Bill Ayers, and Jennifer Egan among others.

To hear more about this collection of stories, tune into, or stream, NPR's Talk of the Nation today at 2:40 pm. And for more about his Six-Word Memoir project, check out Smith's PopTech talk.

by Chris DeLuca

The hanging garden, a collaboration between Clorofilas and Aer Studio, uses basic technological components to enable plants to communicate by placing sensors in their soil to detect moisture levels. The design studios, respectively based in Manchester and Barcelona, linked the sensors to LED lights that illuminate when moisture levels get too low and the plants need watering. The heart of the project, the open-source Arduino platform, takes the information received by the sensors and relays it to the corresponding LED light. This communication apparatus between plant and human life removes a variable of uncertainty when it comes to providing a plant with the right amount of water at the appropriate time.

The hanging garden project, which was created primarily for office spaces, also enables more effective communication amongst co-workers who assume responsibility for watering the plants; if a plant has already been watered earlier in the day, for example, co-workers in the afternoon will immediately know the plant is sufficiently hydrated. The technology used to create the hanging garden might be expanded and applied to projects which involve multiple stakeholders, like communal gardening initiatives.
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There's always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week's highlights follows.

• Inventor Eden Full, who we interviewed last June, has been named as one of Forbes 30 under 30 lists in the energy disruptors category for her innovative work that maximizes the output of solar panels.

• Congratulations are also in order to Heather Knight (PopTech 2010) named to Forbes 30 under 30 list in the science category. Knight and her colleagues at Syyn Labs were behind the Rube Goldberg contraption that opened PopTech 2010. 

• If you live in Miami or Salt Lake City, tickets are on sale now for a live showing of Radio Lab, whose co-host Jad Abumrad shared examples of how sound has been used to make scientific strides at PopTech 2010. If you want RadioLab to come to your town, be sure to let them know. 

• David Eagleman (PopTech 2010)'s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain was named as one of The Boston Globe's best science books of 2011. The reviews says, "Incognito is popular science at its best; these may not all be original observations, but they’re beautifully synthesized." 

If you'd like to receive a stream of these updates (and more) throughout the week in real time, follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the PopTech blog.

Image: Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

The term "social entrepreneur" has seen a lot of usage in recent years. Wikipedia defines a social entrepreneur as someone who "recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to achieve social change". Many of PopTech's Social Innovation Fellows fall into this category.

A new, similar term has recently come into play: cultural entrepreneur. In a recent article by Courtney E. Martin and Lisa Witter published on Standford Social Innovation Review blog, the authors propose that cultural entrepreneurship be regarded as "social entrepreneurship's little sister."

From the article:

[W]e argue that cultural entrepreneurship is different than social entrepreneurship, because it is focused primarily on reimagining social roles and motivating new behaviors—often working with and in popular culture to reach the widest possible audience. Social entrepreneurs solve problems by disrupting existing systems, as microfinance has, or through breakthrough product design, like the solar powered lights from d.light design or Barefoot Power.

Cultural entrepreneurs, on the other hand, solve problems by disrupting belief systems—using television shows like Glee to initiate viewers into the disability or GLBTQ rights frameworks or the Twitter campaign #mensaythingstome, designed to expose anonymous misogyny online.

While it's true there are a plethora of new tools that enable a movement to bring its message to an intended audience, cultural entrepreneurship reads a bit like good old-fashioned activism.

What do you think? Has social entrepreneurship matured to the point where it's branching out its family tree, as the authors suggest? Or is cultural entrepreneurship just activism in a Tweet's clothing?   

Image: no

‘Tis the season for lists: wish lists, to-do lists and even lists of new years resolutions. Adriane Herman could be called the queen of list-making and list-taking. She’s been collecting people’s lists for the past few years, and, in doing so, has gained an inside look into how people spend their time, determine their priorities, and organize their lives. After digging through waste baskets in addition to accepting submissions, Adriane has amassed enough funny, gut-wrenching and mundane lists to exhibit them and turn these mini-memoirs into works of art.

For other artists and well-known luminaries who have been making their lists and checking them twice throughout history, check out this book that was created in conjunction with the show, Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art at the Morgan Library in New York City.