TEDx Cambridge

TEDx Cambridge approached us with an opportunity to be part of it’s annual conference series and a unique challenge. How can we foster collaboration amongst this unique group of attendees, some of the brightest minds in the Northeast? At the core of our solution was the creation of an algorithm that scored different facets of an individual’s social, educational, and professional background and found their closest counterparts. We gathered this data during event sign-up by scraping supplied social channels, as well as offering an additional questionnaire to those interested.

The end result manifested itself in two ways, both intending to surface these commonalities and to spur conversation in the ideal that the collective intellectual power in the room could create positive change within the larger community, a ideal very much in line with the objective of the TED organization. Attendees were first greeted with the ‘Constellation’, a large visualization that showed the entirety of the people attending the conference, from attendees to speakers, connected to those whom they were most related.

The second component invited attendees a bit closer. Volunteers manning several displays could share with an attendee their 5 closest connections, whom they could now seek out with the additional context of their shared backgrounds and interests.