Designer Jared Ficklin creates wild visualizations that let us see music, using color and even fire (a first for the TED stage) to analyze how sound makes us feel. He takes a brief digression to analyze the sound of a skatepark -- and how audio can clue us in to developing creativity.

How does knowledge grow? Sometimes it begins with one insight and grows into many branches; other times it grows as a complex and interconnected network. Infographics expert Manuel Lima explores the thousand-year history of mapping data -- from languages to dynasties -- using trees and networks of information. It's a fascinating history of visua...

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

Using art and technology, Alexander Tsiaras visualizes the unseen human body.

Using advanced data analysis tools, Rajiv Maheswaran and Second Spectrum help make basketball teams smarter.

Anders Ynnerman studies the fundamental aspects of computer graphics and visualization, in particular large scale and complex data sets with a focus on volume rendering and multi-modal interaction.

Sebastian Wernicke thinks every TED Talk can be summarized in six words. In this talk, he shows how to do just that -- and less.

To understand how life works, you need to watch it in action, says bioimaging scientist Gokul Upadhyayula. Taking us down to the cellular level, he shares the work behind cutting-edge microscopes that capture and record, in three dimensions, the complex behaviors of living organisms -- from infecting cancer cells to crawling immune cells -- and ...

Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data -- and at times vast numbers of people -- and weaves them into stunning visualizations. From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data, from a Johnny Cash video assembled from crowd-sourced drawings to the "Wilderness Downtown" video that customizes for the user, his wor...

Drew Berry creates stunning and scientifically accurate animations to illustrate how the molecules in our cell move and interact.

Jer Thorp creates beautiful data visualizations to put abstract data into a human context. At TEDxVancouver, he shares his moving projects, from graphing an entire year's news cycle, to mapping the way people share articles across the internet.

Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is "Our Choice," Al Gore's sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth."

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the AlloSphere, a new way to see, hear and interpret scientific data. Dive into the brain, feel electron spin, hear the music of the elements ... and detect previously unseen patterns that could lead to new discoveries.

A collection of talks that highlight the powerful impact of sharing history visually.

Could visual illusions be a cure for polarization? (Credits: Director of Photography: William Atherton; Production Design: Adam Pruitt; Creative Partner: SpecialGuest; Production company: 1stAveMachine; Producers: Dave Kornfield, Andrew Geller, Matt Snetzko; Music: Bryn Bliska; Executive Producer, TED2018 Film Program: Sinéad McDevitt; Director ...

As light passes through defective glass, beams split into color spectra, causing "diffraction grating." For the first time ever in film, we get up close and personal with this visual phenomenon in a series of beautiful chromatic abstractions. (Credits: Music: Gavin Little; Special thanks to: Ed Bruce at Screenscene, Los York; Executive Producer,...

Tom Wujec studies how we share and absorb information. He's an innovative practitioner of business visualization -- using design and technology to help groups solve problems and understand ideas. He is a Fellow at Autodesk.

Looking to level up your presentations? It might only take a poorly-drawn sketch, says professor Martin J. Eppler. He offers three tips to use visualizations at work, laying out how these simple tricks can boost creativity and communication, improve decision-making and lead to better collaboration among colleagues.

It's the age of Big Data. But what, exactly, do we do with all this information? These talks explore practical, ethical -- and spectacularly visual -- ways to understand near-infinite data.

With his team at SENSEable City Lab, MIT's Carlo Ratti makes cool things by sensing the data we create. He pulls from passive data sets -- like the calls we make, the garbage we throw away -- to create surprising visualizations of city life. And he and his team create dazzling interactive environments from moving water and flying light, powered ...

Tamara Roukaerts is head of marketing at Aurasma, working to build an augmented-reality lens via smartphones.

Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara.

Manuel Lima studies how information can be organized -- into elegant and beautiful diagrams that illustrate the many unexpected twists of big data.

In his day job, Jared Ficklin makes user interfaces at frog design. As a hobby, he explores what music looks like ... in light, in shapes, in fire.

Zoom in -- way, way in -- to look at the world from speck's-eye view. Learn about very tiny insects, the world at the nanoscale, and sculptures so small it's best to hold your breath while viewing.

Maps don't just tell you which street to turn left on. Maps convey information that shapes our lives, deepen our understanding of problems and our ability to create solutions, and whisk our imaginations to new lands. See what we mean, below.

"Memories are the architects of our identity," says technologist Pau Aleikum Garcia, but they're not permanent. Photos can be lost amid political unrest or natural disaster, while illnesses like Alzhemier's can rob people of their past. He puts forward a novel solution — "synthetic memories," or dreamlike visualizations of long-gone moments crea...

Jean-Baptiste Michel looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world.

Jakob Trollback is a pioneering designer, whose work in video and motion graphics has helped define the industry -- always pushing the edges of technology and entertainment through design.

Sculptor, painter and printmaker Alwar Balasubramaniam makes work that crosses the boundary between art, perception and life.