Interviews on wonder, curiosity and creativity
Nathan Sawaya is an award-winning artist who creates awe-inspiring works of art out of some of the most unlikely things. His global touring exhibitions, THE ART OF THE BRICK, feature large-scale sculptures using only toy building blocks: LEGO® bricks to be exact. His work is obsessively and painstakingly crafted and is both beautiful and playful.
Tom is a research scientist trying to understand how embryos develop into animals. He started life as a single-celled embryo in the small town of Battle on the south coast (of ‘Battle of Hastings’ fame). Since then, science has taken him on many adventures and to many places, including Boston USA where he trained, and... Continue Reading →
Yesim Kunter is a play expert and a futurist. As a consultant she develops “playful” experiences for Fortune 500 Companies, Universities, and Communities by applying ‘Play Philosophy’ to products, lectures, environments, communities, culture creation and market research with future scoping. She has developed ‘PlaytoInnovate® Workshops’ in order to train organizations with diverse backgrounds from kids to professionals for leveraging Creative Thinking and held talks at prestigious conferences such as World Innovation Convention, TEDx. Previous to her consultancy she had worked for Toys R Us, Lego and Hasbro as a play futurist.
Daniel Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois where he heads the Visual Cognition Laboratory. His research explores the limits of awareness and memory, the reasons why we often are unaware of those limits, and the implications of such limits for our personal and professional lives. In addition to more than 100 scholarly papers, he has penned articles for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Education (among others). In 2010, he and his colleague Christopher Chabris co-authored the New York Times bestseller, The Invisible Gorilla.
Tom Noddy introduced the world to Bubble Magic via television in the early 80's. Before that, he spent a decade inventing and developing this astounding art.
Elizabeth Loftus studies human memory. Her experiments reveal how memories can be changed by things that we are told. Facts, ideas, suggestions and other post-event information can modify our memories. The legal field, so reliant on memories, has been a significant application of the memory research.
Andy is also a ‘recovering academic’. His Loughborough University PhD was 12 years in the making, and his research findings around positive psychology and engagement feed into a series of game-changing keynotes, workshops, and books including ‘The Art of Being Brilliant’. He is also a best-selling children’s author. His ‘Spy Dog’ series has sold in excess of a million copies worldwide.
Kokichi Sugihara is a Meiji University distinguished professor emeritus as well as a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo. His research area is mathematical engineering. In his research on computer vision, he found a method for constructing 3D objects from “impossible figures,” and extended his research interest to human vision and optical illusion. Constructing mathematical models of human vision systems, he created various new impossible objects, and has won the Best Illusion of the Year Contest multiple times.
Bruce Drinkwater is an Engineer and Professor working at the University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. His interests span many applications of ultrasonics including imaging, condition monitoring as well as ultrasonic levitation, tractor beams and haptics. In 2015 he co-invented the world’s first stable ultrasonic tractor beam, in 2017 he demonstrated the levitation of wavelength-scale objects and in 2019 the levitation and manipulation of multiple objects.
Vincent Gambini is a magician and theatre artist. He approaches magic through deconstruction, irony and philosophy. His critically acclaimed shows include ‘This is not a magic show’ and ‘The Chore of Enchantment’.
Words on Wonder 