Even before the first speaker took the stage at TEDxUIUC on Sunday, Kendall Rak was thinking about Why. A junior in engineering, Rak balanced a notebook filled with functions and symbols in his lap — the result of taking a class in higher mathematics. But that class, to Rak, was the What and the How; he said he wanted more from his engineering education. He wanted the Why.

Eight hours later, he would have new notes scribbled alongside the equations of his notebook, new perspectives on creativity, intuition, risk, failure and love.

Eight hours later, TEDxUIUC would bring Rak closer to that elusive Why.

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TEDxUIUC is a localized version of the wildly popular TED conference, and like many students in attendance, Rak is an avid fan of TED videos that have garnered millions of views on YouTube.

Organized by students, the TEDxUIUC conference has been held since 2009, and this year’s event attracted an audience of mostly engineers and science students who were selected from among a pool of 900 applicants. The conference was split over the day into three themes: Initiate, Innovate and Inspire.

The conference kicked off with Deana McDonagh, chair of the industrial design program at the University. Wearing a pair of seemingly physics-defying heel-less pumps, McDonagh spoke about the nature of “design thinking,” a type of thinking that values childlike curiosity and creative problem solving.

“We apply design common sense, which really isn’t that common,” she said of industrial designers.

Two large projector screens on both sides of the stage showed examples of her students’ work: elegant high-heels made of paper and glue, a wedding dress of plastic bags, a bikini top made of Coca-Cola cans that left the imagination spinning.

Later, during one the various networking breaks throughout the day, McDonagh explained that the nature of the current education system sometimes works to stifle that kind of free and creative thinking.

“We realize that creativity has been dampened by their lifetime of education. My heart sinks when I hear a student say, ‘But I’ve been told all my life I can’t draw,’” she said. “What saddens me is that incredible doors are nailed shut by other people. Are we not here to nurture and encourage and empower and enable people to live a full life?”

Allowing people to live a full life was also the subject of the pair of speakers who followed McDonagh. Adam Booher and Ehsan Noursalehi founded Bump, a non-profit design studio that provides prosthetic arms to those living in the developing world.

However, their presentation wasn’t about their successes, or at least not directly. It was about their failures and how these early miscalculations were not only instrumental, but necessary.

“This is about overcoming failure, and thus overcoming the fear of starting things,” Booher said.

He and Noursalehi went on to describe their various mistakes, including their initial plan to found the company as a for-profit LLC, their fixation of making the prosthetic affordable above all.

What they didn’t count as a failure, though, was their complete ignorance of how to build prosthetic arms when they began working on the company. They said it gave them open-mindedness and creativity.

“What it gave us was the ability to explore and innovate in a way that experts in the field simply can’t,” Booher said.

Turning failure into success and ignorance into leverage are the kind of ‘Big Ideas’ that TED events are known for advancing, and attendees were encouraged to spark their own discussions during networking sessions throughout the day. During lunch, many ventured outside to sit on the grass, enjoy the sun and talk.

“There’s a lot of pressure on this campus to just get in and start your life’s project, so to speak,” said Jon Schultz, sophomore in media. “I think college has done its best to stifle design and creative thinking by trying to standardize and over-systemize every process of education.”

Neha Shafizadah, senior in engineering, said the presentations made her think about the need for passion in her work.

“If you don’t believe in it, if you don’t have your full heart in it, you won’t go and innovate and research,” she said. “But if you have that passion you will go miles just to get something done. You need to believe.”

*** 

At 6 p.m., Rak reviewed what he had written in his math notebook. Most of the pages were already filled with dense stacks of partial differentials and matrices that he copied dutifully, over and over again, from his professor.

Beneath them, written in faint No. 2 pencil, were messages and ideas that moved him so much that, after a few minutes of fumbling, he admitted he still couldn’t really explain how he felt, at least not now. It was still too fresh.

He flipped through the pages.

“Confidence, ambition, persistence.”

“Help is the first principle.”

He thumbed to an earlier page, where he had jotted down ideas from Noursalehi and Booher’s presentation on how embracing failure and ignorance had allowed them to provide prosthetic arms to those in need. On the very bottom of that page, squeezed in below the bottom margin, Rak had written:

“Don’t let yourself be the obstacle.”

Danny can be reached at [email protected].