TEDxOPorto - The do it yourself thing

These posts about TEDxOPorto will be written in English 

so I can share with the world the ideas worth spreading.

There are so many trends happening at the moment that I guess the world is becoming esquizofrenic.

Although social media should potentially generate a more intense activity of networking and interacting we hide behind a screen and become some kind of selfish bastards, addicted to taking pictures to ourselves and to the food we eat.

Some major trends that hit are resulting from this obsession about selfies and self-survival. One of those is the Do it Yourself (DiY) lifestyle.

One of the speakers at TEDxOPorto – Pedro Medeiros - came to talk about the “DiY gardens” as a way to eat healthier and be a pal for the environment.

Some years ago gardening was something unoccupied housewives or bucolic grandmas would dedicate themselves to. Nowadays having a small-scale farm (a real one not a country yard on Farmville!) is chic and hype.

This movement that leads people to planting parsley and tomato is not about self-sufficiency. We all know that it is impossible to grow a farm in the balcony of an apartment. On the other hand we are used to a pattern of acquiring fruits and vegetables all year long notwithstanding the rounds of nature something that is not possible in a natural environment where seasons regulate plants growth.
The farming mania is probably just a fashion with an eco label on it.

However, the drift around gardening isn't new. 
In England, United States, Canada and Germany during World War I and II governments motivated growing vegetables, fruits and herbs at home to reduce the pressure on the public food supply. These private gardens called “Victory gardens” were considered a civil “morale booster” since gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown.

Maybe this fascination around private cultivation is after all nothing more than a craving for a glimpse of power…

One other craze around these DiY possibilities are the 3D printers, an innovation that was presented last year as something that would change our lives someday and that a simple guy from Viana do Castelo – Emanuel Ferreira - confirmed as an existing option today.

Can you imagine wishing for a ring or a pair of sunglasses to wear, drawing the model and then leaving them to print on a 3D scale while taking a shower?

Probably you can’t. 
As Emanuel commented it is quite conceivable that if you had the possibility of crafting everything you wanted you would have some creative blackout, a phenomenon he called the “syndrome of the seated God”: if you could turn real all the things you desire you’d probably ask for a chair to sit and think about it for a while…

The truth is you spend as much energy at conceiving than as building so the mere fact that 3D printing is everyday more accessible will only shorten the leap between the idea and the completion not foster the creative process itself.

The major innovation doesn’t come out from those vain desires of wanting and getting. You can take this 3D printing technology and make it useful for producing miracles as the Not Impossible Labs.

One other speaker that brought about DiY was Hugo Silva who came to talk about innovative engineering possibilities that are founding a creative destruction of medicine. This guy that has fun democratizing DiY technologies created a site where almost everyone with a small technological background can acquire a low-cost basic toolkit to create projects and applications with physiological sensors for monitoring biomedical signals: Do it Yourself stuff. 
The paradox between being self-sufficient and socially responsible, between individualism and solidarity, between concealing and sharing can induce a silent and valuable revolution: we can become “skilled revolutionaries” using science to solve social problems. This expression was brought by Jose Antonio Pinto a social worker with a Master in Sociology who uses his knowledge to aid the poor overcoming their situation instead of just masquerading their basic needs with some immediate short assistance.

Lets hope that we are insolent enough to use some of the time we spend wandering, drifting and posting through social media to actually 

harvest a nonconformist social change 

that can benefit those in need.