My understanding of good art is that it should challenge the status quo and give us reason to react. Chris Jordan’s work is simply effective by helping people to see and connect with the statistics with which we are inundated. “This is 1 million plastic cups. Which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every 6 hours.”

One of his artworks is shown below. “This design depicts 32,000 barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006, with the vast majority under 21 years of age.”

Here’s a Frenchman who doesn’t take himself too seriously. It is humbling to be able to see beyond yourself and the importance of your own work, especially when you design toothbrushes and other incredibly beautiful things. My favourite part of his talk is the “duty of vision” about the importance of raising our angle of vision. This is a funny and brilliant talk. “Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate.”