f/1.4 — 300 days
Aperture
Focus, Contract, and Expand
- EventTEDx FTUHanoi 2025
- Date16 August 2025 · 13:20–18:00
- VenueD201 Hall, Foreign Trade University
- RoleHead Curator
- ScopeTheme, speaker curation, narrative flow
The theme
An aperture narrows to sharpen, and opens to let in more light. So does a mind.
Stepping beyond the “Breakpoints” of the year before, Aperture asked whether a worldview had stayed intact or shifted — and whether the aperture behind it had widened to let new opportunities in, or stopped down to a single point of view. A wide aperture admits more light but flattens depth of field; a narrow one holds more of the frame in focus. The mind works the same way, and it is adjustable. The invitation to the room was to open up, stop down, and go looking for their own blind spots. Under the usual banner: Ideas Change Everything.
“Khẩu độ ví như tâm trí định hình
cách quan sát và tiếp nhận thế giới, là
chìa khoá của nhận thức, trực giác và
sự trưởng thành.”
Khẩu độ — Bắt nét, Thu, Phóng
On paper
Where the iris came from.
The working notes: everyone carries a lens — mind, heart, eye — and the limits of that lens can be widened, by choice or by circumstance. Aperture is the most consequential setting on a camera because it decides the composition of the photograph; a point of view does the same to a life. Open the aperture, let more light in.
Curator’s note
I wrote the theme on a sheet of music, on Valentine’s Day, the last one left in the office that night. Everything after that — roughly three hundred days of it — was the work of finding seven people whose ideas could survive being narrowed down to eighteen minutes.
I’m back this year as ex-Head Curator, running a speaker-training session for the Local Voice track at TEDXPANSION 2026.
TEDxposure 2025
Spreading TED.
Curation
The curation department.
Ten of us, three hundred days, seven talks.
The core team
Everyone who built it.
On the day
Behind the frame.
