Winston Liew

Brainstormer, Change Agent, Connector, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Event planner, Musician, Performer, Project manager, Social entrepreneur

"Behind every good design, is a story; behind every good story, is a design." As a TEDx curator and coach, Winston has coached and assisted more than 200 speakers in the past 10 years to find their ideas and establishing a context that could bring out the essence of their work. Through his talk show platforms; TEDxPenangRoad, TEDxBangsar and Ideas Agent Meetup, they run quarterly and annually transformative gatherings that has celebrated unsung heroes and given voices to the voiceless. Other notable highlights include his work on Malaysia’s national hero and key trailblazer for human rights activism, Dato Ambiga; Judy Cheng-Hopkins who was named Forbes' top 10 powerful women in UN in 2011; Steve Chao, an Emmy-nominated war and conflict zones investigative documentary maker and most importantly, Marianna Pascal's "Learn a language? Speak it like you're playing a video game" talk who's now the Top 80th most viewed TEDx video of all time which garnered 24 million views worldwide since 2017. As a cause-brand curator, Winston has curated the first and biggest pedestrian safety citywide campaign which has earned the Best Broadcasting Award for Penang City in the TOP General Assembly among 125 city governments and 51 non-government entities. Other notable work in this area includes his work with the State Ministry of Health on Smoke-Free Penang which was recommended by the UN as the sample of the use of "human touch" in hard topics in 2015; and the annual "Race for a Better Planet" sustainable campaign by Sunway Group which engages 10,000 nationwide every year to celebrate sustainable-living through sports, talks, workshops and markets. As a community curator, Winston has curated and led a band of youth leaders under Global Shapers Community from 2013 and 2015, represented Penang to the World Economic Forum's annual curators meeting among 500 other cities to generate cross-collaboration ideas at a global level to channel Forum resources and best practices into Malaysia. As a placemaking curator, Winston has rejuvenated new and underperforming places by infusing art with community hubbing strategies across Penang and Kuala Lumpur. Notable projects include Sunway GEO Avenue, a green hub in Sunway City and GMBB, a creative hub in Bukit Bintang. In 2020, Winston was chosen as the Top 7 Global Finalist for the Global UK Alumni Awards for the Professional Achievement Category.

Every season there'd be communities that I cultivate the most, topics that I read about the most, creative works that I dwell in the most or even music that defines me the most. As I'm writing this, what came to my mind under the broad umbrella of "what am I passionate about", could be these :- Communities : Biohackers Topics : The Anatomy of Movie Genres Music : Running Red Lights by The Avalanches · Rivers Cuomo · Pink Siifu

We live in a very interesting era where we encourage people to be outcome-driven - where productivity mostly means the shortest way to the outcome. At the same time, we also encourage people to go for out of the box experimentation, from soul searching adventures to cross-disciplinary exploration. So there’s this two separate train of thoughts. We’re caught between a generation that’s all about design-thinking and a generation that’s all about fluidity. We aim to be all about the outcome today, but wait a minute, we should also be all about the journey. We have bought into both sides. How can we possible find our way when both of this is true?

Design - Build, visualise, create, Education (Children; Adults), Event organizing and planning, Experience Design, Ideas & Innovations Management, Keynote Speaking, Movement building, Music arranging, composing and performing, Project Management, writing, editing, project generation, Training and Consultation

Ever since one of our TEDx talks went viral where we garnered 14 million views on Youtube, we know the real impact will only come if the talks were curated well. (Daniella Balarezo covered our talk on ideas.ted.com in 2019). Over the years, we've spent most of the time finding great ideas and making sure the speakers are equipped in delivering the best they can. Our dedication to this has created a few great memories for our team in our last event in 2019. Our talk by Steve Chao, the Emmy-nominated Documentary Maker who spoke about "An investigative journalist's take on fear and how we can unlearn it" got to 30k views on the first few hours, and was shared by TEDx official Facebook Page. Our talk by Brian Garcia, "Graffiti culture - criminal activity or artistic expression?" had been recommended by TEDx official FB Page twice, over the past two years. The saddest thing that happened to our TEDx community is of course the passing of one of our speaker, the Asian Super Star, Godfrey Gao. We're so glad that his noble cause in youth development is shown to the world right before his death, and that the media in China got "the story from the other side" to cover. Our talk has been translated and reshared to Weibo by his fans, and garnering more than 2 million views ever since. https://ideas.ted.com/when-speaking-a-new-language-what-matters-most-is-your-attitude-not-your-accuracy/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TDhFtALONU&t=553s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWi1SSkC3IQ&t=26s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLRWnTeJv_c