Richard Saul Wurman
Author, Information Architect
Appearing at BIF-6
The Commissioner of Curiousity
Richard Saul Wurman likes to simplify things to initials and numerals: TED is the Technology Entertainment Design conference he created; TUB is The Understanding Business, a company Wurman founded to capitalize on his theories of knowledge.
There’s also TOP, one of his publishing companies, along with Access Press, that produced books on “the topics that matter in our lives”—such as healthcare, wealthcare, travel and child-raising; IA is information architecture, a field Wurman essentially launched three decades ago; or it could stand for “Information Anxiety,” his blockbuster 1990 book that foresaw the growing problem of data clutter and proposed a radical new means of organizing and presenting knowledge.
Then there’s 19.20.21., a massive undertaking to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to reach 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century.
Finally, comes his latest book called 33. With its Wurmanesque sub-title Understanding Change & the Change in Understanding, 33 is a fable re-imagined three decades after its original telling as a conference keynote address at the1976 AIA convention. It chronicles the adventures and musings of an eccentric (yet oddly familiar) character: the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination. The bemused, amused, and roundish imp waddles through the city of What-If in the land of Could-Be, trying to make sense of the myriad changes that have transpired in the past 33 years.
In Wurman’s original presentation, he told the tale of the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination who is hired to run a city and county for one year. In exchange for his services, the powers that be agree to do everything the Commissioner tells them to do. “What he did was look at everything that was going on and did the opposite–like change the laws of copyrighting to the right to copy” says Wurman. “The results were astonishingly favorable. In fact, everything he did was so successful that they banished him, as people would predictably do.”
Wurman’s new and re-imagined story is presented in an ingenious, multi-layered format—"information upon information," as the Commissioner himself might say—with the original fable at its core. Surrounding this is an updated tale as presented through 33 episodes and accompanying graphics.
Once described by Fortune magazine as an “intellectual hedonist” with a “hummingbird mind,” Wurman’s body of work is based on an epiphany he had as a young man: Human understanding is held back by difficulties in the way writers, designers and publishers convey information. Driven by that awareness, he left the practice of architecture (where he apprenticed with the legendary Louis Kahn) for what he came to call “information architecture,” advocating innovative design and editorial techniques to make data more visual and comprehensible.
“The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand,” Wurman has said. “It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.”
With 82 books under his belt, Wurman’s oeuvre is outrageously eclectic, and it all springs from the same source: his own ignorance. Spurred by his lack of understanding of what he considered basic or crucial topics—like healthcare, education, travel and child-rearing—Wurman has sought ways to convey them to others more clearly. “Anything you do should come from your age, your ignorance or your curiosity.” His long suit, he says, is being able to embrace his own ignorance more than others embrace theirs.
Though he still considers himself a designer, Wurman remains true to his realization of decades ago – that design and technology are only tools to facilitate comprehension. What’s most important are the tête-à-tête exchanges that happen between people. An entire chapter of his best-selling Information Anxiety is devoted to what he calls "the lost art of the conversation." He writes, "There is nothing we do better than when we do conversation well. There is no other communication device that provides such subtle and instantaneous feedback, or permits such a range of evaluation and correctability."
From conversation to storytelling, Wurman is probably best known for the TED conferences he launched in the early 1980s, which brought together many of America’s sharpest thinkers in the fields of technology, entertainment and design for sprawling intellectual gabfests. He also has been involved with all of BIF’s Collaborative Innovation Summits, serving as mentor, storyteller and host of the first two.
“I’m an aficionado of what happens when you get interesting people together and you make it easy for them to overcome their shyness and get them talking to each other,” Wurman says. “Unequivocally the Business Innovation Factory attracts smart individuals who tell a fresh story about their passions, ideas and failures. Looking in the gray area between these stories is where good, inspiring concepts will arise.”
Richard Saul Wurman lives in Newport, Rhode Island with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their three Biblical yellow labs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
