You probably don’t know his name, but Richard Saul Wurman is one of the most important figures in defining how we discover and consume information today.
Through his 90+ books and the 40-some conferences he has created (such as TED) or played a major part in organising, Wurman has revolutionised a range of industries on his quest for understanding that which he does not understand.
Wurman was born in Philadelphia in 1935, and spent much of his early life following his curiosity.
His first love was architecture. He received Bachelor and Master degrees in the field at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1959 with the highest honours, and the Arthur Spayed Brooks Gold Medal.
Over the next six years he worked as a project architect in the US and London, during which time he also began his work as an author. Wurman’s first two books were released in 1962, when he was 26.
Returning home to Philadelphia, he established an architectural partnership that lasted 13 years, all while continuing to publish and teach, first at North Carolina State University, then Princeton, one of the highest ranked Ivy League schools in the country.
Wurman gained an ostensive reputation as a visionary who was able to engage and inform diverse audiences.
“The key to making things understandable is to understand what it’s like not to understand,” Wurman says. It’s a approach that he took in his own writing on various topics such as medicine, children, estate planning, and his popular Access series of guidebooks, beloved for their flowing design and bite-sized pieces of advice.
Through his chairing of several conferences, including the International Design Conference in 1972 First Federal Design Conference, and the International Design Assembly of 1973, Wurman began to realise that much of the content put on display was boring audiences. It was too long, too similar, with the same men in white suits talking, talking, talking.
It was in the 1980s that he coined the term ‘information architect’, making the transition from the structure of buildings to the structure of conversations.
The result was the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference – TED. Launched in 1984, and featuring some of the first demonstrations of the Sony compact disc and Apple’s Macintosh computer, it was nonetheless a flop.
That wasn’t going to stop Wurman. Over the next six years, he honed his vision for the perfect conference. In 1989, he also released his best-selling book Information Anxiety, which John Scully, former chairman of Apple Computer, claimed was “next to the Macintosh, the most important tool developed for understanding information in years.”
Finally, in 1990, Wurman rebooted the franchise, and began to invite speakers from industries outside of those the TED brand originally stood for. The new conference style revolved around one of his five tools for innovation: subtraction. Gone were the lectures, and the long presentations. Speakers took to the stage with 18 minutes to share their point – long enough to ensure effectiveness, but short enough that listeners did not get bored.
TED grew into a $4,400 per ticket, invitation only event that garnered international attention, but by 2001, Wurman grew disenfranchised with the format – as was his wont – and sold it to Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation before removing himself as chairman in 2003. He remained as chairman of TEDMED, which he’d established in 1995, until 2010.
In 2012, Wurman received the Smithsonian’s Lifetime Achievement Award, around the same time that he launched his new event, the WWW Conference.
Designed as the natural evolution of TED, Wurman defined the idea behind WWW as “intellectual jazz”, something that would inspire honest discourse rather than the traditional presentation style through which idea were so often spread. Participants took the stage to discuss a topic Wurman had announced only moments earlier, leading to an improvised conversation between two or more great minds set to music by the conference’s Musical Directors – Herbie Hancock and Yo-Yo Ma. There was no time limit; he merely ejected them from the stage whenever he got bored.
At 81, Wurman is still active in the conference community today, and is always exploring for something new to learn about.
His advice to those who want to understand how he came to be who he is today is simple: “My opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn’t designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. The big design problem is designing your life. It’s by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day.”