But enough about your meeting. Let’s talk about Richard Saul Wurman’s meeting. In fact, let’s talk about Richard Saul Wurman, because that’s Richard Saul Wurman’s starting point for every meeting he’s ever planned. And he’s planned some big ones. Q An architect by profession, Wurman chaired the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1972, the First Federal Design Assembly in Washington, D.C., in 1973, and the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) National Convention in Philadelphia in 1976. He founded the groundbreaking Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conference in 1984, TEDMED in 1998, and the e.g. conference in 2006 — all deep-think projects that deconstructed the standard meeting in everything from formatting (out with longwinded keynotes and panel discussions, in with concise, passionate speakers) to the mix of people who participated (out with “siloed” professions, in with pretty much whoever wanted to come, from almost any discipline).
His latest projects are equally grand. 19.20.21 takes its
name from the fact that there will be 19 cities in the world with populations of 20 million people in the 21st century; a “multi- year, multimedia initiative,” according to its website, 19.20.21 will study these “supercities” from every angle — education, transportation, demographics, infrastructure, crime — with an eye on standardizing how we understand “population’s effect regarding urban and business planning.” (See “The Supercities Project,” p. 90.) And the WWW.WWW Conference, debuting next September, aims not so much to deconstruct the conference experience as to reduce it to its essence: people talking. A “celebration of improvised conversation,” WWW.WWW will pair 100 “interesting individuals” — from the website: “An astrophysicist & a microbiologist. An actor & a playwright. A jazz musician & a classical one” — and prompt them with a question. The resulting conversations will be intercut with music from composer and cellist Yo-Yo Ma and jazz great Herbie Hancock, and portions of the program will be accessible via a tablet app and live-streaming. The common through-line in all of these projects is the
man himself. “I only produce things on subjects that I don’t understand,” Wurman, 76, said in a recent interview with Convene from his office in Newport, R.I. Indeed, he coined the terms “information anxiety” and “information architect” in books of the same name — two of more than 80 that he’s written — as part of what his website identifies as “the singular passion of his life: making information understandable.” That sense of benevolent self-interest seems to apply to
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interviews as well. During our talk, Wurman didn’t so much answer our questions as use them as stepping stones toward a more peripatetic conversational path. Relaxed and genial, he wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about. And so he did.
You’ve said that “making information understandable” is your lifelong passion. Understandable in what sense? My internal measure is, can I explain it to a literate 12-year- old? Things that I don’t understand, I seek methods of making them understandable, whether it’s doing a book, making a phone call, talking to somebody, running a conference, going to a conference, watching television obsessively. Whatever it is, I try to do, to allow me to find a path that gives me some comfort, [so] that I understand a pattern that interests me. I do a lot of cartography; that’s an obvious pattern, but
everything else for me also is patterns. A gathering is a pattern — how you set it up and how it’s paced, and when there’s downtime and uptime, and when people talk to each other. How long things take. How things reinforce each other, and how subjects change and are diametrically opposed. To me it’s all theater, but the theater of understanding.
You’ve written more than 80 books, on every topic imaginable. Is there anything they have in common? The desire to understand something. If it’s on health care, it’s because I’m interested. If it’s on children, it’s because I have