grandchildren. If it’s on cities, it’s because I’m an urban planner and I like to understand cities. If it’s on cartography, it’s because my passion is trying to work out my understanding of maps and cartographic theory. I only produce things on subjects that I don’t understand, which is also counterintuitive, because I think most people go to a publisher with their expertise and then get an advance. I don’t have a publisher, and I only write about things that I want to learn about. So I start every project in total ignorance, and in terror. The new conference — the WWW Conference — is a
conference of absolute, pure terror for myself, because it’s all improvised. There’s no schedule. I have no monetary model for doing it. I don’t know if it will work, although I’ve tested it in a few minor ways, but I don’t know if I can keep it going for two-and-a-half days. Whether the conversations will be as good as I think they will be or better, whether the people will come — the participants; there’s no paid audience. I think it will work, or I wouldn’t be doing this, but I know that I will be at the edge with this one.
Is there an advantage to operating like that? It gets the best from each of us. We’ve been brought up to pursue comfort, and you don’t get your best work when you pursue comfort. That’s what people do when they do conferences. Probably all your conferences that your members are doing, they’re pursuing comfort — the comfort of having panels, comfort of having name-brand executives, comfort of having people prepare their speech, comfort of having a podium which protects their groin, comfort of saving seats in
SELF-MEDICATED:Any project that Richard Saul Wurman under- takes is motivated by “the desire to understand something” — including health care, which led to the creation of TEDMED.At the closing session for TEDMED 2010 in San Diego, Wurman appeared with geneticist Nathaniel Pearson, Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, and TEDMED PresidentMarc Hodosh.
the front for the VIPs, comfort of having it funded, comfort of people dressing up, comfort of small talk. Comfort of introducing people. I don’t introduce people at my conferences. I say, “C’mon up here.”
What led you to get involved with conferences in the first place? [The International Design Conference in] Aspen in ’72 was probably my first big outing, where 1,200 people came. I was fairly young. It was supposed to be at that time — and I think it was — the best conference in the world. It was that way before me and after me; I didn’t make it the best conference in the world. This open book where I could do anything I wanted to do for a week — I really reinvented the conference. I used the whole town of Aspen for my conference, and did a lot of things that show up in my later work. After that, the next one was the First Federal Design
Assembly, which was high politics. It was the first and only design assembly that the federal government had, and that came out of the National Endowment [for the Arts]. And then