nobody interviewed. I wanted to have people who might know or not know each other, and ask a question that goes between them and starts them on a conversation; and when I was tired of that conversation, pull them off. And they wouldn’t know how long they were going to talk. It would be improvised. And, as the little description says, in between would be a thread of improvised music, which is jazz and intellectual jazz, and then have amazing visual things, because [glass artist] Dale Chihuly is going to do great installations — each part of it to be as high a level as I can produce something.
What do you think of other people’s meetings and conferences that you’ve attended? I think they’re all so terrible. Most people build conferences out of the pieces of what they’ve been taught a conference is made up of. They use an outdated alphabet. It’s like using an alphabet from the Middle Ages. They have panels, they have keynote speakers, they have introductions, they stand behind a podium, they speak for a certain amount of time — it’s all made up of a kit of parts. I don’t even think about that when I start a meeting. I don’t think it has a beginning, end, and middle; I think of it in just a different way. People think that it’s very good for people to have choices
about what they go see, so there are many threads that go through a conference. You can take this track or that track. The primary reason for doing a conference is that the people who go there have common memory. But they don’t; they go on different tracks. And everybody thinks they were on the wrong track: “Oh, that must have been a better meeting than mine. A better speech than mine.”
How would you like to see meeting planners approach the task of planning conferences? I really do believe they should question the kit of parts that they seem to come up with over and over again. Even though it might give them a little discomfort to trust the humanity of the people up there and their intelligence, if they allow people just to talk about what they love rather than what they’re selling, they might become better salesmen from the stage.
When you speak at a conference, do you give a classic keynote? [Laughs.] No! First of all, I don’t prepare a talk. Second of all, I use no visuals. Third, I sit in the middle of the stage, right up front, and I won’t start speaking unless every seat in the front row is filled, and are not saved for VIPs. And then I really talk
The Supercities Project By 2050, more than two-thirds of the global population will live in urban environments. That’s where 19.20.21 comes in. Richard Saul Wurman discusses the ambitious initiative to study the world’s biggest cities — and to help them learn from each other.
What is the goal of 19.20.21? To understand cities. No two cities do their maps to the same scale. We don’t really understand what an urban area is or what it isn’t. The legends of every single map of every single city in the world are different. It seems that in everything in our society, various
parts — sciences, businesses — like to talk to each other. Businesses have numbers; they talk to each other based on euros or dollars or something like that, or profit and loss. Sciences have languages; they talk to each other. But cities, which is the largest invention of humankind, can’t talk to each other. There’s no common language.
Does the project involve a conference? Part of it is going to be urban observatories that are live with comparative information about urban areas around the world. It’s not like a museum show where you put something up on a wall. It’s actually huge screens that have the information about cities around the world live at the same scale, displayed in the same way. That’s another piece of the menu — developing the templates for comparative information and the templates for how you draw a border around a city.
“IT OCCURRED TO ME THAT THE ONLY INTERESTING PEOPLE I WAS TALKING TO WERE IN THE TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS, THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY, AND THE DESIGN PROFESSION. AND IT SEEMED TO ME THAT WHEN THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT SOME PROJECT THAT THEY WERE DOING THAT WAS INTERESTING TO ME, THEY WERE INVOLVING THE OTHER TWO DISCIPLINES. SO I THOUGHT, I’LL CALL IT TED, AND GET THESE PEOPLE TOGETHER.”