Background

Richard Saul Wurman was born on March 26, 1935, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He is a son of Morris Louis Wurman and Fannie (Pelson) Wurman. Wurman grew up in Philadelphia, in a family where the father habitually questioned his children on current events at the dinner table; those who didn’t know an answer had to look it up.

Education

Wurman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in architecture, the latter with highest honors in 1959.

Wurman was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Arts in 1994, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at ArtCenter College of Design the next year.

Career

Wurman went to work for the architectural firm headed by the eminent Louis I. Kahn in the 1950s. Kahn’s guidance led to an academic career that saw Wurman serving as a professor of architecture in several American universities, as well as England’s Cambridge University, during the 1960s and 1970s; while at California State Polytechnic Institute, Wurman also served as a dean of the School of Environmental Design.

During the same period, Wurman also managed to attend—and sometimes chair or create—a variety of conferences in architecture and design. Eventually, Wurman branched out on his own, founding the highly successful publishing company Access Press and the consulting company The Understanding Business. A major project of the latter was the restructuring of California’s Yellow Pages into the “Smart” Yellow Pages, a venture that directly reached the homes of over 33,000,000 Pacific Bell subscribers.

It is as author and publisher of his Access travel guides, however, that Wurman may have made his greatest public impact. These guides, dealing for the most part with cities but also with other regions (such as Northern California’s wine country), have become notable for their tall, slim format, the use of color to lead the reader to different types of attractions (i.e., red for restaurants, green for shops, blue for hotels, black for cultural sites), readable maps, informative summaries, interesting sidebars on the best attractions in a given city, and most of all, their easy-to-use neighborhood-by-neighborhood organizational plan.

The earliest city guides under the Access imprint, published in 1982, dissected the American cities of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco; Hawaii also earned a volume in 1982. Other cities Wurman has written guides to over the years include Chicago, Boston, Washington, New Orleans, London, Rome, Paris, Tokyo and Italy’s Florence-Venice-Milan axis. Critical response to the series has been enthusiastic.

As the information revolution progressed during the 1980s, Wurman’s wide-ranging curiosity kept him on top of the changes. Toward the decade’s end, he wrote a book that encapsulated and made explicit many of the beliefs and assumptions that had either arisen from, or given rise to, his previous successes. This book, published in 1989, was Information Anxiety, and the title diagnosed what Wurman perceived as a widespread condition caused by the difficulties many people have in assimilating and processing the deluge of information now transmitted to them. To counteract the overwhelming flood of often-useless information, Wurman proposed that consumers be selective in receiving and learning: “learning is remembering what you are interested in,” he suggested, as quoted in a Publishers Weekly review. Having decided what was personally important and unimportant, the consumer would then need the ability to access information, which Wurman included in his discussion. Fundamentally, the educational system itself would need to be transformed, with the first six years of elementary school being devoted exclusively to the subject of learning to learn.

The media organization TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) was conceived by Wurman in February 1984 as a conference which has been held annually since 1990. TEDMED, EG conference and the WWW conference were created by Wurman, as well.

Wurman continued to produce ever-newer work in the 1990s, including a co-written guide to Macintosh computers, more than one book on how to handle personal finances, and a host of Access guidebooks. His miscellaneous projects are almost too numerous to mention, including a retrospective exhibit of his designs shown in Tokyo in 1991, and the editing of books on Chicago architect Louis Kahn and on how to give and take directions.

Wurman has, during the course of a long career, broadened his vision so as to become an expert on information—specifically, on the layman’s access to information, and as a corollary to that, on education. His projects have varied greatly in subject and scope, and his job title might at times be author, at times editor, at times consultant or designer or chairman of a board. There has, however, been a unifying design, connecting all his ventures. Yet Wurman has proven himself capable not only of success in a number of fields, but of re-imagining at least one field, that of the travel guidebook. He chaired TED from 1984 through 2003, and TEDMED from 1995 through 2010.

Achievements

• Wurman is best known as a creator of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) and TEDMED conferences. He has published more than 80 books on different topics.
  
  Wurman is a winner of the Arthur Spayed Brooks Gold Medal. He is also a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Wurman won the Annual Gold Medal from Trinity College, a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts and received the Boston Science Museum’s 50th Annual Bradford Washburn Award in October, 2014.

Works

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  • The Wall Street Journal, Guide to Understanding Money and Markets

    (Answers the most frequently asked questions about stocks,...)

    1990
  • Medical Access

    (Explains the procedures and purpose of more than one hund...)

    1985
  • Wills, Trusts & Estate Planning

    (This book takes you through the decision processes of thi...)

    2001
  • Heart Disease & Cardiovascular Health

    (In easy-to-understand terms, this book brings the reader ...)

    2001
  • Understanding Healthcare

    (Understanding Healthcare answers 100s of key questions an...)

    2004
  • Information Architects

    (This book shows how the presentation of information can m...)

    1997
  • Information Anxiety 2

    (Information Anxiety 2 teaches critical lessons for functi...)

    2000
  • USATLAS

    (Richard Saul Wurman's new road atlas)

    1991
  • Information Anxiety 1989
  • 33: Understanding Change & the Change in Understanding 2009

Views

Quotations: “Each project has focused on some subject or idea that I personally had difficulty understanding. They all stem from my desire to know, rather than from already knowing— from my ignorance rather than my intelligence, from my inability rather than my ability.”

Membership

Wurman is a member of the American Institute Graphic Artists and the Alliance Graphique International.

Connections

Wurman is married to Gloria Nagy. The couple has four children - Joshua, Reven, Vanessa and Anthony.

Father:

Morris Louis Wurman

Mother:

Fannie (Pelson) Wurman

Spouse:

Gloria Nagy

child:

Anthony Wurman

child:

Reven Wurman

child:

Joshua Wurman

child:

Vanessa Wurman