One day, the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, may add The Orchard to its tour roster of celebrity mansions. Outside the wrought-iron gates, an interactive touch screen will explain that one of the early Cyber-Barons of the Information Age made it his headquarters from the last decade of the twentieth century.
A beaming portrait of Richard Saul Wurman as TEDzilIa—part human, part monster conference organizer, striding the globe from Monterey, California, to Kobe, Japan—dissolves to a menu bewildering for its variety of alternative biographies. Press One for Richard Saul Wurman architect, Two for professor, Three for city government appointee, Four for mapmaker, Five for author, Six for corporate consultant, Seven for conference maven. Whichever choice is selected, the text quotes Wurman’s favorite self-explanation: “I was just trying to make things that I didn’t understand understandable to myself.” Sidebars list books published, awards garnered, and articles enumerating these career highlights.
Next, a United States map will chart the stations of the cross in Wurman’s peripatetic career: Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Newport. Beside each city, tongue-in-cheek captions grade quality of life, color coded (with appropriate visual icons) under work, love, personal finance, dining, and domestic architecture. As the visitor cruises this ocean of data, mini-windows pop open, replaying testimonials by sundry CEOs and best-selling authors. “I really don’t know what he did,” they all say, in so many words, “but whatever it was, he was damn good at organizing information. Plus, he cut his own hair.”
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The real Richard Saul Wurman is a rotund Santa Claus figure, given to roars of laughter and sentences loaded with subordinate clauses. And a studied line in self-deprecation. “I usually say I’ve failed sidewise throughout my life, had a bunch of different careers,” he opines, sitting at a table of his own design in his Newport study. An overachiever’s showcase, the room is designed to dispel any lingering doubts about Wurman’s productivity. Display shelves against two walls are loaded with his publishing output in several editions and translations. Were it not for the fax, computer, and TV/VCR, one might be in the library of a nineteenth-century English country squire.
Certainly, his new address puts him on the map socially, albeit a century too late. Once the Firestone family guest house, Wurman’s thirty-room new base is a short stroll around the cliff-walk from The Breakers, summer cottage of Cornelius Vanderbilt—the Barry Diller of the Railway Age. But if Newport was the watering hole of the late nineteenth-century industrial elite, Monterey now serves a similar role for their postindustrial counterparts—thanks to Wurman’s TED conferences, the latest of which was held there last month.
First held in 1984, these tribal gatherings have become the Yaltas of Data, where the statesmen of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) get together to discuss hot issues, show off new gizmos—and cut multimillion-dollar deals in the corridors.
TED regulars include such Digital Age luminaries as former Big Apple chairman John Sculley (now of Spectrum Information Technologies), Microsoft chief Bill Gates, and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. But Wurman’s trick has been to mix CEOs, rocket scientists, and designers with specialists in other fields, from music to medicine to movies. The audience profile is just as eclectic, and just as carefully composed.
“It’s easy to talk about convergence today,” says Negroponte, “but in 1984 it was considered lunatic. TED was a force in changing this. The most salient characteristic is the degree to which the participants are his friends. Ricky is TED.”
In much the same way that Wurman’s Access series revolutionized guidebooks by slicing cities up geographically (thereby reuniting topics—such as food and lodging—usually treated in separate chapters), so the TED conferences have reconceived the professional shindigs, bringing together people from diverse disciplines that have become highly segregated.
The TED timetable is designed to maximize just such no-holds-barred schmoozing, recognizing that this, for most delegates, is the main point of being there. “What you really go to TED for is the stuff going on in the audience,” says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. “There’s intense conversations, everybody’s doing breakfast and dinner. We’re all wrung out by the end. It creates a community of interests for people who would otherwise pass like ships in the night. Wired magazine was more or less launched at TED3; they got a lot of their people and ideas there.”
Negroponte confirms this. “I’ve been to every TED conference, and in each case something important happened in my life as a result, the first being the Brand book (Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T.).”
A simple flyer announces each conference, but as time has passed, word of mouth has become sufficient. Wurman keeps the audience to around five hundred despite an applicant pool that would easily allow him to double that, carefully sifting prospective participants for diversity.
“I’d make a lot of money if I did it for a thousand, but it would completely undermine the conference. The hall holds about five hundred people, so in three or four days you can meet everybody. I still think of it as giving a great party.”
Trip Hawkins cites TED2 as the place where he got the idea for his multimedia company, 3DO. He credits Wurman with creating “the only real conference in the industry. By that, I mean the only one where people really sit and listen to the presentations, and talk about real issues. They go for meaningful exchange of ideas.” But Hawkins notes the downside of such embarras de rich-esses. “You always feel like there’s lost potential, because the possibilities are so great with the terrific people he’s able to bring together.”
With an individual registration fee of $1,450, it’s perhaps not surprising that some 60 percent of last month’s TED5 audience were CEOs, a statistic Wurman is fond of reciting. Less impressive is the number of women speakers over the years: a mere handful. Wurman admits that he has “a really difficult time finding women speakers equal to the men in the field. They haven’t been in the profession as long, haven’t caught up in certain executive and power positions. There’s been a glass ceiling.” While acknowledging these shortcomings, and the restrictive admission price, he is unapologetic. “This isn’t a scholarship group. I run a private business and I’m not ashamed of saying things that are not PC. My life and this conference are indulgent.”
No press passes are granted—“I’m not looking for publicity,” he claims. And no special places are reserved for speakers, so aristocrats and hoi polloi mingle equally. “I don’t want a ‘Them and Us,’” says Wurman. “This isn’t a conference about bells and whistles, it’s about ‘Why are we doing this?’”
Although he has had enormous success in attracting technologists and entertainers to the conference, Wurman strongly believes that designers should also heed the message of TED. “The raison d’être of the design professions is communication,” he says, “and TED is about responsible communication and learning.” Wurman thinks designers need to keep up with innovation: “Just because they’re using computers doesn’t make them modern.”
TED4, held in Kobe, Japan, in 1993, was “a good experiment,” according to Saffo, but apparently less successful than its predecessors. At this version of TED, Wurman invited key companies and designers to submit five-minute video “Idea Bytes.” Americans who went to Kobe reported that while many of these productions made the trip worthwhile (a videoconference jam session between musicians Herbie Hancock in Kobe and Makoto Ozone in Tokyo, for example), others came off as inept self-promotions. “The people with the good ideas didn’t have access to the technology and vice versa,” recalls Saffo. “Richard takes risks, and there’s always something that fails. The good news is that when things fail, they fail in interesting ways.” As Wurman sees it, “If you’re willing to fail, you can’t lose—you just try again. A huge lesson we learned at Kobe was how poorly Japanese and American companies describe themselves.”
While declaring TED4 “socially a triumph,” he nonetheless swears he’ll never try holding another conference in Japan after the problems with translation (which reduced the number of speakers) and other cultural differences, nor is he interested in running them anywhere else outside the US. “The conference is not my life. For sure by the year 2000, if it hasn’t really peaked already I’ll stop it then.”
Wurman goes to considerable lengths to foster the convivial atmosphere so central to TED’s success, for example, by wrangling party favors from certain sponsors. One of the free-bies at TED5 was a sampler from the forthcoming “Best of TED” CD-ROM anthology, to be released by Voyager. At TED3, the going-home gift was a Sharp Wizard personal digital assistant, loaded with the names and addresses of all the delegates.
Wurman’s cultivated knack for knowing the right people works toward getting what he wants as well. “You see,” he continues, schooling me in the social graces, “in this office, we work on the following model: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. For instance: there is a best room in a hotel that somebody’s going to sleep in. If you don’t ask for it, you can never get it. I have to assume it’s always gonna be me.”
One does, or you do, you in particular?
“I do. I do.”
Why should you get the best room?
“Well, I really think I deserve it. If I go to a restaurant, I always want the best table. I don’t always get it, but I want it.”
What does it do for you, to get it?
“It fulfills the fact that I deserve it—although I don’t necessarily expect to get it.”
By now a veritable one-man brand (the middle name is included as a way of “grabbing some dignity”), Richard Saul Wurman first made his reputation as creator of the Access guidebooks series. But there are other, earlier publications he’s equally proud of, principal among them the “technocratic snow job of an atlas” he did for MIT Press in 1966—the first comparative statistical atlas of major American cities; and the Spanish-and-English newsletter he produced while deputy director of Housing and Community Development for the City of Philadelphia in the early ’70s.
Wurman’s training as an architect seeps through all his work, and he insists that that’s how he envisages himself, despite the plethora of professional incarnations. “I’ll be an architect till the day I die. I’m very interested in the structure of information as the way in. And I do see it as architecture.”
At one point in our conversation, I hand Wurman my copy of an early LA Access, bought in a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica last year; I definitely prefer the design of the earlier editions: their longer format, quieter graphics, and radiused black covers. “That’s a hand job, too expensive,” he explains of the rounded corners, taking hold of the copy and going suddenly quiet. “Oh my God, this is an early one. First edition. I don’t think I have one of these . . .” He turns the pages with genuine tenderness, as if greeting a forgotten child.
“This brings back memories. Of a little office where I couldn’t pay the electricity bill, of taking all the money I had in the world and really inventing something, pasting everything up by hand because we didn’t have a computer. Nobody would distribute it. Nobody would publish it, so I went around and sold it myself at bookstores, gas stations, car washes. It was a very difficult time of my life. I was going down the tubes—bankrupt.”
Stretched to the limit financially, in 1981 Wurman sought advice from a colleague on the board of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Frank Stanton, ex-president of CBS. “By the time we finished talking, he said ‘I’ll buy half the company.’ It saved my ass.” Stanton’s support funded the next edition of LA Access, and new guides to San Francisco and Hawaii over the next few years. In 1991, several years after Wurman bought Stanton out, he sold the venture to HarperCollins publishers.
The Access concept has proved applicable not just to major world cities, but also to cultural events and institutions such as baseball, the Olympics, medicine, and the Wall Street Journal. The format takes an architectural approach to a subject, using abstracted diagrams and color to unpack privileged knowledge— be it the rules and folklore of a national pastime, or the codes and rituals of the financial markets—and explain it to the intelligent layman. The recent city guides deploy more garish graphics and have lost the purist charm of the originals; the nonurban guides also sacrifice aesthetic subtlety in favor of sheer density of factual information.
“Every page is a word-map,” Wurman explains, drawing the basic distinction between his books and their illustrious Baedeker forebears, a pile of which lies on the far shelves of his office.
“Richard’s taken modes of information that have been hidebound for a hundred years and thought out ways of digesting them,” says natural-sciences author Stephen Jay Gould, a TED speaker. “Nobody thought of maps as anything other than spatially coordinated. What Richard has done is try and convert spatial information into time. One of the things you want to know when you’re driving is ‘What is an hour?’ An hour in Arizona is very different from an hour in New York.” For a scholar, however, Gould finds the Access guides don’t carry enough information. “They’re an entrée. The Guide Bleu is so dense with scholarly detail that you’re going to lose other things. The answer is to carry both.”
The increasing recreational and cultural use of city centers—which the Access guides facilitate—coincides with the transformation of the urban economy, the exodus of traditional downtown employment to the suburbs. “Cities are too expensive for work. Work has gone out to Stamford, Connecticut, or New Jersey,” Wurman observes, adding that when he travels, he no longer visits cities. “They’re more hostile, harder to get around. When it snows, it’s slush, you don’t see the change of seasons, and you can’t leave anything in your car.” Perhaps induced by his new rustic perspective, Wurman professes an enhanced appreciation of the extra-urban. A new series, called the In Between Guides, will cover “the wonderful idiosyncratic hotels and indigenous restaurants” of regional America.
Like a work of architecture, each Access guide proclaims Richard Saul Wurman as its author (even now, his name appears on the cover, as mandated in the terms of the sale to HarperCollins), but their inside-back covers reveal a team of assistants, writers, designers, and translators whose compendious efforts yield the singular vision.
“Richard is very much a person who has an idea and goes out and finds someone else to realize it,” says Loring Leifer, who worked with Wurman on his two “theory” books, Information Anxiety and Follow the Yellow Brick Road (she’s credited in them with “turning Wurmanspeak into English”). “He used to say, ‘My books aren’t written, they’re assembled.’ I put his ideas into sentences, from the vast amounts of interviews he had done. He put in lots of sidebars, so people would be able to read at different levels, to leap from one idea to another. It’s in his nature to make those leaps. He’s very impulsive.”
Yellow Brick Road was much less successful than Information Anxiety. Wurman argues that it fell victim to managerial upheavals at the publishing house Bantam Press and, hence, to inadequate marketing. “I’m waiting for it to go out of print so I can do a paperback and sell it myself.” Two-thirds of a projected trilogy, these books attempt to emulate the flavor of face-to-face communication by incorporating snippets of data in the margins, and diverse “voices” within the body text, including extended first-person testimonials by friends of the author. “The act of transferring information from one human being to another is extraordinary, really sublime,” says Wurman. “l try to capture small parts of that complexity and, to the extent that I can, make my books like frozen conversation.”
The trouble with anything frozen is that it needs thawing before you can enjoy it again in its original condition. Both of Wurman’s books are stuffed full of insights, anecdotes, and raw nuggets of information, but the net results are cacophonous ensembles from which one struggles to extract any sense of a memorable governing thesis. In their frenetic hopscotching from one topic to the next (or backward, at random, as advised in the introduction), these books seem to suggest the mode of attention of a TV viewer, distractedly flipping the remote control, rather than the sustained concentration of a conventional reader. “I fall asleep reading narratives,” Wurman admits. “If I pick up [Allan Bloom’s] The Closing of the American Mind, I close it after three pages.”
Among Wurman’s numerous upcoming projects are a book on “The Information Architects,” featuring some twenty designers: people like New York graphic designer Peter Bradford (“the most thoughtful person in graphic design in terms of thinking about the structure of information”), Nancye Green of Donovan/ Green, Joel Katz of Paradigm:design, and Nathan Shedroff, the point man behind Danny Goodman’s Macintosh Handbook—with Richard Saul Wurman.
Then there’s a guide to Newport, Twelve Issues That Face America made easy-to-understand, and a new book on the Media Lab, where Wurman is currently a visiting scholar—a duty-free position bestowed by Negroponte, who predicts the book will be “a window into the Lab for a wide mix of eyeballs and minds. I have no idea how it will turn out, which is why I asked Ricky to do it.”
“King Philip Chose Ohio for Going Skiing,” Wurman suddenly announces. Then, noticing my bafflement, proceeds to translate: “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species.” He reaches into his briefcase and cheerfully unloads fat wads of Xeroxes from The Life That Lives on Man, Our Skin as an Eco System, and the Atlas of Medical Parasitology—background reading for a new book he’s coauthoring with illustrator David Macaulay and Stephen Jay Gould. “We’re structuring a story about the animal kingdom starting from man. If we incinerated our bodies and everything died except for the things that are living on it, you’d still see a human body. There’s that many mites and bugs and worms all over us,” he says, enraptured. Then Wurman vouchsafes his real ambition. “One of my fantasies is to be head of a big company, like president of IBM. There’s no way I’d ever be offered one of those jobs, but I really think I’d rise to the occasion.” He stops for a moment. “Maybe I’d be a fuckin’ disaster.”
Many people in Wurman’s extended network of contacts remark on his gregarious and fearless ability to ask questions, especially the simple ones others are too shy to ask. And how he has managed to retain a childlike curiosity, “a willingness to be the kid in front of the emperor,” as Macaulay puts it. Wurman has certainly hit upon a very beguiling strategy: proclaim your ignorance and people will grant you a psychological advantage, floored by your gutsiness in admitting such a shortcoming. He has taken his own, average, sense of insecurity and turned it into a lifelong crusade, a business. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether he’s having you on.
“There’s a real dichotomy in my personality. I really, genuinely believe I’m stupid. I’m always feeling this insecurity of being dumb, not being able to read hard books. Everybody seems smarter than me. On the other hand I know I’m pretty fucking clever. I can see patterns. I can go into some pretty demanding meetings with a fundamental question, maybe as the Last of the Great Innocents, and come off smelling of roses.”
In his recent profile of Bill Gates in the New Yorker, John Seabrook noted that “one of the lessons you learn in becoming an adult is that it doesn’t always pay to be curious. Some people learn to avoid curiosity altogether. My impression is that [Gates] still has the fantasy of the giant, all-knowing brain, and that this is what the information highway means to him. It’s a place where curiosity is rewarded.” Reading this, I was struck by its aptness as a description of Richard Saul Wurman: the fantasy of the limitless capacity to absorb vast quantities of data, the guzzling voracity of his appetite to digest information on whatever subject.
Wurman talks admiringly of “single-agenda personalities”—Yasser Arafat, Mahatma Gandhi, and the architect Louis I. Kahn are his favorite examples—as if yearning to see himself (or be seen) as having that kind of unwavering vocation. But he is pulled by an equal and opposite drive. “I have this feeling that I have to keep on starting over, having these other lives. It’s a way of cheating the grim reaper.”
Even now, Kahn is his hero. Wurman studied with him at the University of Pennsylvania and later compiled an anthology of his writings (What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn). “His agenda was architecture with a capital A, and nothing else really mattered. I get teary-eyed talking about him,” he says, suddenly pensive. “I was really angry at him for dying. How could he dare die on us when we still needed him? He allowed that it was OK to have simple thoughts, simple not being pejorative. He was a permission giver, that was his magic.”
Shortly before Kahn’s death, Wurman confessed his “interest anxiety” to his mentor on a long transcontinental flight. Already immersed in a smorgasbord of activities, while running an architectural practice with two partners in Philadelphia, he was beginning to doubt his true path. “Kahn was quiet for a moment. Then he said ‘Even when I get a haircut, I’m an architect. You’ll always be an architect.’” It was a kind of benediction. But lest the prophecy should turn out not to be correct, Wurman takes precautions. He cuts his own hair. “At high school I wanted to be a painter. At my father’s doing I took all these tests to see what I had an aptitude for. They revealed three possible careers: as an architect, an archaeologist, or a hairdresser. Two out of three ain’t bad. I haven’t been to a barber since I was twenty-two.”
Outside The Orchard, the touch screen has almost run through its menu. Among the snippets of bio-infotainment that the visitor has downloaded, there’s the occasion when the Cyber Baron passed up an invitation to become office manager for Charles Eames; the nadir in the late 1970s when he lived in a Venice flophouse on a borrowed mattress; the Eames lecture where he met his wife. A closing sequence replays a segment from Gloria Nagy Wurman’s introductory speech at TED3, in which she revealed how the First Couple of Access really get around. “Richard and I have driven hundreds and thousands of miles together across the world, and the way we navigate is by SCREAMING at one another for fifty miles at a time about whose fault it was that we missed the exit to the New Jersey Turnpike.”
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