Richard Saul Wurman. Image credit: Melissa Mahoney. Image & research courtesy of the Wurman Archive

To many, Richard Saul Wurman is inevitably introduced as "the man who created TED." Since Wurman organized the first TED conference in 1984, the organization's library has expanded to over 4,300 publicly available videos from some of the world's greatest minds about some of humanity's most curious and urgent subjects, not to mention the almost 50,000 independent TEDx talks which have been delivered since 2009.

The more one talks to or reads about Wurman, however, the smaller TED seems to shrink amidst a dizzying list of his pursuits into the world of the misunderstood, the unknown, and the unexplored. Born in 1935 in Philadelphia, an architectural alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, Wurman has counted Louis Kahn and Charles Eames among his mentors and Moshe Safdie and Frank Gehry among his great friends. He has published over 90 books on topics from architecture and graphic design to data and medicine, leaving a trail of influential projects such as TED and TEDMED, theories such as LATCH and A-NOSE, and an entirely recognized field in Information Architecture which, incidentally, was the subject of a book by recent Archinect interviewee Molly Wright Steenson.

Steenson observed succinctly that Wurman's career boils down to "the singular pursuit of 'understanding,' to make information inform — finding the form in information." However, it was perhaps Wurman’s wife, the novelist Gloria Nagy, who captured this remarkable trajectory most aptly when she said, "It is very hard to explain what Richard does. It is especially hard for Richard to explain what Richard does. All of his training, as an architect, as a cartographer, as a graphic designer, as an entrepreneur, as a publisher, and as an author, has all been about a passion for making information understandable."

In June 2023, Archinect’s Niall Patrick Walsh spoke with Wurman about his reflections on artificial intelligence and how it sits in a broader timeline of technology and innovations. We also discussed how AI intersects with Wurman's passion for making information understandable and accessible and Wurman's wider thoughts on how his architectural background, his engagements with Louis Kahn, and his fascination with "opposites" have and continue to shape his career. The discussion, edited slightly for clarity, is published below.

This article is part of the Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence series.

Niall Patrick Walsh: Your life is deeply interwoven with questions about technology, data, information, and understanding. How do recent advances in AI, particularly generative AI such as ChatGPT and Midjourney sit within these questions? How significant are they to you?

Richard Saul Wurman: I understand your question, but I would like to take the clock backward. I love Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses. Moses himself is a larger-than-life character. His life was a fairytale, an exaggeration; he represents a character who goes from swaddling clothes in a river to a king. When Michelangelo was creating his sculpture, he went to Carrara to find marble to use, and he said “I have to let Moses out.” To him, Moses was in the stone. It wasn’t about adding anything, as architecture often is. It was about subtracting; of discovering something he felt was already there. The Ajanta Caves in India are another example of this, where the builders carved the temple from the rock.

Let’s think of the technology behind how Michelangelo let Moses out of the stone. One is transport. It is almost cliche to say, but we truly do not know how the Great Pyramids were built. How did they move the stone? We have theories about ramps and pull systems, but we don’t definitively know. There are some elaborate technologies that were used at the Great Pyramids, or to move a stone the size of Michelangelo’s Moses from Carrara to Rome, that was indispensable yet are now either taken for granted or not understood.

Michelangelo could have taken that hammer and chisel and turned it on his assistants in violence. Instead, he used it to create a masterpiece. — Richard Saul Wurman

Then, there is another technology Michelangelo used to create Moses: the hammer and chisel. We don’t think about the hammer and chisel as technology because they seem self-evident. But somebody had to invent it, right? If you sent me out to create a hammer and chisel from scratch, whether finding iron ore or heating it correctly, I wouldn’t know how to do it. We often talk about the cap of where we are in society in the present moment and don’t understand how we got here. Nor to we read the usefulness of present inventions in parallel to anything else that has ever been invented.

Here’s another key point about inventions and innovations. Michelangelo could have taken that hammer and chisel and turned it on his assistants in violence. Instead, he used it to create a masterpiece. The lesson here is that many wonderful inventions can be used in many ways. We have cars that kill 40,000 Americans every year, but we embrace cars and love them, and receiving our driver’s license is held as a milestone in our lives.

When we invented the car, did we really understand with certainty how it would change the world and our cities? Did we even realize the connections it would make in the mind of someone who studied it? If you study cars in-depth, you start to learn about materials, steel, plastics, fiberglass, aluminum, etc. You learn about chemistry from gasoline and kerosene. You learn about power, hydrogen, helium, water, and energy. You learn about language and geography, given how cars are made in different countries. Then you learn about streets and rubber. You learn about how artificial rubber production was halted during World War II, and how Ford founded a place called Fordlandia in the Amazon Rainforest in the 1920s that went bankrupt. You learn about the street system in different cities. You learn about the history of cities, and how they are designed. All this comes from thinking about one invention.

If you study archaeology, you realize that 150 years is like sneezing. And these new artificial intelligence tools are a sneeze. — Richard Saul Wurman

So what does this all mean? We have this hammer and chisel being put to good and bad, just like every invention from cars to drugs to electricity. We have no idea what an invention grows into from when it starts. What we do know is how dependent we can become on recent inventions. If you go back 150 years, we didn’t have electricity, and most people didn’t have running water. If you study archaeology, you realize that 150 years is like sneezing. And these new artificial intelligence tools are a sneeze. Do I think they are wonderful? I think they are probably wonderful and probably awful. And the best part? What is truly good about AI, nobody has probably thought of yet.

As you mention, the hammer and chisel was an innovation from 10,000 years ago that we still use today. We could call this a resilient invention. When I look at artificial intelligence, but also computing and electricity, I think that what we call innovation today is much more fragile. How would generations in 10,000 years' time be able to ‘access’ or ‘detect’ our AI and computing innovations the way we can do for the hammer and chisel? Will they even care that it ever existed?

There are also interesting parallels with the idea of data and information. A chisel is an information device in that it can carve information and data in stone, which will last thousands of years. Yet today, there are legitimate fears that our reliance on the digital storage of data, which has a far shorter and more fragile life than that of chiseled stone, will mean that in hundreds or thousands of years, our descendants will find it difficult to find and interpret data on how we live today: the so-called Digital Dark Age. This all goes to your point that humanity has a tendency to dwell on innovation in the present without placing it in a wider timeline, both past and future.

Let’s dwell on what we mean by innovation. A lot has been written about my LATCH Theory on how there are only five ways of organizing information: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy. I have another one, which says there are only five ways of innovating. The acronym is A-NOSE, which stands for: Addition, Need, Opposites, Subtraction, and Epiphany.

The iPhone was ‘Addition.’ They knitted a quilt of parts that already existed and packaged it neater. ‘Need’ is when your leg is broken, and we invented walking sticks, wheelchairs, and a whole manner of medical responses. An ‘opposite’ is Neils Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who said that the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. Think also of the tango. The tango is a dance of opposites, love and hate, improvisation and rules, and so on.

When you apply A-NOSE, many so-called innovations today become less impressive. — Richard Saul Wurman

‘Subtraction’ was my TED conference. I took away the panels, the dress codes, the single-subject format, and the questioning from the audience. I took away the press. If someone went over time, I would pull them off the stage. I took away the money, too. Steve Jobs would send me the computers for the conference and would take them back at the end. Nobody thinks of TED in this way now, but at the time, this was the innovation. Look beyond TED even, and we see that Bauhaus was about subtraction. The final innovation, ‘Epiphany,’ is mysterious; it is fooling around with paper, glues, and surfaces, finding that the glues aren’t sticking, and inventing the post-it note.

When you apply A-NOSE, many so-called innovations today become less impressive. Putting a camera on the back of a car so you see who you run into is not innovation. It’s not game-changing. It is simply making something incrementally better.

Let’s think about the Wright brothers’ plane versus today’s fast jets or even the Concorde. The Wright brothers’ plane was little more than a kite that figured out how to push wind behind it. None of the fundamental principles of plane design were there, whether that was how curves were sculpted on wings, operability, or aerodynamics. Every month, year, or two years, there was serious incremental change. If you went back in time now and showed the Wright brothers a modern jet engine, they would be lost. It was only after a long line of incremental changes that we reached the aviation capabilities of today.

The same applies to Concorde, which I flew on several times. The big change here was time, but nothing else. It was probably less comfortable than other planes, the seats were tight, the food was mediocre, and the cost was high. We still hail it as an innovation, but to me, it simply isn’t. We consider the Wright brothers and Concorde as the seismic innovations of the aviation industry, but to me, the innovation was when they invented the operable wing. That’s the mystery of the airplane to me: How they made these simple curvatures that allow us to fly planes upside down and do tricks. I still don’t understand it.

Always look at the opposite; there’s a business in the opposite of everything that we create. — Richard Saul Wurman

Under a reasonable growth pattern, I won’t be able to comprehend the speeds at which we will travel in the future, and that’s before they can beam us up like Star Trek. It will be so different from how I fly today. They’ll have speeds of several thousand miles per hour, or perhaps there will be cheap planes with the same density as subway trains. Maybe the fuel will be helium. Now remember A-NOSE. O is for ‘opposite.’ There might be incredibly fast, economical planes, but there will also be the opposite. There’ll be airships that are slow and beautiful, that give you somewhere to relax with a small group on a cruise from London to New York. Always look at the opposite; there’s a business in the opposite of everything that we create.

You mentioned LATCH theory earlier and the organization of information. I am re-reading your book Information Anxiety at the moment in order to apply this pre-internet concept to AI and ChatGPT today. There is an ongoing question as to whether ChatGPT and generative AI make information more accessible or if the ease of access actually drowns us in information.

You’re defining ‘information anxiety’ the way it sounds, but that is not the way I define it. Information anxiety is the gap between what we know and what we think we should know. Let’s say I am reading a story in a newspaper. If I don’t understand where the story took place, I might re-read it because I feel embarrassed at not understanding the story. So there’s a gap in understanding. We all live in between what we are taught is information, such as words, articles, and books, and what we actually understand. If you read something and it doesn’t inform you, I define that gap as the anxiety. It isn’t the overload, which is what many people assume it to be.

We all live in between what we are taught is information, such as words, articles, and books, and what we actually understand. — Richard Saul Wurman

If you read my Access Guides series, you’ll see that they are dense. I never simplify them by removing information. Instead, I clarify them with an understandable set of rules. If you can understand it, there is no anxiety. There’s a lot of information, but no information overload. If I do feel that something is not interesting, I filter it out and don’t feel guilty. If I don’t understand the story on the front page of the paper, I’m not stupid. The writer was.

Is there something to be said for ChatGPT as a tool for filtering out non-information and drawing on millions of data sources to distill the information you want in a conversational and accessible way?

Have you asked ChatGPT to generate your biography?

No, ChatGPT doesn't know who I am.

My own life is the only thing I can judge without doing my own research. There’s been a lot written about me, and when I put my name into ChatGPT, it starts making big errors by only the third paragraph. If I had read the first couple of paragraphs, I would have no reason to think anything else was inaccurate, but it is flagrantly wrong. They’ll probably correct it over time, but for now, it's nothing I would depend on.

That said, I think it will get better. Generative AI is an interesting step along the way. Is it the invention of a new animal? I don’t know. It feels to me like an incremental step ahead of Google and Siri, but on steroids. Will it devour the world, or eat itself up? Will it change the habits of people writing music or books? Probably, but so did Encyclopedia Britannica. When I went through high school, people were stealing paragraphs from Encyclopedia Brittanica and rewriting them.

This idea of standing on shoulders and rubbing shoulders can tell you a lot about the invention of villages, towns, and cities. — Richard Saul Wurman

Everything is stolen, in a way. I am working on a project now called 'Shoulders,' which will be the name of a conference or book. The subtitle is ‘Shoulders We Stand On and Shoulders We Rub.’ If it was a conference, the rules for each speaker would be that you can’t talk about yourself or any of your projects. Instead, you have to tell the story of your influences. Not stylistic influences but ethical and moral influences. I feel that I stand on the shoulders of Socrates. I didn’t meet him or write anything about him, but he influenced me. I stand on the shoulders of Louis Kahn, too. I’ve also rubbed shoulders with many people. This idea of standing on shoulders and rubbing shoulders can tell you a lot about the invention of villages, towns, and cities.

Speaking of towns and cities, I wanted to conclude by looking back at your early training in architecture. Looking at the major contributions of your career, whether it's TED, LATCH, Access Guides, or mapping, the term ‘performance’ seems to unite everything. We’ve talked before about how this idea of performance first emerged in your architectural training, so I am curious about how this architectural background has shaped your career more.

I studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s. There, I had a professor who was short in stature, with a scarred face, a high-pitched voice, somewhat chappy clothes, and a displaced bow tie. He once said to us: “When you are in a room, you should know how it is made.” You can’t appreciate how disarming this was to hear in 1954 or 1955 when you’d have another professor who gives you a brief and tells you to place partitions in a 1,200-square-foot home and hide everything behind a low-hung ceiling.

When you look at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin by Mies van der Rohe, you can see how the building was made. You see the columns sitting outside the glass holding up the roof. You see the connections, the frames, the lights. It was probably the easiest architectural problem in the world: Create a rectangular shelter with no internal divisions. And yet, its authenticity gives it elegance.

Neue Nationalgalerie, and Modernism more broadly, was all about flexibility. You can move a wall to one place this month, and another place the next month. You can’t do that in a Gothic or Romanesque cathedral. In those buildings, the chapels have a happy home where they are serving the aisles, and you can do what you like within them. Then you can look up and see the weight of the ceiling coming down onto the columns that reach towards them like the veins of your arm. You feel yourself soaring with them. It all makes sense. You can understand the private places of worship, the main place of worship, where the bishop and choirs sit, and so on. Again, it is authentic. Nothing is hidden. You’re in a room, and you know how it is made, as the professor said.

The lifeblood of the building is the performance. — Richard Saul Wurman

He would then tell us about how half of the budget for any modern building goes to HVAC and electricity. Why don’t we express it? We’re paying for it, so let’s give it a life of its own and how it serves the space. When the technology changes, let's make it easier for those systems to continue serving us without cutting through drywall and pulling out wires. The lifeblood of the building is the performance.

I’m sitting here in my office. Let me give you the train of thought for my office table, which I designed. What did I want from my table? I wanted to have meetings. What’s the biggest meeting I would have? Six people. I’ve had countless meetings, conferences, gatherings, and dinner parties. In these gatherings, I am a viewer, a listener, a learner; all I want is to understand. I know from experience that for this to happen for everybody at the table, the maximum at one meeting is six people.

So, what is the most efficient way to have six people at the table? If it is a rectangle with three people on each side, or two on each long side and one on each short side, it isn’t intimate. In the end, I made it an equilateral triangle. Each side holds two chairs. If you have six people at a meeting, you can place objects perfectly in the middle. There’s no wasted space. You can also have a work meeting of three partners, which most partnerships have. If it’s two people, it’s just a fight. Also, nobody is sitting more than 10 feet away from someone else, because beyond 10 feet, the communication breaks down.

What does the table want to be? — Richard Saul Wurman

So, the logic behind the performance gives me dimensions and geometries for the table. I got craftspeople involved to select beautiful materials, but it wasn’t designed to win awards or to sell. It was designed to perform. Louis Kahn used to ask: “What does a brick want to be?” Here I asked: “What does the table want to be? What does the office want to be?”

The influence of Louis Kahn on your thought processes has been somewhat ever-present in this conversation. You’ve talked about served and servant spaces, what a brick wants to be, and your own encounters with him at the start of your career. Is this what you mean when you talk about standing on the shoulders of Louis Kahn, not just stylistically through architecture but also through a more fundamental outlook on the world?

Exactly. When I say “shoulders” to somebody, they look at me with a blank. “What do you mean by shoulders?” they ask. I say: “We stand on people’s shoulders, and we rub shoulders with people.” Imagine a TED gathering where you get all these fantastic people in a room, but you tell them that they can’t talk about any book or project they have ever done. They can’t talk about their work or plans for the future. All they can do is tell us about the shoulders they have rubbed, and the shoulders they stand on.

I don’t just mean copying their style. It could be a violinist that affects an architect. It could be long-dead people like Socrates. I never met the man, but I stand on his shoulders. So the gathering is outside of you. It’s about asking: “What is the bubble that allows you to take breaths?”

What if it wasn’t all ‘me, me, me’? What if it was about others? Wouldn’t that be interesting? And it’s the opposite. — Richard Saul Wurman

I’ve been feeling bored with myself for the past six months, but just in the last month and a half, I started taking this idea seriously because it is so interesting. I’ve discovered that, actually, my favorite topic is opposites. This ‘Shoulders’ conference is the opposite of every meeting I’ve ever put on, which was driven by fancy people and their egos making a presentation, as well as me and my ego making a presentation. What if it wasn’t all ‘me, me, me’? What if it was about others? Wouldn’t that be interesting? And it’s the opposite.