By Richard Saul Wurman
Recently, I took another look at two words that have become important to me—information and question. The word information (which is half of the title of my book, Information Anxiety, 1989) comes up often. Information Anxiety is about the current (then and now) flood of what is normally called information. Often when people see the term “information anxiety,” they assume that it refers to too much information, but my definition of the term refers to the lack of understanding that typically comes with gaining or obtaining information. Information anxiety is the gap between what we assume we should understand and what we are able to understand. We cannot be overloaded by information that we are interested in and that, at the same time, is also understandable.
What makes the terms question and information remarkable on another level are the roots of the words and the contrast between them. Most information does not inform, while a quest—that discovery, that journey, that joy in finding something—is a big part of the word question.
There is a power in being informed, and likewise there is power in a quest. Somehow those two words, inform and quest, have more rigor and more thoughtfulness than the words question and information. Instead of nouns—things to be worked on—the words live as verbs, as action. Information architects, and all good journalists, are essentially on a quest to inform their audiences, or to serve as a guide on a journey for understanding.
Since coining the term information architecture, and writing the book Information Anxiety, my previous description of data and information still resonates today.
“There is a tsunami of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilized world. This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of foam…. we see graphic designers and government officials, all getting their shoes wet and slowly submerging in the dense trough of stuff…. they walk stupidly into the water, smiling—a false smile of confidence and control. The tsunami is a wall of data—data produced at a greater and greater speed … in amounts that double, it seems, with each sunset.”
When I wrote the above, the technology in my life was the fax machine. To have the world at your fingertips meant going to a library. We still have too much data and too little understanding, even with the comprehensive “make your life simpler” gadgets of today.
Since initially describing information anxiety, I have attempted to remedy it in a variety of ways. In the 1970s, I wrote a series of books titled after the Yellow Pages: The Yellow Pages of Learning Resources (1972) and Yellow Pages Career Library (1974). Following those were 23 Access Guides to cities and resources. In each book, I arranged information intuitively: around a neighborhood (in the case of a guidebook) or a specific question or idea.
A lifetime of organizing information and embracing my own ignorance has led to a vision showing the potential of information, my waking dream.
The Waking Dream
I had an architecture office in Philadelphia called Murphy Levy Wurman. Al Levy and I formed a little nonprofit out of our architectural practice called Gee!, which stood for Group for Environmental Education. We wrote several publications together on the manmade environment, the environment for over half of the people in the world. Among the publications we produced was a book called Our Manmade Environment, Book 7. The definition of the word environment by Buckminster Fuller was “everything but me.” The book became popular; Time Magazine did a feature on it, and it was published by MIT Press, where I met Muriel Cooper, who took me on a tour of MIT and led me through the architecture machine department that Nicholas Negroponte created. I worked on and published more books with Muriel and we bonded.
Later when I was running the early Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conferences, I invited Muriel to come and show off something that I had seen at MIT. When she arrived at the conference, she came up to me and said, “Ricky, Ricky, I'm not ready yet, I don't have my computers, I have to pull it together.” It was remarkable: she worked day and night, then finally climbed onstage on the third day with David Small where she showed a live demonstration of flying through information and navigating content in a new and fantastic way. She was doing things in the 1990s that are commonplace now. Shortly after this first and only presentation, she suddenly and unexpectedly died. At her funeral I gave a eulogy that later became the introduction to my book Information Architects (1996):
“she wore wings on her many cartographic exercises: flying on airplane wings, flying in space, over maps, over information. Watching as the aerial perspective changed with clouds, re-focusing her vision of a man created reality…. a wonderful experience.”
Muriel had achieved a version of my waking dream, a dream of information in context, laid out spectacularly, where everything is at your fingertips. When I saw her onstage demonstration at TED, I remember saying, “She's flying through information.”
In addition to thinking about the words question and information, I have been interested in how words that were once important have begun to weaken due to overuse. I am referring to the innovation fad: innovation conferences, innovation books, innovation divisions of companies, or innovation to describe cars, tires, food, and technology. Perhaps an alternative perspective on innovation is to consider what is not called innovation.
I've been thinking about a six-part nomenclature for innovation:
- Innovation by combining existing ideas. The combination of a steam engine and carriage became a car. A gyroscope and a scooter yields a Segway.
- Sometimes the lack of need or desire for a particular invention creates a perfect environment for innovators to run wild; for example, Edwin Land and his invention of instant photography.
- Similar to number two is number three: the recognition of a black hole, a zero, a nonexistence that creates the space for invention. Maybe an appropriate example is the invention of the Post-It note.
- By subtracting or taking away a key component, one can invent new possibilities. Examples are the design of a bicycle with no chain, eyeglasses with no frame, or in the case of the conference I am creating, a conference with no presentations or schedule.
- Opposites—for example, Jonas Salk's major breakthrough in vaccination depended on using dead vaccines as opposed to live ones. As a result, he created an effective vaccine for polio. In the past, I have started many speeches by peeling a banana from the opposite end to illustrate how to reconsider a common practice.
- I have also found that innovation has a relationship to disasters. There is a reasonable theory that asserts that innovations in farming and harvesting can be traced to the Black Plague. As a result of population loss due to the Plague, the remaining population—faced with less people and the same amount of crops—needed to invent new means of farming and harvesting. The theory follows that it was this necessity and the resulting period of invention that helped lead to the Renaissance.
By that point, my business focused on conferences and gatherings. I watched the introduction of the Apple Macintosh computer at the first TED that I created in 1984, and Java, which was called Oak before it was renamed by James Gosling. I even saw the first Google demonstration in 1999 at the “Geeks and Geezers” TED event (where all attendees were over 70 or under 30 years old). Despite these advances in technology, the realization of my waking dream remained a demonstration from years ago. Macintosh made computers understandable, both graphically and in terms of scale, but did not necessarily make information, understanding, or learning easily accessible. Java revolutionized code for programmers and laid the groundwork for future advances, and Google mastered the technical art of the search—but in order to search, you still need to know what you want to find.
The Internet now includes social databases and tools, vast open collections of the worlds of knowledge, tools for education, conversation, and gestural or intuitive means of navigating virtual spaces. The convergence of all of these things allows me to describe my waking dream as part of the WWW Conference (www.thewwwconference.com), in the form of an app that can metaphorically aid in understanding:
The accompanying app will engender a new modality, perhaps equal to the pivotal changes that have emerged in how we interact with information and each other. It will not merely archive presentations, as is currently the practice, but will offer a unique way to navigate, learn, and understand information based on one's own personal journey and vast online resources. Wikipedia integration, bibliographic references, social media connections, and a flood of illustrative and cartographic images will allow for expansion and sharing of ideas as offered by the WWW Conference. It will present information in a way that has not yet been achieved. It will be the equivalent of a computer that can nod, nod with understanding.
In this description, I have tried to articulate how the navigation of information should be effortless, enjoyable, and personally rewarding—how the power and purpose of information is to inform, just as a quest is part of a question. Long ago, academics declared that “experience” is paramount, and I once described performance as a new language of design. In this vision, performance and experience are one and the same—both are words for ideas that illustrate the quest of a question and the complexity of information in a way that imparts not only a personal curiosity but also the performance of information.
In retrospect, I would call myself an understanding architect instead of an information architect.
Understanding is power.
Described by Fortune magazine as an “intellectual hedonist” with a “hummingbird mind,” RICHARD SAUL WURMAN is an architect, author of over 80 books and founder of the TED, TEDMED conferences. His latest project, the WWW Conference, will gather some of the world's greatest minds to talk about the complexity of patterns and convergences affecting our health and that of our planet.
