Richard Saul Wurman Overview

Richard Wurman has used his experience with city planning to form theories on information organization that fundamentally question how organization impacts our use of resources. In the 1960s, Wurman saw how urban renewal efforts faltered -- despite massive government funding --... [more]

Richard Wurman has used his experience with city planning to form theories on information organization that fundamentally question how organization impacts our use of resources. In the 1960s, Wurman saw how urban renewal efforts faltered -- despite massive government funding -- because planners lacked consistent and well-coordinated information about population density, income levels, and housing stock. In reaction, he co-designed the "Urban Atlas" (1967), which provides a comparative statistical analysis of America's major cities. His next project experimented with new ways to organize and navigate information. "The Nature of Recreation" (1967) describes the landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmstead by using parallel texts and marginalia to show conceptual connections and a hierarchy of ideas. As Wurman discovered, this way of organizing information could be applied to other subjects, often proving a more effective way to answer basic questions than older methods such as indexes. He based his method on his own "first law" of information organization: "You only understand something new relative to something you already understand." Wurman has also created handbooks on career choice, medical procedures, and computer programs, as well as a guide to the city of Los Angeles and a road atlas of the continental U.S. Each project involves making information accessible according to the logic of human needs. Rather than organizing his atlas alphabetically, he constructed maps in units based on hours of driving time and organized them by geography and itinerary. Wurman became so adept at making information accessible that Pacific Bell hired him to reorganize the California Yellow Pages. In his hands, the age-old codex has become a new tool for making the world more approachable. [show less]