Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman "One Way": Richard Saul Wurman (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman “One Way” at TEDxGrandRapids conference.

In this conversation, American architect and graphic designer Wurman shared insights into his theory of innovation, highlighting the importance of additions, needs, opposites, subtractions, and epiphanies in driving progress. He reflected on the legacy of Johannes Gutenberg, emphasizing the profound impact of his printing press on society and the unexpected outcomes it catalyzed.

Furthermore, Wurman underscored the significance of understanding relative concepts, connecting disparate ideas, and appreciating the complexity of language and perception. The dialogue provided a fascinating exploration of history, technology, and human cognition, offering valuable insights into the nature of innovation and the interconnectedness of ideas.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN: I sang in the bus to the speakers. They put me on a bus this morning from the hotel. And I sang a good morning song, you know, “good morning to you, good morning to you, you’re all in your places with sunshiny faces, oh, this is the way to start each new day, good morning.” That was the delay time was reasonable, the half-life, the half-life was okay.

So my name is Richard Saul Wurman. I’m going to talk about a couple of details to begin with, and then he’s going to prompt me, this lovely man, Dan Klein.

The Importance of Detail

Everything is a detail. I sat in the middle of a row to make a point, not sitting in a safe seat. I believe speakers should come from everywhere in the audience because it shouldn’t be a place, even if it’s convenient, it shouldn’t be a place. And there shouldn’t be a place.

Now these seem like silly, funny things. Each thing I’m saying has a point to it, honestly, they seem humorous, but sometimes some of the most amazing things you learn in a joke, because a joke is a construction of the opposite of expectation or radical alternative, what a wonder a joke is, just think of George Carlin when you think that, just think of it.

But in this audience, I’m not going to say every one of you could come up on the stage, but arguably there’s 25 or 30 people who could come up here and the speakers can come from just from anywhere and you should symbolically have people, you could be sitting in the aisles and just come from anywhere, because all we’re doing is chatting with each other.

And the TEDx events that were invented by Laura Stein at TED are rather amazing, the difficulty is that it’s slightly insular because these are local events, so most of you know each other or come from a local thing, where the original, the TED conference, people came in from everywhere. And what that did is you met people that you would never have met, and that changed those circles in your life.

The Theme: Everything Connects

Now the circles that will change today is people talking about things you didn’t think you were interested in, and that you will see a connection to, which is the theme. The theme, you could use any word as a theme, you know that, I mean that’s just, people sit around and argue, what should we call it this year, and you could call it RED, and then you could have the same conference.

DAN KLEIN: We’re already on that.

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN: You could run a RED thing, I mean, if IBM were to do a show on their work, you could just call it BLUE, and you could connect it to the Blue Boy by Gainsborough, or why is the sky blue, or the water blue, or am I blue, and music, and all kinds of things. So everything connects.

People struggle for themes to call things, you don’t have to call, my last book I just called 33. I called it 33 because it was a sequel to a book I had done 33 years before. It meant nothing. And it doesn’t have to. Conversation means something. So one of my recent things, I spoke twice yesterday, and some of the people here heard me, there’s a couple of students, so it’s funny, I know I’m going to say some things you maybe have heard. I mean, one has a limited repertoire, at least what comes up in your head when you’re kind of old.

Questioning the Basics

One thing I talked about yesterday, I’ve been thinking about lately a lot. And it’s not, you know, stars will not go off and lightning, and it’s going to be a wonderful breakthrough for you. But it might occur to you later that I said this, as you have conversations. I’ve been thinking about, in the most basic way, a question, what’s the most basic things you ask?

Well, one of the most basic things you ask from child on up is, what’s life? What’s life? And if in this front row or so, I had the Pope, and I had the President, and I had a microbiologist, and I had my mother, she’s dead, well, the Pope is dead, well, there’s a live Pope. And then I could have a convicted serial killer, we see them on television, so there’s a lot of them around, and so forth and so on, a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief kind of thing. And I asked each one very seriously, and not as a joke, that question, what’s life? And everybody would answer it really quite differently, simple question. I mean, it doesn’t get more basic than that, what’s life?

And the answers would be tied up with what they think they should say, which is the way we answer things. I mean, the Pope might believe one thing and say another; the murderer might believe something of convenience of his imminent death, I mean, saying that he’s going to be fried or something. So part of their answer will be what they think they should say, and part of it will be what they believe. But they would all be different, in the simplest of questions. And many of your questions to each other every day are more complex than that.

The Importance of Detail in Interaction

So how do we have a conversation, how do we have a conversation where there’s meaning back and forth? I have a badge, which I will not wear, because what is on the badge is my first name real. I don’t know you guys, I don’t want you to say hello Richard, it’s this false friendliness that we know — I want to, there’s a last name that might represent somebody I would like to meet, I don’t know their first name. If I’m at a conference, I was just talking to the person sitting next to me back there, and I said, if I was at a conference on shipping, I wouldn’t go up and say, “oh hi Fred,” I would like to see his name Smith, who owns FedEx.

Every little detail, you see the house lights are up, because I want to see you. I had to ask for the house lights up, because the nature of having a conversation on the stage is seeing the people. And you really do see people out here, you wouldn’t think you could, but you really can see faces, and you have a sense of whether they’re listening to you or not. And these lights that are some place there, they’re so bright normally, that the person on stage is blinded, because that’s the standard way of lighting things.

Everything is sort of standard, and I like to question the minutia to try to find a direction, a way that’s clear, of how to subtract things out, to get to the essence of things. I did a conference a year and a half ago, I keep on doing things, I sold, I ran TED for 18 years, I’m not going to give you the whole history of things, but I ran it for 18 years, and Chris Anderson is running it now for the last 12 years, and Laura Stein, who is not here today, is the person in his organization who has recently left, who started all the TEDx things. And I think that they’re extraordinary, I didn’t think, I thought it was TED light, I thought it was a stupid idea, sort of, because I’m not very compassionate.

Embracing Ignorance

But I think it’s turned out, you know, like somebody who converts to something, they get to be really fond of it. And I think the TEDx thing is really quite wonderful, really quite wonderful, and so much better than I thought it would be, it really surprised me. And when something is really better than you think, you get charged up with it, because you question your stupidity, and questioning your own inabilities, sinks it in, makes you feel, makes me feel, that there’s so much stupidity in my life to fix, and it gives me something to do every day.

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And my power, and why I’m more powerful than anybody in this room, is that I more embrace my ignorance than you embrace your ignorance. I know how deeply ignorant I am, and I know it at all moments of every day, in every conversation, in every interchange, in every face that I see, I know how ignorant I am, and how little I know. And that stupidity, that amazingly wonderful blank slate that I get up with every morning, is really quite exciting. Now, go ahead.

DAN KLEIN: I have delighted in having you as a teacher, and this isn’t anything that you signed up for, I just sort of asked you to interact with me over the years now, and you’ve been quite gracious. And you’ve told me many times about your teacher, Lou Kahn, and one of the things that you and Lou would do, and I think it relates to what you were just talking about, is instead of going forward from what the problem the client brings in architecture, when you were working in architecture, you talked about going backward from the problem into innocence, into being dumb. And typically a relationship with a teacher, oftentimes it’s on the basis of becoming more expert, and I love the idea that one of the ways that Lou taught you was by reveling in being dumb together.

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN: Well, I think I don’t think he taught me, I thought he allowed me to learn. He allowed me to be more of myself. I don’t think you teach anybody. If you can give people permission to be more of themselves… I gave the commencement speech last year at Harvard Graduate School of Design. And my speech, it was a simple speech, I just thought of five of my friends who were architect or architecturally related, and in the room were parents and their kids. And I knew they just didn’t want to be there anyway, they wanted to get out, I mean nobody wants to go to a commencement speech, and then the next day see another commencement speech.

They had just gone through a rather arduous, very expensive few years of their life at Harvard, and they wanted to get the hell out of there, but that’s all reasonable, it makes sense, there’s nothing bad about that. I’m going to give a commencement speech in two weeks at another university, and I know the same thing, who the hell wants to see somebody in black robes stand in front of you and say, ‘you are the great generation?’ I mean, it’s just such horseshit. I mean, every generation is just a generation, it’s not a great generation, it just happens to happen that way, because God invented time so everything didn’t take place at the same time.

Embracing the Unknown

Think about how convoluted that is. So I picked out these five people, and none of them had a silo that went from private to general, and many of you, still, most of you in this room, if you do something pretty well you want to keep on doing it and doing it better and repeat it and do it better, if I do something and it turns out okay, why do it again? Why would you want to do what you already did? I’m going to die soon, that’s just a fact.

Why would you want to do it again? And your silo can tip over, you can find something else that interests you and do it and embrace that terror, the terror of, I mean, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to say coming up here on the stage, that’s sort of terrifying, but it’s delightful. Would I like to have gotten up this morning and not had that terror? No! I would like to have that edge on my day of not knowing, because it makes you feel things. I’ve always had that edge.

My father went through the depression and he was totally risk adverse and I found that so strange because he was so charismatic but risk adverse. I’m fairly charming, I’m fairly charismatic myself, but I’m much more abrasive than he was and really willing to be the moth going into the flame on a daily basis and I’m unemployable.

I am unemployable and that’s, I don’t like it, I would love to get a paycheck, no I would, I am very, I’m really envious of people who are asked to do things. I’ve done 83 books, I’m working on two more now, nobody’s ever asked me to do a book. Nobody asked, I’ve done about 40 conferences, nobody ever asked me to do a conference. I get asked to talk places, that’s the one thing I get asked. So I do it because it’s such a seduction for me and I can be paralyzed by seduction. I mean wow, somebody, they want me, you know that speech at the Academy Awards, they like me, they really like me. And so speaking some place, I wanted a private plane to bring me here so I’m pissed at that because it was hard to get here, and I missed the whole lecture yesterday because the plane was broken.

The Power of Storytelling

Traveling is no fun but the idea of chatting with people and trying to improve your game and that’s what I’m trying to do. And every once in a while, you know, yesterday in the speech, every once in a while I’ll say, gee, I never said that before and you get to say things you’ve never said before. And that’s where you get to see what kind of works or what is interesting.

Many people show slides. Most always I don’t show anything, because I realized that when you show slides, what you become is a caption. The next person is going to show slides, lots of slides, so just think of him as a caption under the slides.

I’ve never met him so I don’t have a personal thing in that, and I’m sitting someplace else so he won’t get a chance not to talk to me. If I tell you a story about things, you either decide to take that story home with you in your head and then you own it. But you don’t own my story because I’ve already worked it out for you. I also, as the students who were with me yesterday know, I really ask people never ever to take notes but just to listen. And I believe taking notes, you tell your brain, you don’t have to remember that because it’s a crutch, a strange crutch. All that said, I have three or four pieces of words on this thing.

DAN KLEIN: To be fair, I wrote those though, you didn’t.

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN: He wrote them because he wanted me to cover things here. Gutenberg! Okay.

DAN KLEIN: Yeah, we’re supposed to talk about technology.

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN: Oh yeah, this is technology. Okay, I’ll talk about, first before technology, I’m going to talk about, no, no, no, it’s about technology but I’m going to talk about a theory I have about innovation because the word innovation is used absolutely, I mean you’ll hear it all day today, it’ll slip out even with me warning them not to talk about innovation. It’ll just come out because we’re using that word, it’s one of those buzzwords we’re using all the time.

And innovation for most — most things that are called innovation are incremental change or just an improvement of something, they’re not innovation. So I tried recently to come up with, some of you know I came up with a theory of how to organize information called LATCH, which seems to be an established theory by Location Alphabet Time Category and Hierarchy, there’s only five ways of organizing information. So I tried to come up with a theory of innovation and I have to just go into this.

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Several people ask me, well, what did you do before you did TED? I didn’t do TED, it was an elaborate hobby, everything I do is an elaborate hobby, it’s not what I did, it’s not what I do, it’s never what I’ve done or did. I have, I get up in the morning and I have an interesting day which consists of an unplanned a lot of things and phone calls but it’s not what I do, I don’t — if you sat next to me on a plane, either your ear would fall off because I would talk so much or I would just say I’m gainfully unemployed.

The ANOSE Theory

Anyway, so innovation, so I thought of an idea of how to codify innovation and I came with an acronym called ANOSE, A-N-O-S-E, because I realized that I think I’m, this is right because nobody has said it isn’t and somebody says it isn’t right, I will change my speech next time. I don’t have any deep investment in anything I do, I have a deep investment in doing good work, so I will change it in a minute.

The next conference I’m going to do is called 555, originally it was called Prophecy 2025, somebody says you can’t do Prophecy 2025 in the Emirates, you can’t use the word prophecy, I changed it instantly to 555 which is finding the future first, I just changed it. I changed it within about five minutes after the person told me, I called up my office and changed the website. I’ll change anything if I can do better work, I have no vested interest in anything but trying to see something that’s clearer.

Modes of Innovation

So ANOSE stands for Addition, Need, Opposite, Subtraction and Epiphany. And I think those are the ways you innovate. The automobile, or I guess my iPhone is in my pocket, it rang twice during a speech yesterday, but it’s an addition. It’s innovation by adding lots of things together. There are some special technologies within that, but basically it was the combining of all these things in a slim, handable package that that innovation is.

The innovation is the putting of these things together. The car, there’s wagons with four wheels around, nobody sat around in Germany or France and invented a car, there were several engines that had been invented, a long time, a steam engine, an internal combustion, a Stirling engine, an electric engine. They slapped them into a four wheel thing and connected it to some wheels, they’re still adding things onto the car, you know, the camera they put in the back so you can see who you run over.

They’re still adding things onto the car, you know. Need is easy, you know, that’s why innovation occurs, a lot of medical things are because of need, there’s a palpable need for a vaccine for malaria. There’s a device when they rip out your knee or do something to your hip, there’s a lot of medicines, a lot of things, there’s anesthesia, there’s things that people think up that are really innovative, there’s vaccines that are alive and vaccines that are dead.

Scratching the ANOSE

Salk’s big breakthrough was doing a dead vaccine, so where you took the Salk vaccine, which was not the United States because it was more expensive than the Sabin vaccine, but in other places you really got rid of the disease, that’s why there’s still some polio around the world, because they use the Sabin vaccine in those countries, or no vaccine at all. So we have A, nose, you scratch your nose when you think of something, that’s why I thought it was funny, O is opposites, so many things are the opposite of preconception.

We already talked about jokes being the opposite of preconception, Niels Bohr talked about his great Nobel Prize winning physics, talked about his great breakthroughs by looking at the opposites of things. Many of you, Google opposites and you’ll see an astonishing number of breakthroughs are the opposite of preconception.

Engine in the front of the car, engine in the back of the car, engine in the middle of the car, just real radical changes, radical alternatives. Subtraction, the TED conference, I got rid of fat men, white men in big seats that are CEOs and politicians. I don’t know if any speakers are CEOs or politicians, but I never had a CEO or a politician to my conferences who can’t tell the truth. Well, but legally they can’t, every CEO can’t legally tell the truth about their company, because if it’s a public company you’re not allowed to tell the truth, and a politician, I don’t have to explain that.

Innovative Conversations and the Role of Artifacts

But that’s not a pejorative, that just is, right? Now, I did have politicians like John Warnock, who was the head of, founded Adobe, and he’ll come into this next story, so it’s a connection. Adobe does a lot of type. And he collects first edition scientific books, so he brought a couple million dollars worth of those books to stage and we had a table and a camera and we could look at those books and he could tell us about those books. He never talked about it.

The only time he talked about Adobe is he got to the Gutenberg Bible and said, we can’t set a book as well now, even with computer typing. You can’t do it as well as the first book. That’s fascinating. That’s really interesting. And now we’ll talk about Gutenberg, who was born in 1297, and he did his book in, the book that we know, the Gutenberg Bible, did about 180 of them in 1340. And he made it up of, the movable type was the big thing we know, and the printing press. The printing press was a dumb thing. The printing press was like a wine press.

The Essence of Gutenberg’s Innovation

It was, that’s not a great breakthrough. He and his brother took a wine press and figured out, instead of squashing grapes, he’d pump down and hit a plate, hit a piece of paper on some type, and that was not a big deal. The printing press was not a big deal. The setting of the type, and the carving of the type, and making an alphabet up of 126 letters was the big thing.

He did 126 letters in his alphabet, so he had in his letters the combination of the spacing between all letters, so that every letter is perfectly spaced. Now, you can’t pick up anything where letters are perfectly spaced in any, it’s not done in any computer program, and it’s not done in the way type is set. No book has been set in type better than the first Gutenberg Bible. And we think of the Gutenberg Bible, it brought, it brought books to the world.
Yeah, he did about 180 of them, and they were very expensive, and they had no page numbers, so you couldn’t find anything in it.

Finding things is not trivial. All the people who are buying companies for a billion dollars is about how to find something. Google is about how to find something, how to find pictures, how to organize pictures, how to do this, how to get rid of things, how to, just all organized, all finding things.

The Yellow Pages was a very successful business for years and years and years, it was finding things, how to find, they were in the find it business. A guidebook is a find it thing. Any index is about finding things. Finding things is one of the big subjects in life, you know?
You know, finding things and, you know, and hamburgers. Those are big businesses. So, I subtracted out the saved seats. The speakers just came from anywhere.

If the room was filled, they sat in the aisles. If you had a physical problem, you could sit in the front row. If you were over 90, you could sit in the front row. And my wife had a seat in the middle of the front row that was saved for her. That was it. Nobody else. Nobody was a VIP. Nobody got special treatment, except me.

But, I mean, I was running it. That was understandable. Well, it is. That’s understandable. I mean, why wouldn’t I, right? It was my party. And think of this as a dinner party. That was my welcome to everybody. I said, welcome to the dinner party. I always wanted to have but couldn’t. Think about what that means. You go to a dinner party because you trust the host or hostess that they’re going to invite people that they think they’ve curated, the fact that they think you will like them and they’ll put you next to somebody they think you will like to talk to.

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This is not curated that way. This is curated on the basis of you sitting next to somebody you will meet, which is fine. But you trust that you are all kindred spirits because there’s been a filtering system of getting you here because you choose to come here. You choose to spend the time. Therefore, it’s money. And your time is valuable. Even if you’re not paid, like me, it’s valuable because you die. So every time is valuable to you and your life.

Gutenberg’s Legacy and Unintended Consequences

And you will probably meet some people that you will talk to again that you wouldn’t have met. And when you do this on a global basis and people come in, then you have the chance of changing completely these circles, these connections in your life.

He had to invent the ink because there was only water-based ink. He had to invent an ink that stuck. He had to invent paper because they had only vellum and lambskins or whatever they had. And he really invented the whole thing. The paper, the press, the ink, the type, the way of doing type to create a Bible of 42 lines. And he printed only a couple hundred. And now we come to the second subject, unintended consequences.

99 years later, they used it for finding things and they realized that books you could find things in. And the church saw it as a way of printing something over and over and over and over again called indulgences. So rich people could buy these pieces of paper and not go to confession. And they made a lot of money off of that. And Martin Luther, one of the things he pinned up on the church was a tirade against indulgences, which came from Gutenberg, who with his brother died in 1368 bankrupt. He didn’t make money off of it. For the next two hours, I’m going to talk about some other things.

DAN KLEIN: Do you want to talk about the Urban Observatory?

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN: I’ll talk about the Urban Observatory. You better hold that because they’ll talk too long. My time is up and they’re getting squeamish there and I have a little film to show. They’re going to go a little crazy, but it’s okay. You’re going to eat lunch slightly later.

Relativity and Understanding

And the next speaker is furious. You only understand something relative to something you understand. That sounds glib. It is not glib. Some of you, all of you learned in school that an acre is 43,560 square feet and most of you have forgotten it. When you buy a piece of land, you care about it.

But now I’m going to tell you how big an acre is and you can’t forget it because I’m telling you how it is relative to something you understand. It’s just a teeny bit smaller than a football field without the end zones. That’s an acre. You will never forget that. I have to go through everything rapidly because I’m not going to be really horrible here.

You all know that the blue whale is a big whale. It’s the biggest of all animals. It’s a fuzzy place between animal and vegetable. We know that, but we’ll give that up for the moment. There’s vegetable life and fungus and seaweed that’s bigger than any whale, bigger than anything, but we’re going to forget that for the moment.

So for animal life, and mushrooms are closer to us than many animals, by the way, genetically, but that’s another whole speech. And that’s correct, by the way. The whale is 90 feet long. They don’t know too much about it. It’s bigger than any dinosaur that they have found so far. And you’ll forget that.

Unexpected Comparisons

But I’m going to tell you something that you’ll be able to talk about in a bar tomorrow night. Its tongue is as big as a bus. Its heart is as big as a Volkswagen. The aorta that goes with the heart you can swim through. The Volkswagen was Hitler’s people car. It first came out in 1935, the year I was born.

So did the Toyota. And also invented in 1935 was nylon. The first active thing of radar happened in 1935. Carlos Gardel. Anybody from Argentina here? You know who Carlos Gardel is? I said, you know who Carlos Gardel is? How can you not know who Carlos Gardel is? He invented the tango. Well, okay. You see, everything connects.

I mean, I could go on now on that whole stream of the Second World War and the tango and that dance and what that dance and the architecture of that dance is and connect it to other dances and connect it to things for several hours. Everything connects. And it would be perfectly listenable. You would find that little journey interesting.

The Significance of Understanding

So, no two cities in the world do their maps at the same scale and with the same legends. Now, I know you don’t believe that. You think Google Maps, I’ll just say, you want to look up Google Earth, Google Maps, put up three cities and show a comparison of their land use. Well, you can’t. You can’t show comparison of things.

And the only way you understand something is relative to something you understand. The only way you should take policy in this city is to understand other cities and what they’ve done that succeeded and didn’t succeed in a similar fashion of similar population or in land use patterns or other things so you can understand, learn from that. Not necessarily to copy it. Sometimes it’s to avoid it.

We speak a language. We have similar. We should have similar languages. I just showed you we don’t. We can’t say what life is. If I asked people to write down a little piece of paper what being wealthy, rich, comfortable is, everybody would have a different answer. And yet you use that word every day.

So, my time is really up. I’m going to go through this now very quickly. This is a proof of concept where we have, in this first one, we have 13 cities. You can choose any three cities. You can make the scales go up and down. There’s a whole bunch of categories that are all the same from these 13 cities. We’re going to have 50 cities up, 51 cities up in a redo of this in July. And then it’s going to open as a big exhibit on electronic panels with a search panel in the Smithsonian on the mall that they’re redoing as a fairly fancy exhibit that will be exportable and live off the cloud. And that will be done by next February 10th, come to the opening in Washington.

Now, I’m going to end with this. The whole first group of slides didn’t come on. I thought I’d end on a high note. This was for my 75th birthday. I’m 79 now. But there’s no sound. It was all too short. I’m sorry. Thank you.

Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman “One Way”: Richard Saul Wurman (Transcript)