Richard Saul Wurman
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Richard Saul Wurman (born 1935 in Philadelphia) is a Jewish American architect and graphic designer. He is considered a pioneer in the practice of making information understandable. He has written and designed over 80 books and created the TED conferences. In 1976 he coined the phrase information architect out of his reaction to a society that daily creates massive amounts of information, but with little care or order. He created the popular ACCESS travel guide books which were innovative in their use of mapping content by neighborhood. Simple, but effective use of colored text allowed the reader to quickly separate, locate and evaluate restaurants, museums, parks, and other categorical destinations. The design concept was based on how we seek information, in this case, by location. With this series of books, Wurman firmly established the purpose of information architecture.
He is a 2004 Medalist of the AIGA, which honored him as a design conference impresario.[1]
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[edit] Books
- Access Travel Guides
- Information Anxiety (1989)
- Follow the Yellow Brick Road - Learning to Give, Take, & Use Instructions (1992)
- Information Architects (1997)
- Information Anxiety2 (2000)
- Understanding USA
- USAtlas
- N: The Newport Guide
[edit] Quotations
On creating the term "information architect": "I thought the explosion of data needed an architecture, needed a series of systems, needed systemic design, a series of performance criteria to measure it." — Richard Saul Wurman[2]
That said, information architects are people who have a passion to make the complex clear.
[edit] References
- Dirk Knemeyer (January 2004). Richard Saul Wurman:The InfoDesign interview.
