Sunday, June 1 - Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Richard Saul Wurman Selected as Closing Keynote Speaker
Prolific author and former architect Richard Saul Wurman will deliver the keynote address at the closing session of the 2008 Technical Communication Summit, to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 1 – 4.
Wurman is known for the large variety of subjects he has explored, including information architecture, cartography, travel, information theory, health care, sports, children, and finance, among others. His eighty-one books cover topics as diverse as city guides, health manuals, financial planning, and the Olympics. He seeks to make the complex clear by exploring ideas that are new and important to him.
Wurman’s new project, 19.20.21, will give him and his partners the opportunity to develop the methodology for a comparative understanding of planet Earth by looking at nineteen of the world’s largest cities that have populations of more than twenty million people in the twenty-first century. Wurman’s interest in such a project developed upon reading about Lagos, Nigeria, one of the world’s largest urban areas, when he realized that the information available seemed incomplete and confusing. This revelation led Wurman to conclude that the world’s cities do not ask questions of themselves in a unified way with the intention of comparatively examining themselves. For example, cities use different scales for maps and varying types of legends.
Wurman completed an architectural partnership in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and served as director of GEE! Group for Environmental Education. In 1958, he was part of an initial project to explore and map Tikal, Guatemala. He has taught at Cambridge University in England; City College of New York; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Southern California; Washington University, St. Louis; and Princeton University.
Wurman earned B.Arch and M.Arch degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and received a doctorate of fine arts from the University of Arts in Philadelphia, an honorary doctorate of letters from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Art Institute of Boston. He has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Graham Fellowships, and two Chandler Fellowships. The AXIX Design Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, has presented a retrospective exhibition of his work.
In addition to 19.20.21, Wurman’s recent projects include publications on diagnostic testing, heart disease, and making sense of the health care process.
