Richard saul wurman can i afford to retire

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All Rights Reserved. Add this book to your favorite list ». Community Reviews. Showing Rating details. All Languages. More filters. Sort order. Cecilia Dunbar Hernandez rated it it was amazing Feb 04, Spencer marked it as to-read Oct 19, Liz marked it as to-read Jan 15, Paul Vittay marked it as to-read Jul 05, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one ». About Richard Saul Wurman. And how many people were born? The latest I could get was The architecture profession is no different from such incompetence.

AD: You could be described as somebody who finds more interest outside of their comfort zone, in the unknown and the unexplored. Did your time as a practicing architect fulfill that part of your personality?

RSW: I miss architecture. My goal in life was to be a great architect. I love architecture, but I do not love, like, or tolerate the accident of a client, or what they might want me to do.

The frustration of even the most famous architects is that they work for a client, and that they spend a lot of time coddling and pleasing the client. Early in my career, Robert Venturi and I were among those tipped to follow in the footsteps of Louis Kahn.

I was considered a serious architect. I still consider myself an architect. I love architecture, I visit architecture, many architects are friends of mine including Frank Gehry and Moshe Safdie.

But I am also interested in many other things. I focus on cartography, painting, guide books; they all interest me. It is part of my body and soul. RSW: That convergence existed even at the time, but nobody in those industries observed it. Today it is old news. AD: Having observed that relationship between technology and design, what do you believe is its future?

Do you believe one overpowers the other? RSW: I think form follows performance and performance follows form. Function is putting a piece of wood down and sitting on it.

Performance is sitting on something that makes your back align correctly, and accommodates your movements. If it is done to a level of perfection, then it becomes an art form. There is a fork in the road between looking good, and being good. AD: Is there any architect you identify today who you believe is particularly noteworthy in that pursuit of an architecture that strives to be good, rather than looking good?

It is a pleasing sculpture, but one which underneath holds a space that succeeds in being good. AD: Early in your career, you worked closely with Louis Kahn. What is your view on the evolution of architecture between then and now? I had an epiphany when I met him, he was somebody who told the truth. It was through the simplest of statements and observations. For example, in current buildings, half the budget is taken up by the mechanics; and yet it is not expressed.

When I went to school in , the attitude was that you hung a ceiling and you hid everything. You hid the lights, you hid the air conditioning, you hid the water. You essentially created a glass box, and the preoccupation was how good you did your moldings. Later on, architects such as Michael Graves painted buildings just to make them look pretty. Then you have buildings that look like they are solving mathematical equations, and look clever. Now you have a group of buildings built for billions of dollars, the Hudson Yards in New York , which is so anti-human that it takes my breath away.

There are thirty miles of arcades. Because the upper floors extend out to street level; because it is a city for people; because the ground floor is interesting. There are shops, and restaurants, and all manner of things. When I go to a city, I want to go somewhere where the streets are interesting, hence we go to Venice, to Rome, to Paris. The ground floor of Hudson Yards is a Park Avenue wrapped around a staircase. How significant were Kahn and Eames in shaping your trajectory?

RSW: Charlie influenced me heavily. He was the truest student of seeing. He allowed me to see those things I always saw and never saw. He allowed me to distinguish between learning and education and to demand of the world around me that it become self-revealing. That is one aspect of character I shared with Charles Eames.

In , I was 25 and working for Louis Kahn when he was beginning his rise to prominence. I asked could I write a book on him, and he said yes. I said that I wanted to have something by my bed, metaphorically, that I could open up and look at his drawings, and read what he had written.

He was the first person in our lives that spoke architectural truth to us. He was my guru, he remains my guru, and I live with him every day. AD: Beyond Kahn and Eames, were there any other encounters which heavily influenced your life?

He was an odd man, who spoke thirteen languages. Given his interest in the Far East, he spoke Tibetan, and several dialects of Chinese, as well as European languages. For example, he learned Swedish because he was asked by the King of Sweden out for lunch in order to learn about a piece in his historical collection. He was the most encyclopedic person I knew, and he influenced me in enormous ways. When I was 19 or 20, he opened my eyes to another half of the world that I had never been taught.

Back then, we had not heard of Tibet, we barely knew where China was, it was a different world. Through him, I learned about Chinese sculptures, the making of Japanese swords, etc.

I was also introduced to archaeology, particularly the Mayans. The oldest Mayan city is Tikal , which I journeyed to in There were no roads to it, no water or supply lines.

Three of us mapped the entire city, along with a couple of native assistants with machetes who helped us cut our way through the jungle. They were really the first maps ever produced of Tikal with any accuracy, and would later be published by the United States Geological Survey. From that, I became involved in Mayan architecture, which was another part of my life.

Then I have a whole medical part of my life. You asked about two designers because that is your field, but I could just as comfortably talk about Mayan architecture, or medicine, or painting. Even this morning from 5am to am I was working on a sculpture which is to be cast in bronze.

I have a varied day, and a varied life. AD: Given the many challenges that future generations of architects will face, what is your biggest piece of advice to young architects seeking to use their skills to improve the world, not just through the design of buildings, but through broader and more diverse paths? RSW: Some years ago, I wrote a letter for the graduating class of architecture students. Architecture is the thoughtful making of space and place.

It shelters nearly everything that defines civilization: families, factories, football, and the sounds of a flute. Architecture holds formative conversations with everything. The near future is about conversations between those who are similar and those who are different, and about innovative ideas that come from such conversations.

What will be your conversation? Architects can relate to anything. Architects are in everything. Young architects should be human. They should have a conversation, and not just with buildings.

I was trying to give them permission, that whatever they choose to have a conversation with can be their life. It can be with the environment, with a building, or with how a flute sounds. You're not gonna do any good for me. You're not gonna get me jobs or a grant. There is nothing that I can see that has a direct result of pleasing you. There are maps and journals, drawings and photos of Wurman and others.

On a low shelf is a magazine apparently called Successful. Beneath the word — rendered in red, all caps — is a portrait of the man himself, slightly younger but more or less the same: silver crewcut hair, round face with beard and bulbous nose, mischievous smirk and light, appraising eyes. Just above his left eyebrow, in much smaller letters, so small that they span only the space beneath "Ful", it reads "Meetings".

Apparently that is a magazine. Successful Meetings magazine. Wurman is their cover boy and deservedly so — he is an absolutely first-rate meeting-maker, a visionary in fact. When I return to the discussion my partner appears to be arriving at a conclusion. I don't have a so-called philosophy that is worthwhile for anybody.

The fact that I've survived is the magic. The magic is that somebody as abrasive and dissonant as I am, with basically no skill sets, can survive opulently in this world without trying to. Throughout the interview he has delivered pithy, quote-friendly pronouncements like, "The worst person to hire is an expert," and, "Young people are the oldest people around. To prove it, I decide to define a model of the man's success. Follow your fascinations In his book Information Anxiety , Richard Wurman writes: "Your work should be an extended hobby.

Since the s, Wurman's professional output has been driven by his personal obsessions, and a cursory review of the more than 80 books he's made over the years reveals a man of distinct passions. There are multiple atlases and brochures on medicine and on money, and there are guidebooks covering an enormous range of subjects, including guidebooks A Guidebook to Guidebooks , Richard Saul Wurman lives in a 19th-century house that is a copy of a French 18th-century building, in Newport, Rhode Island.

Besides being an architect and graphic designer, he has curiously also been concerned with archaeology. Taken out of sequence, these subjects appear random, but read in chronological order a kind of narrative emerges.

With student assistants, he produces earnest works with titles of touching blandness, such as Various Dwellings Described in a Comparative Manner In the s Wurman's focus shifts from form to performance. He examines cities and develops tools for communicating their qualities. The effort yields publications that underline user experience — handbooks, guides and educational supplements.

He approaches these in the same spirit as his books, emphasising engagement and exploration, using the gatherings as platforms for urban adventure. His architectural practice closes shortly after. By the s Richard Wurman is living in California and producing guides of all kinds. The first is Los Angeles Access , a book produced in what the author describes as "a full state of disorientation" and comprised of the info that he needed after moving from his native Philadelphia.

Subsequent guides, all titled Access and published by Wurman's Access Press, make more comprehensible Paris, baseball, Polaroid, the Olympics, the aforementioned dogs, and more. In he releases Information Anxiety, a book-length manifesto on information design that applies techniques developed in the guides to new and more abstract subjects.

In he sells his publishing company to HarperCollins. TED takes off in the s and book output decreases. The publications Wurman does produce reflect his increasing involvement in the areas of technology Danny Goodman's Macintosh Handbook , , entertainment Twin Peaks Access , and design Information Architects , In , Richard Wurman turns He produces a sequel to Information Anxiety, but the majority of his books address issues of physical and financial health.

Can I Afford to Retire? Understanding Healthcare follows Diagnostic Tests for Men The book commemorates the anniversary of the AIA Conference and updates a fable that Wurman wrote for that event. That's a design problem, if you want to call it that, that we have an effect upon… We can decide what to do, what our trade-offs are. They expect that if you then lock in and continue on that path with energy, if you're upwardly mobile and intelligent and all those other things, you're going to move ahead and become more and more successful.

Success is usually a term that means partly money and partly achievement, position and power, and so for most of my life I was highly unsuccessful in society's terms. Wurman has worked on the place and considers it part of his architectural portfolio; he designed the landscaping and the largest pool and even the desk separating us — triangular, with stout legs and a glass top — over which he now leans and says in soft tones, "I think it's more interesting to have the terror of doing things you don't know how to do.

But it is more difficult than if you just keep on doing one thing better. It's uncomfortable. The very nature of my life is a life of terror. You will find this word in every Richard Wurman interview. Wurman loves this word. He does not respect this word. A more appropriate term to describe the condition that apparently defines his industrious, appetitive existence would be "anxiety" or perhaps "discomfort". The discomfort that all ambitious workers feel when attempting something they have never done before, for higher stakes than they are accustomed to.

It is a sensation commensurate with risk and should be acknowledged by anyone attempting to apply the RSW model, but should in no circumstances be confused with terror, an important word that has been honed by millions of mouths over hundreds of years of distinctly non-work-related horror.

Wurman misuses it for effect, and advises others to do the same. The letters www in the name derive from significant words like water, war, wonder and witness. Document your journey from ignorance to understanding Another favourite Richard Wurman term is ignorance. He uses this as often but more appropriately than terror, and when inclined spices it up with synonymous phrases like "know nothing" and "know dick shit", the latter of which he applied to comic effect in his keynote address at "Why Design Now?

I start and there's something that interests me and I pursue this journey trying to ask questions and find out how to get so I can feel, viscerally, that I understand something.

His work is the visual record of his own learning process, a process triggered by the sense of anxious disorientation that all information-age inhabitants experience, expressed in a language that we can understand. Counter convention Wurman is most animated when discussing dysfunction. If fear is his primary motivator, frustration is a close second, and in explaining the inspiration behind his best-known work, he mentions few aspirations and a large number of complaints.

I subtracted all the things that I couldn't bare about going to meetings. I hated panels and I hated white guys in suits and I hated lecterns and I hated long speeches and I hated people reading speeches and I hated that it was all about one subject. People selling things from the stage — selling guilt and selling charities and selling books — I hated all those things! And basically my innovation was taking all of that shit away. It was subtraction, in the way that the Bauhaus, as I look back at it, was a whole movement of subtraction.

Now though, it is simply another standard and Wurman speaks of the franchise, which he sold in , as a "20th-century model". In response, he is organising a new kind of meeting, the WWW Conference , for which the plan is to cut further from TED's seemingly stripped-down frame.

What's the essence? It is an experiment, like all of Wurman's projects, uncertain of success — "I don't have a business model. I'm terrified about that. At this moment I'm up to lose about , dollars. Hearst III. Claim no field.

Invade all fields Although he left his Philadelphia practice years ago, Richard Wurman still talks of architecture with the intimacy of an active participant.

Explaining the multidisciplinary impulses behind TED, he says, "The interesting thing about architecture is that it isn't siloed. In that sense, architectural training, in its lack of specificity and openness to learn about each problem you solve, is not a bad way to do it. In 33 , he defines it: "I don't mean a bricks-and-mortar architect. I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural and orderly principles to make something work — the thoughtful making of either artefact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear.

Do good work At some point I suggest that it would be interesting for Wurman to apply his skills to developing tools for the "life design" he writes about in Given the enormous amounts of behavioural data currently being collected in the streets, in our pockets and online, are we not better equipped than ever to examine our fascinations and develop careers based on the Wurmanian model of an extended hobby?

Wouldn't the author of this model be the ideal person to lead the effort? This is his answer: "Unless I misunderstand you, implicit in what you just said would be the desire for me to make a change in the world or to clarify something for other people. I'm not interested in that.

This assumption is wrong. He continues, "I'd have to be motivated to want to do that, and I know that in the PC milieu in which we are living, you're supposed to want to change things for the better.

I believe as fundamentally as I believe anything that if I do good work — in my judgement good work — I will affect people. But never will I try to have an affect on people. This is another Richard Wurman maxim, attributed to Mies. He invokes it often, in conversation and on stage and, to his credit, he does not hide behind the phrase's ambiguity.

Wurman is very clear about what good work is and who defines it: good work is work deemed good by Richard Wurman. He is judge and jury. Though he clearly relishes his personal connections and professional accolades, these are, apparently, collateral benefits from a life of highly industrious narcissism.

When I suggest that the app he is developing for the WWW Conference could be useful in extending the life of the event and opening it to the outside world, he says, "I don't care about that. I just care that this would be interesting for me to do, an interesting problem to solve. This is something that I would like to happen. This is not for the good of humanity. Cultivate childishness It occurs to me at this point that Richard Wurman behaves like a year-old child.

I do not mean this to be condescending or dismissive. It is one of the things I like most about him. He seems to have somehow maintained a portion of preoperational egocentrism and the world is richer as a result. Wurman does not pine for past projects. When the work is done and it's achieved the level of idiosyncratic goodness that Wurman demands, he sets it aside and moves on in that inexplicable, admirable manner of a toddler who, having spent the better part of a morning meticulously constructing some sort of block-based sculpture, demolishes her work without comment and leaves the room in search of juice.

It's only if you keep building on what you've done that it bothers you. I'm not building on what I've done. It's not of interest to me. It's boring. Use others frequently and shamelessly Wurman exhibits another enormously useful, unmistakably childish behaviour — the wanton manipulation of people for personal gain. He is a user of legendary proportions, a man who, back in the TED days, was known to introduce himself by saying, "You don't know me, but you owe me. Wurman later offered to return Marks' 50 per cent ownership stake, but he refused.

And most things don't work. The intention of that show was to stretch to the definition of design and I point out that Wurman's notion of designing your life jibes with it. A new set of questions follows, about Ai's work, personality and current condition. I feel redeemed and then ashamed and in that micro moment of doubt, the master makes his move: "And you can… get me to Weiwei in some way?

He worked for Louis Kahn, and his official biography states that "the only two bosses he ever had who didn't fire him were Lou Kahn and Charlie Eames". After abandoning architecture, Wurman turned to the most diverse scenes. In he coined the term "Information Architecture", and subsequently published 83 books of essays and guides to all manner of subjects. With Anne Tyng see Domus no. What happens when some of the world's brightest minds come together in one location to talk one-on-one about anything and everything?

No script. No preparation. No podium or teleprompters. This past fall, it was a reality. The result was open, honest conversation about topics ranging from climate change to video games, insects, the inner city, and even the end of the world as we know it. September 18—20, the WWW Conference made its worldwide debut in Southern California—opening at the historic Mission Inn Hotel and Spa in Riverside and concluding with two days at the state-of-the-art theater on the campus of Esri in Redlands.

Richard Saul Wurman—architect, cartographer, and founder of the now globally recognized TED conferences—created this new and wildly inventive forum as the "anti-conference. Wurman, who also created and participated in the TEDMED Conferences — and many other conferences and events, sought to break new ground—and looked to do so by celebrating improvised conversation. The result was truly inspirational, instructional, and a perfect nexus of art and science.

The WWW Conference provided three days of dynamic dialog. Wurman's mandate was simple: pair amazing individuals together and spark conversation with a simple question, idea, or premise. Then let the conversation evolve, naturally and organically, without rehearsal, preparation, or planning of any sort.

Williams , and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban , nearly 50 renowned personalities across diverse disciplines agreed to join in the intellectual and artistic stew. Conversations lasted from 30 minutes to more than an hour. There were musical performances; poetry readings; and guests, such as astrophysicists, microbiologists, researchers, actors, playwrights, and CEOs, reinvigorating what it means to create truth, knowledge, and understanding.

When it came time to pick the perfect venue for the event, Wurman turned to friend, collaborator, and Esri president Jack Dangermond. In addition to delivering a keynote at the Esri International User Conference, Wurman has worked with Dangermond on several projects over the years. The two agreed to have Esri host the conference. That the world's great thinkers descended on a location where geography is the great denominator of understanding our world was hardly an accident.

What better place to have conversations around the theme of understanding our world? The Esri auditorium stage featured three couches. Two faced each other for the participants, and the third was placed between, where Wurman would kick off the conversation.

To the audience's left was a magnificent interpretive glass arrangement called Macchia Forest by artist Dale Chihuly , and to their right, a grand piano. The simple and spartan design kept the focus on the people and the dialog they would exchange. Only this is a chapel to understanding, of understanding our world through maps. Each day featured an hour break in the morning and afternoon, and another hour-plus break for lunch.

And during those breaks, speakers and attendees alike often received high-tech demos of the latest geospatial solutions and best practices in places around the world.

This, too, was off-the-cuff. People would wander out of the auditorium and into Esri technical areas to get a glimpse behind the magical map curtain. Day two featured a special event that further explored the dynamics of location—in one room was a live camera feed to innovators in China that spurred impromptu conversation between a handful of attendees in Redlands and their counterparts halfway around the world. What also attracted Wurman to creating the WWW Conference was cultivating the greatest commodity of the 21st century: understanding.

For years, Wurman has held that understanding precedes action. The type of intellectual honesty offered at WWW would be something never before seen, which leads to the question—and understanding—of what the letters WWW represent.

According to organizers, the first W stands for World. And from there, it gets interesting. That's for starters. The event itself demonstrated improvisation at every turn. Opening night at the Mission Inn kicked off with virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma making a last-second decision to perform before the plus audience seated in the Mexican-Baroque styled St.

Francis Chapel. Wednesday morning at the Esri campus went off script as well, with renowned soprano—and recipient of two double-lung transplants— Charity Tillemann Dick singing a personalized rendition of "Happy Birthday" to Norman Lear for his 90th birthday, which had just taken place in July. Then another birthday song was sung for the audience members whose birth year ended in a 5 or 0 20, 25, 30, 35, etc.

There were moments of true spontaneity—like when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mary Jordan was overcome with emotion talking about her experiences as a journalist traveling around the world and reporting and the need for individuals to reach out and do good to others. She shared a story about a woman working in a Mexican prison, who helped comfort prisoners who were forced to sleep on the ground outside the prison walls because there were no more rooms available.

It was preceded by a lighter moment. A bus transported attendees and speakers alike to and from the Mission Inn and the conference each day. Even that commute yielded unscripted verbal exchanges and illuminations both during and after the actual conference. Richard Saul Wurman mentioned during the first night that what the country needs is a "Secretary of Understanding.

Understanding was a central theme throughout the entire event—for the humanities as well as the sciences. Award-winning television producer Norman Lear and Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg both discussed the social, artistic, and technological influence their movies and television programs have held with society.

Katzenberg spoke about the rate of technology change and the opportunity it provides today's filmmakers. He also talked about the first gifts we are all born with—watching and listening—and how the next phase of technology will involve moving from texting toward video, moving to the most fundamental, intuitive approach to consuming information. Lear talked about the social impact of All in the Family and the fact that he saw the ripple effect it left with people watching the show from all the mail he received.

Grammy Award winners and multiplatinum performers alike, Herbie Hancock and will. Of all the speakers, will. He proclaimed society didn't need another musician from the ghetto; it needed another Mark Zuckerberg from the ghetto.

He talked about the work he's doing for his childhood neighborhood of Los Angeles. For this and for all his philanthropic endeavors, he meets remarkable people so he can "sponge it up" and go back to the inner city where he can "rinse it out. Yo-Yo Ma and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Brooks talked about the conditions and requirements for the life of music and writing. While one is a virtuoso and the other an insightful wordsmith, both touched on the discipline that goes hand in hand with creativity.

Yo-Yo Ma described his formative years, age 4 to 15, as a focused, concentrated time with thousands of hours spent forging his art.

Brooks talked about the daily work—the tumult and toil—that goes into writing a weekly political opinion column, particularly in today's fast-paced society. The challenge is to focus our attention. As he put it, you have to be so committed to something that you lose yourself to find the meaning of things. When asked about how he approaches a new project, architect Frank Gehry whose projects include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain responded with a lesson a teacher gave him at an early age: no matter what you do, always make it the best.

University of California, Los Angeles UCLA , Department of Neurology chair and award-winning researcher John Mazziata 's study of the brain through scanning and imaging helps people understand more about how we learn: the types of information, how it is presented, and at what age it can be processed. Gehry posited how we teach students who don't fit into the traditional education system.

Both of his sons did not do well on standardized tests, yet both succeeded in life. How do we help artists who don't know they are artists? Botanist and environmentalist Peter Raven joined Esri president Jack Dangermond to discuss biodiversity, sustainability, climate change, and the need for greater awareness of these issues. Raven stated alarming statistics: there are three people alive today for every one of us when we were born. Another billion will be added to the population in 12 years.

Both agreed—nations and corporations must get together to solve the problems of sustainability. Both also agreed that GIS is a fundamental platform for understanding.

It brings people together to see, understand, and act. Raven summed up a life's worth of observation: learn all your life. Keep voting. Keep teaching. And above all, educate and encourage children. Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist—and lover of ants and ant colonies— E. Wilson sat across from Will Wright , cofounder of Maxis and inventor of the wildly popular video game SimCity. Wilson went from discussing his research that involves complex social behavior in organisms, such as ants and bees, to a question for Wright: can we create games that take a person back in time million years so that they can walk down a path in a cold forest during the Paleozoic period?

That, said Wilson, would be a wonderful game—and teaching tool. Wright agreed. Wright shared that he felt games and storytelling are both educational tools.

We have a limited bubble of experience. We supplement that with games and storytelling. They give us experience without risk.

Building on the themes of WWW, Richard Saul Wurman already has plans for more outlier events; in spring , Prophesy will take place over five sequential Mondays in five cities in five countries around the world, each a one-day event. An expert leader will make a prophecy—by way of long-form conversation—on what can be expected to happen in the next 12 years. It will invite conversation and connection between the generations.

At least two of the five speakers will be from the region where the event takes place. The themes will not be religious or doom and gloom but rather constructive ideas for the near future. Similar to WWW, the events will propel innovation, inspiration, and intellectually invigorating conversation by the world's finest thinkers.

The results will be broadly distributed through world media. WWW was generous and intimate and of the moment. Scenario Journal Scenario Extraction Winter We are limited by a language where words may mean one thing to one person and quite something else to another. There is no ordained right way to communicate. At least in the absolute sense, it is impossible to share our thoughts with someone else, for they will not be understood in exactly the same way.

Richard Saul Wurman describes his work as the promotion of understanding. As the founder of TED conferences, his projects and writing examine information, architecture, design, and communication. This emphasis towards understanding and the problem of too much information complicating the ability to do good work are key themes underlying Information Anxiety and Information Anxiety 2 The following excerpts look at the problem of too much information, how we create understanding, and the beauty of what may be a lost art form: conversation.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the word as having its root in the Latin word informare, meaning the action of forming matter, such as stone, wood, leather, etc.

It appears to have entered the English language in its present spelling and usage in the sixteenth century. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged it liberal deployment.

It has become the single most important word of our decade, the sustenance of our lives and our work. The word inform has been stripped out of the noun information , and the form or structure has disappeared from the verb to inform. Much of what we assume to be information is actually just data or worse.

It must be imbued with form and applied to become meaningful information. Yet, in our information-hungry era, it is often allowed to masquerade as information. So the great information age is really an explosion of non-information; it is an explosion of data. To deal with the increasing onslaught of data, it is imperative to distinguish between data and information. Information must be that which leads to understanding. Everyone needs a personal measure against which to define the word.

What constitutes information to one person may be data to another. In their landmark treatise in , The Mathematical Theory of Communication, authors Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver define information as that which reduces uncertainty.

The differences between data and information have become more critical as the world economy moves towards information-dependent economies. Information drives the education field, the media, consulting and service companies, postal services, lawyers, accountants, writers, certain government employees, as well as those in data communications and storage.

Many countries already have a majority of their work forces engaged in occupations that are primarily information processing. The move to an information-based society has been so swift that we have yet to come to terms with the implications. Understanding lags behind production. Better information processing can speed the flow of data but is of little help in reading the printout, deciding what to do about it, or finding higher meaning.

Meaning requires time-consuming thought, and the pace of modern life works against affording us the time to think. The industrial design critic Ralph Caplan was talking to a woman who was trying to explain something to him. There is still only one method for transmitting thought, for communicating information in a manner that somewhat captures the spirit of the mind: the medium of conversation.

Conversation can be a mirror of the mind, a petri dish for ideas. It enables us to communicate our thoughts in a manner that closely models the way they occur in our minds.