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Anxiety, Follow the Yellow Brick Road) and in medicine (6 books on healthcare and creator and chairman of TEDMED, 1995-2010), and as a conference convener. The path of this journey has been paved by one surface: his curiosity.
The acknowledged father of Information Architecture, Wurman has written, designed and published 83 books on a range of topics, while creating conferences and new mapping projects. All contribute to a greater understanding of complex information. They spring from his particular brand of innovation: doing the opposite of what is rote or expected.
Wurman published his first two books in 1962. The first featured models of 50 world cities all constructed on a uniform scale, the other was the first book to be written on Louis Kahn. In 1967 he co-authored the first comparative statistical atlas of major American cities. His latest book is called 33: Understanding Change & the Change in Understanding. It chronicles the adventures and musings of the eccentric main character, the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination.
Wurman created the ACCESS city guides, using graphics and logical editorial organization to make places such as New York, Tokyo, Rome, Paris and London understandable to visitors. Other volumes he created focus on topics such as baseball, football and the 1984 Olympics, the latter with over with 3.2 million copies sold. His road atlases employed similar techniques that elucidate U.S. geography and transportation

networks. In addition he completed many one-off projects, such as his book Twin Peaks Access, which he co-authored with David Lynch. Several of his books are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Wurman began his career in conferences in 1972 when he chaired the International Design Conference in Aspen. He then co-chaired the first Federal Design Assembly in 1973 and the national AIA Conference in 1976. With each of these he changed the fundamentals of how gatherings were run. All these helped his creative molding of TED, TEDMED, and eg, the Entertainment Gathering.
Wurman created the TED conference in 1984, which he chaired through the 2002 meeting. TED brings together many of America’s clearest thinkers in the fields of technology, entertainment and design. He created the eg conference in 2006 and the TEDMED conference in 1995, which he chaired through 2010. Other conferences he created and chaired include California 101, TEDSELL, TEDNYC, TED4Kobe in Japan and TEDCity in Toronto.
Now in 77, Wurman continues to quell his restlessness with a series of new projects. The WWW Conference will be an active gathering of some of the brightest thinkers of our time discussing the complexity of emerging patterns on our planet in improvised conversation – intellectual jazz. In partnership with Esri and @radical.media, 19.20.21. is a major cartographic

initiative that endeavors to standardize a methodology for comparative urban data. His Urban Observatory project aims to establish, for the first time ever, a series of live and changing electronically connected urban observatories around the world.
Wurman received both his B.Arch. and M.Arch. degrees with highest honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. While there, he was awarded the Arthur Spayd Brooks Gold Medal, the Thornton Oakley Award for Achievement in Creative Art, 2 Chandler grants and two graduate fellowships. He has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Architecture and Design, three honorary doctorates, two Graham Fellowships and numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient given by The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design museum. He was recently given the Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse by Trinity College Dublin, an honor shared in the past by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi.
Wurman currently lives in Newport, RI with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their three yellow Labradors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They have four children and six grandchildren.

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