Richard Saul Wurman Quotes

• The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Inspirational, Attitude, Acceptance

  Richard Saul Wurman (2009). “33: understanding change & the change in understanding”

  82 Copy quote

• The organization of information actually creates new information.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Organization, Information, New Information

  Keynote from Day 2 of the 2010 IA Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, boxesandarrows.com. 2010.

  25 Copy quote

• Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Data, Anxiety, Black

  32 Copy quote

• You only understand information relative to what you already understand.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Information, Relative

  Richard Saul Wurman, Loring Leifer, David Sume (2001). “Information Anxiety 2”, Que Pub

  31 Copy quote

• Allow the information to tell you how it wants to be displayed. As architecture is ‘frozen music’, information architecture is ‘frozen conversation’. Any good conversation is based on understanding.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Understanding, Information, Frozen

  35 Copy quote

• The key to making things understandable is to understand what it's like NOT to understand.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Keys

  "Understanding In The Age Of Also Talking With Richard Saul Wurman". Interview with John Gehl, ubiquity.acm.org. March 1, 2000.

  36 Copy quote

• Most of us do not even know how to ask a question. Most of us do not see the root of the word 'question' is 'quest'. Most of us don't have a quest in our life.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Roots, Quests, Know How

  30 Copy quote

• My definition of learning is to remember what you are interested in. If you don't remember something, you haven't learned it, and you are never going to remember something unless you are interested in it. These words dance together. 'Interest' is another holy word and drives 'memory'. Combine them and you have learning.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Memories, Together, Remember Something

  29 Copy quote

• My opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn't designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. The big design problem is designing your life. It's by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Book, Creativity, Museums

  37 Copy quote

• In school, we're rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  School, Asking Questions, Good Questions

  16 Copy quote

• Accept ignorance; pay more attention to the question than the answer; never be afraid to go in the opposite direction.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Ignorance, Opposites, Attention

  29 Copy quote

• One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Anxiety, Feelings, Sides

  16 Copy quote

• Learning can be defined as the process of remembering what you are interested in.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Education, Learning, Remember

  Richard Saul Wurman, Loring Leifer, David Sume (2001). “Information Anxiety 2”, Que Pub

  20 Copy quote

• The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Badass, Bad Ass, Design

  30 Copy quote

• I am terribly fascinated with things that I don’t understand.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Fascinated

  "Richard Saul Wurman: 'My World Is a Lattice'". Interview with Emma Robertson, the-talks.com. October 22, 2014.

  18 Copy quote

• Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules in the 1930s, attributed his success to the way his mother used to greet him when he came home from school each day. "Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?" she would say.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Success, Mother, Home

  28 Copy quote

• A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England

  Richard Saul Wurman

  New York, Average, Weekdays

  24 Copy quote

• I live by two credos: If you don't ask, you don't get. And most things don't work.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Two, Live By, Asks

  14 Copy quote

• Education is to learning as tour groups are to adventure.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Adventure, Groups

  Richard Saul Wurman, Loring Leifer, David Sume (2001). “Information Anxiety 2”, Que Pub

  18 Copy quote

• I like to question the minutia, to get to the essence of things. The minutia of life is all about design. It's about the design of how you talk to another human being; it's the design of speech; it's the design of everything we do. We need to be better at listening, and we need to aim more directly at understanding and being understood.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Essence, Design, Understanding

  17 Copy quote

• People never forget things, they just never remembered it in the first place because it was too boring

  Richard Saul Wurman

  People, Firsts, Never Forget

  20 Copy quote

• Order is no guarantee of understanding. Sometimes just the opposite is true.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Order, Opposites, Understanding

  Richard Saul Wurman, Loring Leifer, David Sume (2001). “Information Anxiety 2”, Que Pub

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• We do not think in a linear, sequential way, yet every body of information that is given to us is given to us in a linear manner ... we are taught to communicate in a way that is actually constricting our ability to think.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Thinking, Body, Information

  Richard Saul Wurman (1989). “Information Anxiety”, New York : Doubleday

  9 Copy quote

• Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Library, Information, Facts

  16 Copy quote

• People can be motivated to creativity simply with the instruction to "be creative."

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Creativity, People, Creative

  4 Copy quote

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