Soyuz… control panels from the Mir”, and the control
console of the Soyuz 23, as well as dolls, dice, and
fossils. During E3 2004 he passed off an old lapel pin
commemorating the Soviet space program to a reporter.
“I’m uncollecting. I buy collections on eBay, and I
disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic
force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted.”
He once built competitive robots for BattleBots
with his daughter, but no longer does so. As of November
2006, Wright still had remnant bits of machined metal left
over from his BattleBots days strewn about the garage of his
Oakland home. Wright was a former Robot Wars champion
in the Berkeley-based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun
Club. One of Wright’s bots, designed with the help of Wright’s
daughter Cassidy, “Kitty Puff Puff ”, fought against its
opponents by sticking a roll of gauze onto its armature and
circling around them, encapsulating them and denying them
movement. The technique, cocooning, was eventually banned.
Following his work in BattleBots, he has taken
steps into the field of human-robot interactions.
“We build these robots and we take them down to
Berkeley and study the interactions that people have with
the robots,” says Wright. “We built this newer one that has a
rapid-fire pingpong cannon. It will fire about 10 per second.
So we give people this plastic bat and we say, ‘It’s set up to
play baseball. Do you want to play baseball? It’s going to
shoot a little ball and you try to hit it.’ And all of a sudden
it’s like da-da-da-da, and it’s pelting them with balls.”
After building his reputation as one of the most
important game designers in the world, Wright in 2009
left Maxis, the Electronic Arts owned studio he founded.
His first post-E.A. venture was the Stupid Fun Club.
In October 2010, Current TV announced that
Will Wright will produce a new show for the network. The
program, entitled Bar Karma, began airing in February 2011.
In October 2011, Will Wright became
a member of the Board of Directors of Linden
Lab, the creators of Second Life.
JOSHUA WURMAN
I grew up in Pennsylvania, bereft of any really meaningful
opportunities to experience severe weather, hurricanes, even
real deep snow. As a youth, I tried to impress friends and
girls with my home weather station and insect collection.
These efforts, among other factors, kept me well out of the
running for homecoming king. Naturally, I moved on to a
party school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
to search for a better social life. But hating schoolwork, I
rushed through it, earning my MS at only 21. Then after some
aimless additional years in school I dropped out for three
years, working for the Air Force on nuclear winter computer
simulations and other cheery subjects. Returning to MIT,
I earned my Doctorate and moved to Colorado to work at
the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on
bistatic radar networks, a new type of weather radar system
that I had invented. However, after seeing real High Plains
thunderstorms close up, and tornadoes, I got distracted
and conceived of building a network of big, fast scanning
radars that could drive right up to tornadoes and fires, inside
hurricanes, and into other nice weather. The DOW program
was born, and I moved down to Oklahoma to be a professor
for a few years, chase tornadoes and hurricanes, file patents,
teach and write papers. In the middle of this, I traveled to Asia
on a research project and met my wife operating a weather
radar on an island off the coast of Hong Kong and conned
her into believing that Oklahoma was just like Hong Kong.
After receiving tenure and the implied lifetime sentence
at the university, I did the sensible thing: I quit and moved
back to Boulder and founded my own non-profit research
institution, the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR).
My wife and I run CSWR, manage the DOWs as National
Science Foundation (NSF) Facilities, and conduct research
programs such as the VORTEX2 study and hurricane studies.
We have four young children who, so far, show no unhealthy
obsessive interests in tornadoes, hurricanes or radars. I’ve just
finished the VORTEX2 tornado study (http://vortex2.org),
which is the largest tornado research mission ever, funded
mostly by NSF, employing about 120 scientists and crew in
50 vehicles. We had 11 radars, 4 balloon trucks, UAVs, 40
deployable instruments, 13 mobile mesonets, photogrammetry
and microphysics teams, damage survey teams, basically
more of anything that used to study tornadoes scientifically.
Just imagine the lines for fuel and bathrooms in smalltown
gas stations. During WWW, I’ll be keeping a nervous
eye out for any hurricanes threatening to make landfall.
If a hurricane looms, I’ll be leading my team into the eye.
TELEPRESENCE CONVERSATIONS TENTATIVE
MAO YUSHI
Chinese economist, 2012 Milton Friedman Liberty Award.
(He wrote an online column criticizing the communist
and totalitarian policies of Mao Zedong (Chairman
Mao) in China, attacked by Maoists in China.)
http://www.cato.org/special/friedman/yushi/index.html
YAO MING
Retired Chinese basketball player who last played
for the Houston Rockets of NBA; investor.
TAN DUN
Grawemeyer, Oscar, and Grammy awarding winning
Chinese contemporary classical composer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tan_Dun
ZHANG YONG HE
Chinese-American architect, former head of architecture
at MIT.
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
Described by Fortune magazine as an “intellectual hedonist”
with a “hummingbird mind,” Richard Saul Wurman
seeks ways to make the complex clear. Recognizing at
an early age that his ignorance is his greatest asset, he
has made it his mission to sort through the abundance
of information that is available on every topic, and
design the techniques to make it understandable.
In doing so he has continually sought to put himself
in the presence of extraordinary people, including (all now
all deceased), Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, Jonas Salk,
Eva Zeisel, Louis I. Kahn, Charles Eames, Frank Stanton and
Schuyler van Renssalaer Cammann, and Arnold Toynbee.
There are many others. The only two bosses he had who
didn’t fire him were Lou Kahn and Charlie Eames.
As a result, Wurman has had many lives: as an author
(83 books); FAIA Architect, 13-year partner in Murphy Levy
Wurman Architects; cartographer (mapped 1/3 of the Mayan
city of Tikal and current project 19.20.21.); teacher (Cambridge
University, England; Princeton; Washington University,
St. Louis; University of Southern California; University of
California Los Angeles; City College of New York, and Dean,
Cal Poly School of Design); urban designer (recipient of MIT’s
Kevin Lynch award in urban design); graphic designer (AIGA
Gold Medal, membership in AGI and inducted into the Art
Directors Hall of Fame); information theorist (Information
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.
MEMO TO PARTICIPANTS
re: CONVERSATIONS
As most of you are aware, I created TED in 1984 and
chaired it through 2002. During that time I created
TEDMED in 1995 and the eg Conference in 2006. For
all those meetings I developed an 18-minute talk and
a series of rules called the TED Commandments.
Several of you have asked ‘well what are the new
guidelines as they relate to the WWW Conference’?
1 Participants have all been sent the schedule
listing the person with whom they have
been paired, attached again below.
2 If you go to the participants page on the web
site, you can click on that person’s name and link
to his or her biographical information.
3 I have developed a list of 30 different premises or
postulations that will begin you in improvised conversation.
4 I have tried this and it works.
5 You will be facing each other on comfortable
couches and not the audience.
6 There will be approximately 150 people in the
audience, which will be comprised of fellow participants,
guests and individuals invited by sponsors.
7 Absolutely no preparation is necessary.
8 You will not be selling a book, charity, project or religion.
9 As long as the conversation holds my attention and
my perceived attention of the audience, you will be in
conversation. At the conclusion, I will with reasonable
politeness call up the next two individuals.
10 If the conversation is fabulous but goes on so long
as to potentially cause us to miss our lunch, I will also
end it and the two of you can continue it over lunch.
11 There will be no lectern but there will be a side
table for a cup of coffee or glass of water.
12 There is no strict time schedule but I will
attempt to keep the order of the final schedule.
13 On occasion I might take the liberty part way into
a given conversation to add a third person, another
participant or simply another member of the audience,
whom I know can add constructively to the conversation.
14 The entire meeting will be filmed as inconspicuously
as possible from the far left and right of the stage
and with one small camera in the audience.
15 At this moment there are no plans to live-stream
any of the conference. There will be an app with access
to a server to hold the conversations. It is planned that
this will be available on 1 December and will include a
running line of translation into several languages.
16 The app will also contain a large body of curated
personal information about you. Further explanation
about this will come to you next week.
17 I have personally worked out the breaks, lunches and
dinners and I believe they will be of the highest quality and in
rooms that will delight you, both at Esri and at The Mission Inn.
18 Obviously there is a lot of risk about the
conversations, particularly the quality, spontaneity,
clarity, improvisation and surprise.
19 The goal is to find some threads that have not
emerged before as you speak with your partner,
which will encapsulate a type of honesty and a nonpredicted
path in response to each other.
20 This has happened in my several tests of this idea.
21 To repeat, I am endeavoring to make the filming,
ambiance, location and lack of press all focus on
your comfort and the quality of your experience.
This above all is my concern and my goal.
22 Improvised conversation in this manner is a new
form but a wonderful conversation is perhaps the
oldest human media for creative discourse. So in
that sense, this is a great leap backwards.
23 It will be a wonderful salon and an absolutely
immersive experience with extraordinary people.
MEMO TO PARTICIPANTS
re: FUTURE APP
I trust each of you has read my 24-point memo called
WWW Conference Conversation Guidelines with 24 points
that I believe give the spirit of the meeting itself. I’ve
had excellent response from many of you as well as
from sponsors and attendees. This memo addresses the
outcome of the conference, in other words, what I do with
the filming of these approximately 30 conversations.
1 It will be filmed in black and white by a team directed
by Jon Kamen and Sidney Beaumont of @radical.media,
and John Halloran of John Halloran Associates.
2 It will be unedited. There will be a camera on
each of the individuals in conversation, as well as a
long camera on the three of us sitting on stage.
3 Michael Smolens and David Orban of dotSUB will
then translate it into perhaps 10 languages and add a
running translation in English, which will address the
language needs of 90% plus of the world’s population.
4 This will live on a server and be accessed by
an app that has a release date at this juncture of 1
December. The app will also contain a great deal of
additional information on each of the presenters.
5 The additional curated stuff—photos, videos,
and links is what this memo is focused on.
6 Scrollmotion has already done two extraordinary
versions of the organization and design of this app. They
have offices in San Diego and New York City.
7 There will be a series of unique videos on which I will
comment later, made where appropriate of you in situ.
8 The video of the entire conference of course can
be accessed by pairings of speakers from a list and
viewed as you would at the conference showing
individuals in improvised conversation. However, one
could also double click on a single name and go into
this visual biography of each of the participants.
9 The demo can be found at
http://vimeo.com/user7992663/review/47187545/29ddc526f0
The password is WWW. It shows an extremely brief version of
C. K. Williams, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, in which you
cannot only see a bio, for which we will ask a major expansion,
but also photographs of the covers of a few of his 11 books. We
would also like to have all of his books, which you will be able
to order form the app, some outtake videos, not from the
conference but from other sources that we would identify, and
that you will identify, as well as, in the case of C. K. Williams,
many pages, a few shown here, of his personally edited
writings of his poetry—something you can’t find on YouTube,
a presentation or in a book, or perhaps anywhere but this app.
10 The idea of this app is to get a behind the scenes,
behind the curtain, personalized journey through
each individual, which will also have a list of links
to suggested articles, reviews, YouTubes and other
material that will fill out this visual biography.
11 This is an important point: if you Google Richard
Wurman, you come up with perhaps 450,000 citations.
The number changes daily. This would amount to 40,000+
pages, which of course nobody looks at. Basically it’s junk
big data, and people mostly focus on one article and a
wikipedia entry. The attempt here is to have the first primitive
development of a platform for beginning to assuage some
curiosity in the beginning of looking at a visual biography of
at least these 50 people. If the platform works it’s scalable.
That’s the idea of a new modality. If it works for people
perhaps it will work for healthcare and other subjects.
12 I’m putting together a team of people consisting of Ali
Smolens, who will help curate some of the materials for
many of you, Paul Kandarian, a magazine writer friend
of mine from Rhode Island, and three others plus Blaise
Zerega, CEO of FORA.tv who has agreed to make some
original, simple videos such as Frank Gehry walking around
his office showing and discussing models of buildings that
he has not built, or variations of for instance the 8 Spruce
Street tower in New York or hopefully Craig Venter’s
laboratories in a walk-through, E.O. Wilson’s offices, etc. etc.
13 So this is a request for the following: please start thinking
about the stuff that you’ve never shown: everything from
baby pictures, pictures of your pets, pictures of your office,
pictures of your home, things that make you real. Multiple
photographs of yourself, perhaps a strip of photographs of
you taken in a photo booth at an amusement park that you
have in a drawer. Writings that you’ve done that show your
edits, something that shows you’re real, human, and shows
your process. Pictures of your laboratories. Agree to have
somebody do a 5- or 10-minute walk through with you in your
office or your lab or your place of work or your architectural
studio. Videos or DVDs that for example I know Moshe
Safdie has which he makes to describe what a building will
look like in computer graphics to a client. I know he has a
fantastic one of an apartment house in Singapore. And I’m
sure Bjarke has similar things that he generally does not
release. Covers of books about you, covers of books by you. A
list of articles that you think critically describes you and links
to YouTubes or other videos or other citations that you think
and you have curated yourself that make you particularly
interesting, not the half a million available on line. Julie
Taymor most have lots of stuff as well as David Blaine.
14 We hope to have this put together, along with the
entire conference, for release by 1 December and promote
it immediately after Thanksgiving with the help of
IDG, Flipboard (Mike McCue), Esri, IIR and others. I
am going to ask for your cooperation out in Redlands at
the conference and I will have additional copies of this
and the other memo to give you when you register.
15 Attached are technical specifications for those of
you who understand them yourself. Otherwise please
show them to somebody in your office under the age of
30 who automatically understands them, who could help
us translate whatever you send us in a usable format. I
don’t understand them myself but I’m sure some of you
have a better handle on this than I do. These will make
the process smooth and efficient and within budget.
THANKS & TEAM
HOST
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