Richard Saul Wurman Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You only understand information relative to what you already understand.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The organization of information actually creates new information.

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

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

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

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

Education is to learning as tour groups are to adventure.

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.

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

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

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

If you serve that God, all the others will be taken care of. My quote is: 'The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand.' It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.

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

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.

When I have the choice to do something I don't want to do, I most often – most always – do it anyway.

What situations can I create that allow me not to have the disease of familiarity?

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

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

The journey from not knowing to knowing was his work. He was selling his desire to learn about a subject.