By Brandon Lewis, news correspondent
Professor Richard Saul Wurman, creator, curator and chair of the TED series, was honored at the Museum of Science for his contribution to the sciences. The Oct. 23 ceremony celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Bradford Washburn Award, as well as the accomplishments of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City and the UN Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change.
The Washburn Award was created in 1964 after an anonymous donor named the award for H. Bradford Washburn Jr., an explorer-cartographer and Museum of Sciencedirector from 1939 to 1980, according to Erin Shannon, a publicist for the Media Relations and Social Media Department for the museum.
“TED was born in 1984 out of Richard Saul Wurman’s observation of a powerful convergence between technology, entertainment and design,” according to the TED website.
Wurman, a distinguished professor of the practice in the College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD), worked at TED from 1984 to 2002 and is also the co-creator of the Urban Observatory, an interactive exhibit.
“Richard has always operated as a Maverick outside the conventional ways of doing things and in a sense that has permitted him to do the kinds of things he has done,” Nathan Felde, a professor and chair of the Art and Design Department in CAMD, said.
The award itself has also had an impact on the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) program at Northeastern.
“The award, in relation to our MFA program on information and design, [it] is a tremendous thing to have those people associated with that award and to have one of those people be a distinguished professor in our college,” Felde said.
The award has gone to many notable figures, including Jane Goodall and Walter Cronkite. While Wurman has received multiple design awards, he was awarded the Washburn for the influence TED has had through its lecturers. In 2012, TED Talks reached a combined total of one billion views worldwide. Rupal Patel, an associate professor in the department of communication sciences and disorders in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, is also involved with TED, speaking at TEDWomen in December 2013 in San Francisco.
“When I get an award that is outside what I’m trained to do, I get a special excitement because I’m getting recognized for the clarity of my thought and communication rather than something that I was trained to do,” Wurman said. “It also really addresses the passion that I have for my hobbies.”
Photo courtesy Brooks Canaday, Northeastern University
