Alex Wright

Information Architect for The New York Times

Author of "Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages"

Alex Wright
English

Alex Wright is the Director of User Experience and Product Research at The New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots.”

Alex Wright has led research and design projects for IBM, Microsoft, The Long Now Foundation, Harvard University, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo!, among others. His work has won numerous industry awards, including a Webby, Cool Site of the Year, the PRSA Silver Anvil and an American Graphic Design Award.

Alex Wright ′s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Believer, Harvard Magazine, Utne Reader, Yankee, Think, Interactions, Boxes and Arrows, New Architect, WebTechniques, Boston Business, Design Times and Library Journal, among others.

A popular speaker and lecturer, Alex Wright has lectured at The Long Now Foundation, Gartner Group, UC-Berkeley, the Institute of Design-Chicago, Seybold, the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit, CMP Web conferences, Association of Internet Professionals, Creating for the Web, and numerous IBM conferences.

Alex Wright holds a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. He has also completed graduate coursework in journalism at Harvard, and in usability engineering at UC-Berkeley.

Innovation & Creativity

Futurist & Tecnology

Cataloling the word

Paul Otlet described a system of networked computers—or “electric telescopes”—that would allow people to search through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. As the network spread, he foresaw it uniting individuals and institutions of all stripes—from local bookstores and classrooms to universities and governments. He dubbed the whole thing a réseau mondial: a “worldwide network.”

Cataloling the word

Glut: Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages

What do primordial bacteria, medieval alchemists, and the World Wide Web have to do with each other? This fascinating exploration of how information systems emerge takes readers on a provocative journey through the history of the information age.

Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, writer and information architect Alex Wright weaves an intriguing narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the World Wide Web. Finally, he pulls these threads together to reach a surprising conclusion, suggesting that the future of the information age may lie deep in our cultural past.

Glut: Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages