Lunch Talks

Manuel Lima

Founder, VisualComplexity.com & Design Lead, Codeacademy
October 3, 2014

There’s a lot of cross pollination between data visualization and interaction and UX design.

Manuel Lima is a designer, author, lecturer, and researcher based in New York City. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Founder of VisualComplexity.com, Design Lead at Codecademy. Nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009”.

Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken in numerous conferences, schools and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, MIT, Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, University of Amsterdam, MediaLab Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various magazines and newspapers, such as Wired, New York Times, Science, BusinessWeek, Creative Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Eye, Grafik, SEED, Étapes, and El País.

His first book Visual Complexity: Mapping patterns of Information has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese. His latest The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, published in April 2014 by Princeton Architectural Press, covers over 800 years of human culture through the lens of the tree figure, from its entrenched roots in religious medieval exegesis to its contemporary, secular digital themes.

With over 10 years of experience designing digital products, Manuel has worked for Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA, and Kontrapunkt. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design, New York. During the course of the MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency.

See this Lunch Talk featured on Co.Design

  • A woman and a man are presenting at a "Lunch Talks" event. The man sits with a laptop while the woman stands and speaks to an audience. Behind them, a projection screen displays a collage of various headshots inside circular frames.
  • A man is sitting and presenting to an audience in a brick-walled room. The screen behind him displays the text "800 years ago...". He is holding a laptop, and the audience members are seated and listening attentively.
  • A man sits on a stool in front of a screen giving a presentation to an audience. The slides on the screen are titled "The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge" by Manuel Lima, showcasing the book cover and details about the work.
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