Manuel Lima


Manuel Lima FRSA is a Portuguese-born designer, author, lecturer, and researcher. WIRED describes Lima as “the man who turns data into art” while Creativity magazine considers Lima “the Edward Tufte of the 21st Century". He is a leading voice on information visualization and the founder of - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. He is the author of three books translated into several languages, respectively Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, and The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge. He currently resides in New York City.

Background

Lima has a BFA degree in Industrial Design from the Faculty of Architecture at Technical University of Lisbon and a MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. During his MFA program Lima worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping.
Lima has worked as a senior Interaction Designer for Danish design studio Kontrapunkt, advertising agency R/GA, mobile phone maker Nokia, Microsoft Bing and Codecademy. He currently works for Google as Design Lead.

Public speaking

Lima is an active and prolific speaker who has lectured in dozens of schools, conferences, and festivals around the world on the topic of data and network visualization. Among these venues are TED, TED Global, Lift, Ars Electronica, OFFF, Eyeo, Reboot, VizThink, IxDA Interaction, Royal Society of Arts, New York Public Library, TEDx Buenos Aires, Harvard, MIT, Royal College of Art, Open University, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Northeastern University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ENSAD Paris, University of Amsterdam, MediaLab Prado Madrid, Sheffield School of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon.

Recognition

Lima was nominated by Creativity magazine as "one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009" and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2010.