Looking Outwards 08

For this looking outward, I watched a talk by Manuel Lima called “Why Circles” from his 2017 talk at the Eyeo Festival. Lima is a designer who operates in the margins between data and art. He has written three books, the most recent of which is his book on circles, and the subject of the lecture. All of his books are studies of network mapping, first of general mapping, then of network trees, and then of circles representing networks. I am very interested in networks and how they operate, and I think that people like Lima who are not only interested in the vast array of network types, but also the history of these networks can create meaningful parallels between current and previous human ideas and connections. In the book, he is able to generalize all circular networks and diagrams into 21 different types, and then abstract the 21 types into 7 categories. This level of abstraction among the variety of diagrams shown is really helpful for understanding how each diagram is meant to be read. When presenting, Lima began by giving a history of the topic, from ancient to present, while describing how these diagrams were categorized in parallel. He then moved on to interesting juxtapositions between many of the examples that he collected in his research. I think that these juxtapositions were very powerful for better understanding the similarities between previous and current ideas of networking, as well as the similarities between visualization of different professions and areas of study. From this, I think I am first more willing to use circles when presenting my ideas in the future, but also much more open to looking towards different fields and areas of study when thinking about how I visually represent my projects and ideas.

mslima.com