Researcher and Interaction Designer Manuel Lima (MFA DT alum ’05), has been nominated by Creativity magazine as one of the 50 most creative and influential minds for 2009, among other names such as David Fincher (Director), Jeff Bezos (Founder/CEO Amazon.com), David Axelrod (Chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Co-founders Google), Jean Nouvel (Architect), Andrew Staton (Director of Wall-E), and David Byrne (Musician).

Creativity is one of the most prestigious magazines in the areas of Design, Advertising and Consumer Culture. Their annual Creativity 50 list features people “who made a significant mark on the creative consciousness of our industry and our culture as a whole”, but also “made us think differently about some established way of doing things”. The selected 50 come from a variety of backgrounds, from tech pioneers to filmmakers, artists, designers and architects. Among last year’s nominees were Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook), Ridley Scott (Director), Radiohead (Musicians), Jonathan Ive (Industrial Designer/Apple), and Zaha Hadid (Architect).

Based in London, Manuel Lima works as a Senior User Experience Designer for Nokia and is the founder of VisualComplexity.com – A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. Manuel is also a frequent speaker in conferences and festivals around the world on the topic of Information Visualization. In recognition for his research work in VisualComplexity.com, Creativity asserts that Manuel “might well become the Edward Tufte of the 21st Century”.

The original article on Manuel Lima
The full list of the 2009 nominees
More information of Visual Complexity