Ars Memorativa as the Genesis of Information Design: A Conversation with Manuel Lima

Manuel Lima is one of the most prominent figures of data visualization since the publication of Visual Complexity (Lima 2011). In this conversation, Manuel Lima traces back the origin of data visualization to Ars Memorativa, an ancient mnemonic technique to organize information and facilitate its recall. Going back to the origins is an obsession that brought him to collect and arrange into books images of information design from both physical and digital archives. By doing this, Manuel Lima tackled issues related to the digital objects and their creation, use, and preservation, with a point of view capable of combining the passion for visualizing information and the profession of UX design.
This conversation, which took place between Lisbon and Milan on Wednesday 28 July, 2021, comes from a blurb that Manuel Lima wrote for Mapping Affinities (Rodighiero 2021). The discussion is part of the project From Data to Wisdom, and is supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through the grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029717, and the Swiss National Science Foundation through the grant 194442. This text, originally created for the forthcoming book From Data to Wisdom (Higuera Rubio et al. 2022), is published as a preview for Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society.