This talk will expose our long-time obsession with deciphering a wider, holistic view of intriguing topics through the use of recurrent visualization metaphors—from understanding the brain to ordering nature to mapping the Internet. It will particularly explore a critical paradigm shift in our understanding and depiction of knowledge as we stop relying on hierarchical tree structures and turn instead to networks in order to map the inherent complexities of our modern world. This talk is tied to the recent publication of: "The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge" A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, nominated by Creativity magazine as "one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009", Manuel Lima is the Design Lead of Codecademy.com, the founder of VisualComplexity.com, and a teacher of data visualization at Parsons School of Design. 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. 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, Grafik magazine, SEED, Étapes, and El País. His latest book Visual Complexity: Mapping patterns of information has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese.