HATCH Design Mentor Manuel Lima Blogs About Asheville

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by Asheville Now
on Monday, May 04, 2009

The Design and Technology panel was certainly one of the high points of HATCHfest 2009. I recently found myself talking about the panel with it's moderator, Sean McDonald of Jute Networks. He informed me that Manuel Lima, a HATCH Design Mentor, recently wrote a glowing review of the festival and the city Asheville on .

For those who don't know, Manuel Lima is "A London-based interaction designer and information architect, and founder of VisualComplexity.com. He was also nominated by Creativity magazine as "one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009".

Here is an excerpt from Lima's blog post about HATCHfest and Asheville:

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What surprised me most about Asheville was not the warmth of the weather or the people, or even the beautiful mountain scenery, but its stronghold art & design community. I met great people doing outstanding work with a strong determination to leave a mark, change the status quo, and expressing a deep concern on sustainability and environmental practices. Asheville felt a bit like Austin (Texas), a small liberal bastion in a predominantly red state, where tolerant and broadminded views are felt in every corner. In Asheville's case, due to the presence of the NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (the world's largest active archive of weather data) in their downtown area, people seem to be even more aware of environmental issues, which also explains the strong concentration of professionals interested in alternative ways of visualizing meteorological geo-based data.

One of the people driving this battle is David McConville, a brilliant researcher who has dedicated the past six years to an extraordinary geodome visual analysis technology part of The Elumenati. On my very first morning in Asheville, I went with some of the mentors of the Design & Technology program and other HATCH organizers to David's studio, where we sat inside his 15-foot inflatable dome and watched in astonishment the technology they have put in place, as we swiftly crossed the Milky Way, across millions of years of cosmic evolution, driven by David's captivating narrative.

I also had a chance to meet Andrew Jones from the Sustainability Institute, who is conducting a series of relevant research projects involving data visualization to empower users with environmental awareness. I was also impressed with the amount of work, dedication and innovation that has been put in place by Sean McDonald and the remaining Jute Networks team, in the creation of an immensely powerful network analysis tool. I've definitely brought home the insightful conversations I had with many great minds in Asheville, particularly David McConville and Sean McDonald. It was also great to meet many other participants and organizers of the festival, who created a really unique experience.