  The aim of this paper is to introduce an approach to the (strong) Novikov
conjecture based on continuous families of finite dimensional representations:
this is partly inspired by ideas of Lusztig using the Atiyah-Singer families
index theorem, and partly by Carlsson's deformation $K$--theory. Using this
approach, we give new proofs of the strong Novikov conjecture in several
interesting cases, including crystallographic groups and surface groups. The
method presented here is relatively accessible compared with other proofs of
the Novikov conjecture, and also yields some information about the $K$--theory
and cohomology of representation spaces.
