Lisa Strausfeld is a partner in the New York office of the international design consultancy Pentagram. She joined The Gallup Organization as a Senior Scientist in 2006. An expert on data visualization and distilling complex information sources into visually compelling, actionable user interfaces, Strausfeld lends her expertise to the Gallup World Poll. This ground-breaking project continually collects people's opinions in more than 100 countries to determine the general well-being or "soul" of a country, city, or culture.
In 1996, Strausfeld cofounded Perspecta, a software company that developed advanced search and visual user interface technology for the organization of large information collections. When Perspecta was sold to Excite@Home, Strausfeld's information visualization work drew her to Quokka Sports, an online digital sports entertainment company. At Quokka, she led the development of interfaces for "immersive sports experiences" that leveraged digital information assets from live sports events.
In 2002, Strausfeld joined Pentagram, a design firm specializing in print and screen graphics, products, environments, and buildings. Her work lies at the intersection of physical and virtual space, where information structures and physical structures meet and where navigation of information and navigation of buildings is joined in a single experience. Her team specializes in digital information design projects that range from software prototypes and Web sites to interpretive displays and large-scale media installations.
At Pentagram, Strausfeld's projects have included the design of signage and media installations for civic, cultural, and corporate developments, including New York's redeveloped Moynihan Station, the new corporate headquarters of Bloomberg L.P., and the expansion of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Strausfeld has also designed Web sites for a broad range of clients, including Mohawk Fine Papers, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown University, the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, and the New York Jets football franchise. She is a two-time Gold award winner in the prestigious Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), cosponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and BusinessWeek magazine.
Strausfeld's work in her own studio, InformationArt, ranges from creating interfaces for genomic visualization software to designing media projections for New York theater productions. Her designs have been broadly published and have appeared in I.D., Metropolis, BusinessWeek, Communication Arts, and Eye. Strausfeld holds two patents relating to user interfaces and intelligent information search and retrieval.
Strausfeld has been on the faculty of the Yale School of Art since 2002, teaching interactive and site-specific design in the Graphic Design program. Strausfeld's design and technology education began at Brown University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in art history and computer science. She received master's degrees in architecture at Harvard University and in media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, Strausfeld served as a research assistant in the Visible Language Workshop of the Media Lab, where she researched and developed new models for displaying and interacting with complex information.
