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.
