Lisa Strausfeld

Lisa Strausfeld (born 1964) is an American design professional and Information architect.

Biography

Strausfeld born in central New Jersey, one of a set of twin daughters of an ob-gyn and an urban planner. She studied art history and computer science at Brown University and received master's degrees in architecture from Harvard University and in media arts and sciences from M.I.T.

In 1996, Lisa Strausfeld and two MIT classmates launched Perspecta, a software company in San Francisco that made visual user-interfaces for large databases. It was sold to Excite@Home in 1999. After the sale of the company, Strausfeld joined Quokka Sports, staying until the company folded in the early 2000s.^[1]

In 2002 Strausfeld became a partner in the New York office of Pentagram (design studio), the distinguished international design consultancy. At Pentagram Strausfeld and her team specialized in digital information projects including the design of large-scale media installations, software prototypes and user interfaces, signage and websites for a broad range of civic, cultural and corporate clients. Strausfeld left Pentagram in 2011 to establish Major League Politics, and subsequently left MLP in 2012 to head up Bloomberg's data visualization efforts.^[2]

Lisa Strausfeld was honored for Interaction Design in the 2010 National Design Awards, presented by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution; she was a finalist for the award in 2009, the first year the discipline was recognized by the awards. She was named one of BusinessWeek’s “Cutting Edge Designers” in 2007, and Sugar and the Times visualizations were both featured in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind" in 2008. Fast Company featured her as one of its 2009 Masters of Design.^[3] She has received six awards in the prestigious International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), co-sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), and her projects have been honored by the Art Directors Club, the Type Directors Club, the AIGA and the Society for Environmental Graphic Design.

Lisa Stausfeld has a daughter named Muriel. She named her after her mentor, Muriel Cooper.

Work

Her projects include the design of Sugar, the graphical user interface for One Laptop per Child; interactive media installations for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Detroit Institute of Arts; large-scale media installations for the corporate headquarters of Bloomberg L.P., the expansion of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and New York's redeveloped Moynihan Station; Web sites for Gallup, the architecture firms Ennead Architects and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the arts group Creative Time, Brown University, Columbia Business School, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.); and information visualizations for The New York Times.

Selected publications

• Strausfeld, Lisa. "Financial Viewpoints: using point-of-view to enable understanding of information." Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1995.
• Rennison, Earl, and Lisa Strausfeld. "The Millennium Project: Constructing a dynamic 3+ D virtual environment for exploring geographically, temporally and categorically organized historical information." Spatial Information Theory A Theoretical Basis for GIS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1995. 69-91.

Patents

• Horowitz, D. M., Rennison, E. F., Ruffles, J. W., & Strausfeld, L. S. (2000). U.S. Patent No. 6,122,647. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• Horowitz, Damon M., Earl F. Rennison, and Lisa S. Strausfeld. "Immersive movement-based interaction with large complex information structures." U.S. Patent No. 6,154,213. 28 Nov. 2000.

References