Lisa Strausfeld

Strausfeld was 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 the MIT Media Lab.

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, 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 has a daughter named Muriel, named for her mentor, Muriel Cooper.

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 Train Hall; 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.

In 2006, Strausfeld and James Nick Sears created "Rewiring the Spy" for The New York Times Magazine—an applet written in Processing that illustrated the connections between the names of suspected terrorists and terrorist events.[3][4]

In 2018, Strausfeld worked with Glowbox, a design studio in Portland, Oregon, to develop a virtual reality prototype that displays a three-dimensional timeline of women's history, based on The New Historia,[5] a women's history project by Gina Luria Walker at The New School, where Strausfeld is a senior research fellow.[6]

Lisa Strausfeld was honored for Interaction Design in the 2010 National Design Awards presented by Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum;[7] 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.[8] 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.

• 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.

• 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.