The Relentless Lisa Strausfeld

We interface with the award-winning information designer, who explains how her radical approach to data visualization incorporates real space and cyberspace

by Reena Jana

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When Jim Clifton, chief executive of the Gallup Organization, the Washington management consulting firm known for its public opinion polls, wanted to hire "the Tiger Woods of data visualization," one name kept coming up: Lisa Strausfeld. "We did our own [unofficial] Gallup Poll," says Clifton. "With everyone we asked about Lisa, the agreement was so high. Everyone said she's the best." So, in June, 2006, the 42-year-old Pentagram partner was hired to consult as a senior scientist at Gallup. Strausfeld's redesign of Gallup's Web site will go live in September and will feature Strausfeld's data visualizations for the Gallup World Poll, which surveys residents of dozens of nations with timely questions such as "Would you vote for a female president?" The World Poll also offers rare statistical snapshots of war-torn regions, as Gallup regularly gathers data from people in areas such as the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Clifton says the company was looking to create a site that would have the exciting graphics of ESPN.com and the gravitas of the White House's home page. "We also wanted it to be compelling and authoritative enough to attract everyone to it—similar to a Bloomberg screen," Clifton says. While that combination of disparate requirements might strike many designers as almost impossible to achieve, Strausfeld saw the multifaceted brief not only as a challenge, but as one that drew upon her own experience and interests.

'Media-Agnostic' Design

The reference to Bloomberg is fitting. In 2006, Pentagram won a Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award for Environments for its design of the media company's Manhattan headquarters, which featured dramatic information displays. The giant screens Strausfeld and her team designed feature live feeds of financial updates straight from the company's resources. They're a clear demonstration of Strausfeld's ability to transform digital information—usually consumed alone at a PC—into a public, architectural experience.

"I've always been interested in investigating structure, in architecture, software, information design—and the ways they connect," Strausfeld says one recent Tuesday as we sit in one of the meeting rooms in Pentagram's buzzing Manhattan offices. "From my teaching [at Yale and New York University] and work, I've observed a transition to a 'media-agnostic' approach to design. Mastery in design used to be medium-specific," she continues. "Now mastery can cut across different media. To say this stemmed from 'digital culture' would be accurate but too general. The optimal ways for organizing information, for example, are becoming universal." In other words, computer programs that allow us to archive, sort, search, and share data have infiltrated nearly every discipline, from the world of the architect to the world of the Web designer. Why not, Strausfeld seems to posit in her own genre-blending portfolio, apply what works in one arena to another?

Strausfeld's own evolution as a designer is reflected in her résumé. As an undergraduate at Brown University, she studied both art history and computer science. And she's armed with two master's degrees, one in architecture from Harvard University, the other in media arts and sciences from MIT's Media Lab. At MIT, Strausfeld first used the Silicon Graphics computers that were capable of rendering information on-screen in three-dimensional "spaces," rather than as flat spreadsheets or graphs. In 1996, along with classmates from MIT, she co-founded Perspecta, a startup that made visual user-interfaces for large databases for companies such as Encyclopedia Britannica and Merrill Lynch (MER).