Lisa Strausfeld is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 design professional. She is a leading Information architect

Information Architecture

Information architecture is the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems. Among these activities are library systems, Content Management Systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming,...

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Early life

Lisa 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

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

 and computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

 and received master's degrees in architecture from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and in media arts and sciences from M.I.T.

Perspecta

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.

Pentagram

In 2002 Strausfeld became a partner in the New York office of Pentagram (design studio)

Pentagram (design studio)

Pentagram is a design studio that was founded in 1972 by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky in Needham Road, West London, UK...

, 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, a data-visualization venture. She continues to work on projects for clients through her studio, InformationArt.

Other projects

Her projects include the design of Sugar

Sugar (GUI)

Sugar is an open source desktop environment designed with the goal of being used by children for learning.Developed as part of the One Laptop per Child project, it is the default interface on OLPC XO-1 family of laptop computers....

, 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 firm 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.

Personal life

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

Muriel Cooper

Muriel Cooper was a digital designer, business woman, researcher, and educator.Cooper received her BA from Ohio State in 1944, and a BFA in Design and a BS in Education from Massachusetts College of Art. After her graduation, Cooper moved to New York City and attempted to find a position in...

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Awards

Lisa Strausfeld was honored for Interaction Design in the 2010 National Design Awards

National Design Awards

The National Design Awards, founded in 2000, is funded and awarded by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. There are seven official design categories, and three additional awards...

, presented by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum, a subsidiary of the Smithsonian Institution, is the United States' national museum of design history and contemporary design and the only museum in the U.S. whose collection is solely focused on contemporary and historic design...

, 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

Fast Company (magazine)

Fast Company is a full-color business magazine that releases 10 issues per year and reports on topics including innovation, digital media, technology, change management, leadership, design, and social responsibility...

 featured her as one of its 2009 Masters of Design. She has received six awards in the prestigious International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), co-sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America

Industrial Designers Society of America

Industrial Designers Society of America is an organization of professional industrial designers primarily in the United States. Recently IDSA has started chapters in Canada and in China...

 (IDSA), and her projects have been honored by the Art Directors Club, the Type Directors Club

Type Directors Club

The Type Directors Club is an international organization for those devoted to excellence in typography in all its forms. Created in 1946, the organization’s mission is to raise the standards of typography and related fields within the graphic arts. The TDC supports research and education, and...

, the AIGA

Aiga

‘Aiga is a word in the Samoan language which means 'family.' The aiga is the family unit of Samoan society and differs from the Western sense in that it consists more than just a mother, father and children. The Samoan family, also referred to as an 'extended family' is based on the culture's...

and the Society for Environmental Graphic Design.