Lisa Strausfeld at MIND08

Lisa Strausfeld will be a speaker at MIND08, the two-day symposium presented by Seed and the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the exhibition currently on view at MoMA. Curator Paola Antonelli will host presenters including Greg Lynn, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jessica Banks, Chuck Hoberman and Neri Oxman, among others. Thursday, 3 April and Friday, 4 April at MoMA and Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Tickets are free, but required for admission—register here.

Previously: Lisa Strausfeld in “Design and the Elastic Mind”

Lisa Strausfeld in MoMA’s ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’

The Museum of Modern Art’s landmark new exhibition, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” opens this weekend. Curated by Paola Antonelli, the exhibition “highlights current examples of successful design translations of disruptive scientific and technological innovations, and reflects on how the figure of the designer has changed from form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinary dynamic reality.” Two of Lisa Strausfeld’s recent projects are represented: Sugar, the user interface for the One Laptop per Child initiative, chosen to represent large-scale, community-oriented design and demonstrated in the exhibition on two XO laptops, and Lisa’s visualizations for the New York Times Magazine article “Rewiring the Spy,” featured as an example of a critical visualization. Two hundred other objects, installations and concepts are also on display including examples of nanodesign, 3-D printing and organic design.

“Design and the Elastic Mind” opens to the public on Sunday, 24 February and is on view through 12 May 2008.

Give One XO Laptop, Get One

Through 31 December, One Laptop Per Child is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. Donate a XO laptop to a child in a developing country and receive one for the child in your life. Originally a two-week campaign that began in mid-November, the extended Give One Get One offer is the first time the laptop has been made available to the general public.

Lisa Strausfeld and her team have designed a temporary website for the promotion that educates donors about the organization’s mission, while it takes cues from consumer websites through the use of detailed product shots and overviews of the software. The site also provides a walk through of Sugar, the user interface developed by Pentagram with Red Hat and OLPC.

Website design by Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Asad Pervaiz in collaboration with OLPC and Eleven. Identity design by Michael Gericke. Site development by Nurun.

New Work: Gallup

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada have redesigned the website of Gallup, the organization that studies human nature and behavior. In addition to producing the high-profile Gallup Polls that track public opinion about social issues and cultural trends, the group does consulting for corporations and institutions on issues like employee productivity and constituent feedback.

Pentagram worked in collaboration with Gallup on the conceptual and visual design of the site, as well as the navigation, that highlights Gallup’s two most public divisions, the Poll and its consultancy group. On the homepage, the website redesign restructures the various divisions of Gallup into dual columns. In the left column is the Gallup Poll, and its content related to politics and government; in the right, Gallup Consulting, with divisions related to economics and management.

“The site design reflects the macro- and micro-economic model of the organization,” says Strausfeld. “The world poll focuses on citizen engagement and speaks to public leaders; the consulting side speaks to customer or staff engagement. For both segments, the site emphasizes Gallup as a tool for the greater well being of their constituents.”

The two segments—represented with the colors of green and orange—are carried throughout the site as persistent navigation.

Strausfeld says, “The organization has 70 years of public opinion surveys; the content has always been there, and it is constantly updated. The redesign helps quantify all of that qualitative information.” The new site also makes use of video reports.

The redesign was completed as focus intensifies on the 2008 US presidential election. (Gallup famously has a history of calling election results.)

Strausfeld is a Senior Scientist at the Gallup Organization.

One Laptop Per Child Wins INDEX: Award

INDEX, a non-profit organization based in Copenhagen whose mission is to support design that substantially improves human life, has presented One Laptop Per Child with a prestigious INDEX: Award. Every two years, one award is given in each of five categories: Body, Home, Work, Play and Community. OLPC won in the Community category, as the jury surmised: “Without a computer-literate population, developing countries will continue to struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy.” Pentagram developed the laptop’s interface and designed the organization’s identity and website.

New Work: Safdico

Angus Hyland has produced a new corporate website and content management system (CMS) for the South African Diamond Corporation - Safdico.

Safdico is one of the world’s premier diamond producers, priding itself on its craftsmanship and expertise while operating to the most stringent professional, ethical and social standards. Pentagram’s design for the business-to-business focussed site is elegant and controlled, without denying the inherent glamour of Safdico’s products.

Interactive Model of Lower Manhattan Wins IDSA Award

Wall Street Rising’s interactive model of Lower Manhattan.

The interactive architectural model of Lower Manhattan designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for Wall Street Rising’s Downtown Information Center won an Industrial Design Excellence Award, the Industrial Designers Society of America announced today. Co-sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and the IDSA, the awards recognize the best product designs of the year.

Founded in the wake of 9/11, Wall Street Rising is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the historic, cultural and economic interests of Lower Manhattan. The model, developed on the concept of a communal table, creates a shared space where visitors to the center can gather to learn about the history and opportunities of the area. Using a gyro-mouse, users can highlight streets, buildings and other points of interest, receive practical information about local museums, restaurants, shops and neighborhood events, view historic and contemporary photographs or watch short documentary films. These graphics are all seamlessly projected onto the 3-D model from two digital projectors hung from the ceiling.

Continue reading "Interactive Model of Lower Manhattan Wins IDSA Award"

New Work: One Laptop Per Child

Pentagram has designed the identity and website for One Laptop per Child, the non-profit organization with the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations.

The identity is a hieroglyph, designed to be universally understood, that utilizes the icons of the OLPC laptop interface, also developed by Pentagram. The website design employs these symbols as the basis for navigation. Each icon leads to a corresponding section of information: the laptop to a section about hardware and software, the arrow to a section about participation, and so on. The site launched in English but is currently being translated into many languages.

Identity design by Michael Gericke and Dimitris Stefanidis; website design by Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt, Nina Boesch and Takaaki Okada. Site development by Nurun.

New Work: One Laptop Per Child

Home in the OLPC interface

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada are working on the design of the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project, the initiative to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. Michael Gericke has designed the identity for the initiative. The project is being led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, and the designers are working in close collaboration with the OLPC development team, including president Walter Bender and designer Eben Eliason. Production on the laptops is scheduled for mid-2007.

Called Sugar, the interface uses a highly abstracted spatial navigation metaphor, an extension of the familiar desktop metaphor, for easy, intuitive navigation that makes the most of the laptop’s networking capabilities. Children can move through four levels of view—Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity—and connect with others in the network “mesh” formed by users.

After the jump: A tour through the interface.

Continue reading "New Work: One Laptop Per Child"

New Work: Swarthmore College

Michael Bierut and his team have redesigned the website for Swarthmore College. In a first for a college site of this kind, the design is based on a blog format: Content is edited centrally but posts are contributed by students, professors, and alumni, and all of Swarthmore’s academic departments are listed blogroll style in the left hand column. Michael’s team previously designed the school’s viewbook and admissions materials.