Sugar UI Wins IDSA Award

The 2008 International Design Excellence Awards were announced today and Sugar, the user interface designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for One Laptop per Child, won a Silver in the Interactive Product Experiences category, one of four awards that went to OLPC in this year’s competition. The IDEAs are sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek magazine; full coverage here.

New Work: Columbia Business School

Columbia Business School has launched its new homepage and blog designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team, Takaaki Okada, Christian Marc Schmidt and Kate Wolf. Part of a larger redesign, the initial phase of the launch features a continually updated blog that parallels the school’s emphasis on innovation and the practice of business in a rapidly changing world. The site’s visual design with its bold use of black, closely cropped photography and clean page layouts takes its cues from the collateral material Michael Bierut recently designed for the school, a project that also included the redesign of the mark.

One of the main goals for the site was to facilitate a dialog between the various members of the CBS community—current students, alumni and prospective students—while also creating a specific destination for each audience. Strausfeld's team accomplished this by surfacing the site’s content through an extensive tagging structure that dispenses with traditional hierarchical structures and instead, slices the site by relevant topic thereby flattening the content and making it more accessible.

For the new identity, designed by Bierut and Armin Vit, the school’s traditional symbol—the mark of Hermes, the Greek god of commerce, among other things—has been redrawn to make it simpler, easier to reproduce and more precise. The geometric angles within the new mark are echoed in the school’s advertising by Gardner Nelson + Partners and on other promotional material.

DIA Installations Win MUSE Award

The suite of interactive interpretive installations developed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for the Detroit Institute of Arts has received a Bronze Medal in the 2008 MUSE Awards. The 19th annual competition, sponsored by the American Association of Museums, recognizes outstanding achievement in museum media in acknowledgement of the role technology plays in enhancing the museum visitor experience. The judges reviewed the DIA installations as “captivating and diverse,” “a refreshing and unexpected experience for the art museum visitor,” and “an impressively diverse mix of experiences that are astutely matched by the museum to differing goals and visitor outcomes.”

New Work: Detroit Institute of Arts

The suite of interactive interpretive installations created by Pentagram for the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Founded in 1885, the Detroit Institute of Arts recently underwent an extensive six year, $158 million renovation that sought, among other things, to rethink the display of the museum’s permanent collection. As part of the renovation, Lisa Strausfeld and her team worked with the museum's education and interpretation department to develop a suite of permanent media-based interactive exhibitions that would help make the collection more accessible through the use of technology.

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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.

Pentagram Honored for Leadership in Pro Bono Service

Pentagram’s New York office was honored last night by the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation for its work for nonprofit organizations. Paula Scher and Jim Biber were on hand to accept the honor during a ceremony held at the Harvard Club. Pentagram received the first annual “DNA” award for “its exceptional incorporation of pro bono service into its business culture.” Recent Pentagram pro bono projects include work for the Robin Hood Foundation, the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the Public Theater and the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

The award ceremony is part of a two-day Pro Bono Summit that has brought together 150 top corporate, government and nonprofit leaders to launch a multi-year campaign to dramatically increase the amount of skilled volunteering and pro bono service employees give to nonprofits and their communities. The leaders are discussing strategies for making the idea of “pro bono” as common in marketing, finance, technology, HR, logistics and other professions as it is in the legal field.

Speaking about the business advantages of doing pro bono work Scher stated: “A lot of the work we’ve done is outside, public, it’s very visible, and so clients will call us because they’ve seen the design. I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve gotten through [pro bono work with] the Public Theater. We’re connected to virtually every cultural institution in the city. We are rewarded in recommendations; we’re included in groups where we find out information about things—it’s all very good business.”

Pro bono work has been part of the culture at Pentagram for decades as the partners and their teams donate their talents and time to enhance the design programs of cultural institutions and nonprofit organizations all over the city. “Pentagram Design is setting a powerful example of corporate citizenship that we hope other companies will follow,” said Jean Case, Chair of the Council. “Embracing a pro bono approach is good for employees, the community and the bottom line. America’s businesses have an extraordinary pool of skilled talent, and engaging corporate volunteers on a large scale could make a profound difference in the well-being of our communities and our country.”

The Council’s Pro Bono Award is given annually to six companies who are considered to be setting the standards of excellence in offering pro bono corporate skills to solve social challenges. This year’s other awardees are the Advertising Council; General Electric; Harvard Business School Community Partners; McKinsey & Company; and the Monitor Group.

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.

Lisa Strausfeld at AIGA Cause/Effect

Lisa Strausfeld is a featured speaker at the AIGA/NY student conference Cause/Effect: Design as Change Agent. The one-day event, moderated by Steven Heller, will explore the intersection between design and social responsibility and is taking place at The New School on Saturday, 15 November.

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.

Tribute to Unsung Heroine

Lisa Strausfeld and others paid tribute to Muriel Cooper, an “unsung heroine of on-screen style” in a piece by Alice Rawsthorn in the International Herald Tribune on Sunday. Cooper, who in 1973 co-founded the Visual Language Workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is remembered by Strausfeld, a former student, as “a real mentor” who “elevated the quality of digital and interactive design work, and inspired a whole generation.”

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.

Lisa Strausfeld at User Experience Week

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada will give a keynote lecture about the development of the Sugar UI for One Laptop per Child at the User Experience Week presented by Adaptive Path, 13-16 August in Washington, DC. Lisa’s session is on Tuesday, 14 August; details and registration information here.

Lisa Strausfeld Profiled in ‘BusinessWeek’

Lisa Strausfeld is interviewed in BusinessWeek about her recent work, including her involvement in the Sugar UI and her upcoming projects for Gallup, and the “media-agnostic” approach to design. “I’ve always been interested in investigating structure, in architecture, software, information design—and the ways they connect,” says Strausfeld in the article. “Mastery in design used to be medium-specific. Now mastery can cut across different media.”

Lisa has also been selected as one of the magazine’s Cutting-Edge Designers 2007.

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.

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Designing ‘Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies’

Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies opens today at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Station.

Lisa Strausfeld and her team, in collaboration with the author and architect James Sanders, have designed the exhibition Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies that opens today in Grand Central Terminal. The month-long multimedia exhibition, based on Sanders’ classic book by the same name, relates the hundred-year plus history of filmmaking in and about New York City in a display of original scenic backings, film footage, production stills, and exhibition panels complete with quotes, location shots, art department drawings and renderings.

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Sugar on Top

The Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child appears on the Approval Matrix in this week’s issue of New York magazine.

Sugar Town

Sugar, the user interface for the One Laptop per Child project, is featured in BusinessWeek. “It’s the first complete rethinking of the computer user interface in more than 30 years,” writes Steve Hamm.

Sugar offers a brand new approach to computing. Ever since the first Apple MacIntosh was launched in 1984, the user interfaces of personal computers have been designed based on the same visual metaphor: the desktop. Sugar tosses out all of that like so much tattered baggage. Instead, an icon representing the individual occupies the center of the screen; “zoom” out like a telephoto lens and you see the user in relation to friends, and finally to all of the people in the village who are also on the network.

“We’re trying to use as many references as we can to the physical world so it will be easy for kids who haven’t used a computer before to use this foreign thing,” says Lisa Strausfeld, the Pentagram partner whose team is working on Sugar.

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.

Personal Calls

Lisa Strausfeld and other designers critique the new iPhone in BusinessWeek. “Its perfectly ambiguous form can take on just about any personal-sized functionality,” Lisa says.

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: The New York Times Magazine

(Click image for larger view)

Lisa Strausfeld, with James Nick Sears, has designed the illustrations for the cover story of the December 3 issue of The New York Times Magazine. The piece, titled “Open-Source Spying,” is about whether blogs and wikis could be used by agencies like the C.I.A. and F.B.I. to combat terrorism. The visualizations create a three-dimensional space in which the physical relationship of actors, weapons and targets suggest their level of connection in an attack.

Update: Interactive versions of the visualizations here.

After the jump: More images and the story behind the project.

Continue reading "New Work: The New York Times Magazine"

New Work: Mohawk Fine Papers

Lisa Strausfeld, Nina Boesch and Jack Zerby have redesigned the website for Mohawk Fine Papers. The relaunch follows Mohawk’s purchase of Strathmore last year; the design updates the previous version of the site, also created by Pentagram, which featured fluttering pieces of paper, now collected in a single stack. Backend by Avatar New York, our new development partner.

Lisa Strausfeld Named Senior Scientist for Gallup

Lisa Strausfeld has been named to the Senior Scientist program at The Gallup Organization. She joins a group of distinguished experts that currently includes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Richard Florida, and Deepak Chopra. The senior scientists act as an advisory group for Gallup, both by being involved with its clients and internally with research, design and development.