Cool talk alert: Informationart founder Lisa Strausfeld is coming to MICA next week

A data viz pioneer is coming to Baltimore next week to take part in a MICA residency.

Lisa Strausfeld, a designer and information architect who specializes in data visualization, was named the 2019 Wm. O. Steinmetz ’50 Designer-in-Residence at MICA, the Baltimore arts college said this week.

The two-day residency includes a free public lecture, which will be held on March 11 at 7 p.m. in Falvey Hall of MICA’s Brown Center. Strausfeld will also give a workshop as part of a user experience course.

Strausfeld will draw on experiences working at the intersection of design and tech, as well as entrepreneurship. She is founder and principal of Informationart, a New York- and Portland, Oregon-based design and research studio that explores and creates new interactive information experiences. She previously served as active global creative director of the Gallup organization (think: Gallup poll), and led the first data visualization team at Bloomberg. She also founded civic-focused data visualization outfit Major League Politics.

Last fall, she told Fast Company about work to create a new kind of data visualization in VR: “It’s almost like Google Earth for knowledge,” she said.

MICA’s design-focused residency was established in 2009 to bring practitioners to the school’s Bolton Hill/Station North campus.