What do the One Laptop Per Child project, Encyclopedia Brittanica's visual database, and those cool data walls at the Bloomberg headquarters have in common? They've all been touched by the deft hand of Pentagram's Lisa Strausfeld, interface- and display-designer extraordinaire. BusinessWeek has an interview article on the work of the 42 year old "Tiger Woods of Data Visualization" this week, and a quick browse through the attached gallery makes it instantly clear why she's such a big deal. All the showcased work features a combination of clarity and density that makes it both engaging and quickly intuitive, whether the information displayed concerns terrorist cells, old-school stationery or the weather in Bangkok.

The quality and breadth of her work is partially attributed in the article to an ability to be "media-agnostic" in her design work, seeking the best way to depict information based on the type and use of that information, rather than the display technology at hand. As she puts it:

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. 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.

This level of convergence has been discussed a lot in recent years, with cross-disciplinary design teams and hybrid majors at design schools, so maybe it's surprising that such a level of "agnosticism" is still relatively rare and noteworthy. Strausfeld's own educational and professional background might have something to do with it: holding degrees in architecture and media arts, studying art history and computer science as an undergrad, and working for companies as diverse as Merrill Lynch and ESPN.com, she seems to demonstrate the results of a thoroughly modern and pragmatic Renaissance education. So to all you ID grads lamenting your wasted first undergrad years studying Victorian literary theory, there may be use for it yet.