Adam Green sprinkles his lecture on data visualization with class participation. "Does anyone read sheet music?" he asks before showing a video that re-imagines music notation in a more visual way. "Anyone ever in the military?" he asks before explaining that branch of government's preference for white type on black backgrounds. And then, finally, after covering the basics, he gets to the point: "What would you do to make this graph more clear?"

His 19 students take notes, having pushed the electronic devices they arrived with toward the center of the table. Most are relatively young, and, except for the woman wearing Google Glass, this could easily be a college classroom.

But it's not. This is a New York City Google conference room. Everyone in it is a Google employee, including Green himself. Most days, he works in Toronto managing Google's relationships with ad agencies.