32 Facts About Muriel Cooper

Muriel Cooper was an American pioneering book designer, digital designer, researcher, and educator.

Muriel Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, instilling a Bauhaus-influenced design style into its many publications.

Muriel Cooper moved on to become founder of MIT's Visible Language Workshop, and later became a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab.

Muriel Ruth Cooper was born in 1925 in Brookline, an inner suburb of Boston, Massachusetts.

Muriel Cooper met Paul Rand, who was influential to her design "way of life".

In 1952, Muriel Cooper was recommended to and then recruited by John Mattill to join the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology Office of Publications, which would eventually become MIT Press.

Muriel Cooper soon was appointed to head the Office, newly renamed to Design Services, which was one of the first university design programs in the country.

In 1955, Muriel Cooper recruited graphic designer and fellow MassArt alumna Jacqueline Casey to begin her own lengthy career at MIT, where her friend would design many posters and smaller publications in a modernist style.

When Muriel Cooper returned in 1963, she opened an independent graphic studio in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Muriel Cooper taught briefly as an associate professor at MassArt.

In 1967, Muriel Cooper returned to a full-time position as design director of the MIT Press, having been recommended by Paul Rand.

Muriel Cooper set the book in the newly available Helvetica typeface and used a grid system page layout, giving the book a strong modernist appearance.

Muriel Cooper made a film rendition of the book, which attempted to give an accelerated depiction of translating interactive experiences from a computer to paper.

Muriel Cooper designed the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas, the ground-breaking manifesto of Post-Modernist design, using radical variations on the Bauhaus style to produce the publication.

Muriel Cooper was influential in introducing computers to MIT Press design; in 1967, she had audited MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's course on "Computers and Design", which increased her growing fascination with developing digital technology.

Muriel Cooper admitted to being "bewildered" by the course, but nonetheless realized the growing importance of computers to publishing and design in general, and was unafraid to recruit others with expertise in computers to help develop their application to design.

Muriel Cooper maintained her full-time position with the MIT Press until 1974, and oversaw the release of multiple series of titles in architecture, economics, biology, computer science, and sociology that formed a critical discourse around systems, feedback loops, and control.

At 49 years old in 1973, Muriel Cooper was already well known in the design industry.

Muriel Cooper taught interactive media design as the founder and head of the Visible Language Workshop.

Muriel Cooper was recognized as a pioneer in designing and changing the landscape of electronic communication.

The MIT students had very diverse backgrounds and interests, and Muriel Cooper emphasized a generalist approach, encouraging them to switch flexibly among editorial, platemaking, printing, typesetting, and design tasks.

Muriel Cooper explored early versions of nearby Polaroid Corporation's new SX-70 instant color camera, as well as experimental large-format Polaroid cameras and film.

Around this time, Muriel Cooper was asked for a 250-word concise biography.

Muriel Cooper summarized her career to date in 65 words:.

Muriel Cooper's concerns have always been with beginnings and process.

At the VLW, Muriel Cooper pursued a constant examination of graphic production in multiple media, and led a team of graduate students and researchers in the search of new forms, methods and techniques for graphic design that were specific to the emerging context of text on a computer display.

Muriel Cooper personally knew many of her new colleagues, having earlier worked with them on their books published by MIT Press.

Muriel Cooper taught and influenced a generation of students who later became prominent digital designers, including Lisa Strausfeld, and John Maeda, who succeeded her at the MIT Media Lab, and then served as president of the Rhode Island School of Design from 2008 to 2013.

In 1994, at the TED 5 conference in Monterey, California, Muriel Cooper presented a collection of work that had been recently done by her students in the VLW.

The demos demonstrated experiments in dynamic, interactive, computer-based typography, themes which Muriel Cooper had been exploring through much of her career.

In 1978, had Muriel Cooper co-authored a "Books without Pages" proposal to the National Science Foundation to explore computer typography and computer workstations.

Professor Muriel Cooper died unexpectedly after an apparent heart attack at the age of 68, on May 26,1994, at the New England Medical Center in Boston.