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| Muriel Cooper |
There was so much I found interesting in this week's reading, but I did notice that women don't quite get the recognition they deserve. (What else is new?)
I was particularly interested in Muriel Cooper who, among MANY other things, founded the Visible Language Workshop at MIT. I was surprised that she was so important to the computer graphics that we use now, as I've never heard her name. When I searched for information about her, most things I found were articles written after her death, saying how important she was. The Wikipedia page about her only had two short paragraphs.
The Art Directors Club's website has this to say:
"Perhaps no one has had a greater affect on the way information—printed and electronic—is presented today than Muriel Cooper. As founder and co-director of MIT’s Visual Language Workshop, her explorations into the interactions between technology and design broke new ground in both graphic design and computer interface development. She designed covers for more than five hundred books, over one hundred of which have won design awards, and she was the second recipient of the American Institute of Graphic Design leadership award."
(Above pictures and quote credited to the Art Directors Club, @ http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/2004/?id=5)
It seems that someone so lauded would be worth a little more than a brief mention in our textbook and two short paragraphs in Wikipedia.
Another important point to know about Cooper is that in addition to her own work, she was a prolific teacher. She taught at the Museum School of Fine Arts, Simmons College, the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston University, and the University of Maryland, and lectured at other college campuses across the country, as well as her tenure at MIT. Another article, written years after her death, had this to say:
"Unlike conventional design heroes, Cooper isn't just important because of her own work, but for her influence on other designers. By encouraging them through teaching and research to make the images on our computers as clear and appealing as the best-designed printed graphics, she helped to make all of our lives easier. But because digital design seems so esoteric, and is usually discussed in geek-speak, Cooper is barely known outside that circle. That's why she's the design heroine you've probably never heard of." (Alice Rawsthorn, "Muriel Cooper: The unsung heroine of on-screen style," New York Times Style section, Sunday, September 30, 2007)
(Above New York Times quote found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/style/28iht-design1.1.7670693.html)
