Muriel Cooper Overview

As Muriel Cooper saw things, the ruling metaphor for the computer age should be the "information landscape," not the "information highway." Rather than cutting a linear path through a forest of data, computers give us the ability to fly through three-dimensional... [more]

As Muriel Cooper saw things, the ruling metaphor for the computer age should be the "information landscape," not the "information highway." Rather than cutting a linear path through a forest of data, computers give us the ability to fly through three-dimensional landscapes with constellations of interconnected information spreading around us in all directions. In 1952, Cooper began her career in graphic design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After taking several years off to run her own graphics studio in Boston, she joined the MIT Press as its first art director (prior to this, she had collaborated with the MIT Press to design its world-famous logo). In 1974, Cooper began teaching a new subject at MIT called "messages and means," which focused on the relationship between graphics and technology. These ideas eventually led her to co-found and direct MIT's Visible Language Workshop. Cooper and her colleagues in the Visible Language Workshop have used this concept of three-dimensionality to imagine new ways to structure complex systems of knowledge. With computer technology, the same information can be represented in many different visual forms -- as abstract images, realistic maps, diagrams, or words -- and translated rapidly from one form to another. Three-dimensional space allows for the intersection of these forms in ways that make visual sense: from overlapping graphs of comparative financial statistics to a "news viewer" that presents different aspects of news stories on a rotating square plane. Cooper felt that visual representation brings the abstract and amorphous into our grasp, making visible language an indispensable instrument of communication. [show less]