Episode 68: Learning from Muriel Cooper

More people should know the name Muriel Cooper. The first woman to be granted tenure at MIT’s Media Lab, Cooper and her Visible Language Workshop presented Information Landscapes at the 1994 TED conference, showing the possibilities of interface design for decades to come.

At MIT Press, where she was the first design director, she designed the first edition of Learning From Las Vegas. Jessica explains that Cooper wanted to simulate

the experience of movement through the city using the language of graphic design, which is pictures and words. And going of course deeper because she was so brilliant, things like kerning and where the footnotes were and how the footnotes become like these little points of entry for the reader, almost like the signs on the street or like the lights in the city.

However, Michael says,

all Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi wanted was a really regular looking book… a book that people can afford, that didn’t live on a coffee table, that a student could throw in a backpack and read on the quad or read in bed. You cannot read the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas in bed.

And they got their way, publishing a revised edition.

For decades, the first edition of Learning From Las Vegas was a rarity, but now MIT Press has issued a facsimile edition of Muriel Cooper’s first edition.

Also mentioned this week:

• David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesenberger, Muriel Cooper
• Pentagram, Muriel
• Madeleine Morley, Eye on Design, Looking Back on Muriel Cooper’s Visions of the Future
• Video of Information Landscapes (1994)
• Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument
• Michael Bierut, Now You See It and Other Essays on Design
• Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
• Jessi Hempel, Backchannel, The Problem With #metoo And Viral Outrage
• M. J. Crockett, Moral outrage in the digital age
• New York Times, Detecting a Kilonova Explosion
• Lin-Manuel Miranda, T Magazine, Stephen Sondheim, Theater’s Greatest Lyricist

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