The 47th Precinct

“I have a profound disdain for answers… We do a lot of groping here,” she said. “I don’t think there are answers. I think there are thoughts.”

In looking for sources to inspire and encourage design playfulness, I have finally come across Muriel Cooper. An established graphic designer that became an influencial force in digital aesthetics (both in terms of user interface design, as well as simply in encouraging a high standard of screen display graphics to match the quality of print elements), we most likely have Cooper to thank for the ease of use/reading/browsing our work and lives via computers today. Would the shift in consumption of information and entertainment on screen (vs. on print) have happened without Cooper’s Visible Language Workshop at MIT (encouraging MIT students to use graphic design techniques to display computer data in legible/aesthetic text and images)? I certainly wouldn’t spend as much time researching on the web (vs. in the library or microfiche!) if information was organized, categorized, and displayed as when I obsessively reviewed Amnesty International cases in 1993.

{ Muriel Cooper’s MIT Press logo, 1963 }

The AIGA has a great bio article on Cooper. Or, read the NYT Magazine’s accolade.

Although admittedly some of the early projects sound a bit like seeing the original samples of 3d animation (Symbolics’ Stanley and Stella anyone?) and thinking cell animation wasn’t likely to disappear, I am fascinated by the origins and beginnings of the digital design process: how we get from logo to design by numbers, how we look at sound effects in flash now vs. objects having their own sonorous intelligence. I particularly like this anecdote: Cooper discovered computers quite by accident, during a summer course which “flummoxed” her — all the coded data flashing around on screen “didn’t make any goddamned sense to me,” but she was able to see the potential. Here’s a quick snippet from the AIGA article about Cooper’s early influence:

“Muriel was a real pioneer of a new design domain,” says Bill Mitchell, dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. “I think she was the first graphic designer to carry out really profound explorations of the new possibilities of electronic media—things like 3-D text. She didn’t just see computer-graphics technology as a new tool for handling graphic design work. She understood from the beginning that the digital world opened up a whole domain of issues and problems, and she wanted to understand these problems in a rigorous way.”

From the AIGA article, describing a project at the VLW:

The nursery sound I “saw” is just one prototype of a typographical tool that opens up a whole new area of design: the conjunction of image and sound. Using this tool, the shape, size, color, and translucency of type can be made to change in correspondence with a given sound and its temporal duration. A very fast set of algorithms is used to create the number of sizes required for the type to expand and contract, or what Cooper called “on-the-fly scaling.” Meanwhile, under the rubric of “behavioral graphics,” the VLW has developed a species of “intelligent” type, endowed with its own inherent, but adjustable, physical attributes, such as gravity and bounce, for animation purposes; and “paper” whose “fibers” have differential rates of pigment absorption, allowing variable diffusion of color across its surface—physical characteristics that the computer can model, but that cannot actually be physically produced in the “real world.”

This entry was posted Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Art, Inspiration. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.