Alex’s notes

David Reinfurt walks on the trace of Muriel Cooper by looking into the MIT archives.

Muriel Cooper always sought more responsive systems of design and production, emphasizing quicker feedback loops between thinking and making, often blurring the distinction between the two. As a result, she always left room for the reader. This text is an attempt to do the same.

On the 40 year long collection of posters for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he notices the coherency and the quality of the set given by:

[…] the way in each self-consciously incorporates its production method into the design

The result is a tight and powerful synthesis of what is being said, how it is being said and how what is being said is produced.

even though the posters were not all designed by the same designers, but they all have in common that they

[…] were printed at the Visible Language Workshop, a teaching and production facility in the School of Architecture that Muriel cofounded with Ron MacNeil in 1975.

On Muriel’s 1974 CV, she lists here interests:

Concerned with use of mass production and its constraints and with extending experimental and educational experience into work relationships, reducing artificial human split. The significance of participatory and non-authoritarian communication forms in relation to specialization and professionalism. Structured/ unstructured relationships in learning. Direct, responsive means of reproduction.

Muriel has an Art education, and has always been attracted by technologies (?). She is interested by alternatives to classical education, such as “autonomous” education (having a studio of your own)

school as a network workshop model

She describes herself has a “media designer” (is there previous uses of that terms or did she coined it?)

In 1967, she became in charge of the MIT Press, Adequation between the topics covered in the books and her personal interest:

Here she presided over the mass production of a series of titles in architecture, economics, biology, computer science and sociology that formed a critical discourse around systems, feedback loops and control.

How to conciliate/find a balance between mass production, quality and responsivness?

Her work was then equally engaged in the production schedules, budgets and conditions of production as it was in the typefaces, imagery, printing and binding.

transdisciplinarity, constant de/respecializing

Engaging with the IBM Selectric typewriter to shorten the feedback loop.

The corresponding savings in time, labor and money changed the economics of publishing for books that could work in this alternate typesetting.

The result looks like the process that made it and reveals a deep engagement with and symbiotic relation between the design and production of the book.

She spent two year working on the “Bauhaus bible”

Influence of the Bauhaus model on her views on education?

My design approach always emphasized process over product, and what better place to express this than in a tome on the Bauhaus, the seminal exploration of art and design in an industrial revolution.

1. Media design and print design @ conceptual stage
2. Educational pretext — WORKSHOP
3. Publishing
4. Interdisciplinary? INSTITUTE/RESOURCES

With Ron MacNeil (photographer), she sets up a class structured around two newly aqcuired offsets presses.

… design and communications for print that integrated the reproduction tools as part of the thinking process and reduced the gap between process and product.

Messages and Means students learned in a workshop environment how the printing press works by using it. Opening up access to this instrument, students were able to explore an intimate and immediate relationship to the means of production for their design work. The inevitable result was a merging of roles and blurring of specializations. In the workshop, students became editors, platemakers, printers, typesetters and designers all at one time, in overlapping and iterative configurations.

They used the offset printing press as an artistʼs tool: they collaborated on platemaking and they altered the application of inks — they rotated the paper to make printing an interactive medium.

production-led assignments

[…] students made “one-night prints”, skipping the traditional stages of design, paste-up and pre-press by working with presstype and photostatic cameras or exposing the printing plate directly

During the Independent Activities Period of January 1976, a group of (perhaps) over-zealous students took matters into their own hands to re-model this unfortunate architecture, demolishing a wall that stood between the two rooms. Literally tearing an unsanctioned hole through the middle of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, the students fused these two spaces into one. […] In this space, the activities of designing, teaching and producing became increasingly indistinct. This was the Visible Language Workshop.

Calling the facility a “workshop” made an immediate correspondence to the workshops of the Bauhaus with which Muriel was particularly well-versed.

“Workshop” described a space of production that was integral to the space of teaching and of design. By offering access to the tools of reproduction, students were able to understand the technical consequences of design decisions, immediately and the combined setting allowed for the creation of media in an increasingly direct, responsive, even interactive environment.

The shift from a mechanical to an information society demands new communication processes, new visual and verbal languages, and new relationships of education, practice and production.

look at “Visible Language” publications and ‘the Journal of Typographical Research”

The final version of the VLW in the Media Lab was explicitly focused on developing new computer interfaces. Although from the beginning, computers and software were an integral part of the workshop.

[…] the proximity of the users of SYS and the makers of SYS allowed for short cycles of refinement and development with powerful feedback loops.

experimented with the transimission of graphics over seas.

David small has a “closet full of Muriel Cooper things.”

In 1985, the VLW is integradted into the Media Lab.

Where there was once only a single Perkin Elmer computer, there were now several Hewlett Packard workstations and even access to a supercomputer, the massively parallel Connection Machine 2. Still, Muriel insisted that the new space remain a workshop

In time, images stay on the screen. And now they travel through networks. I think what Muriel finally discovered was the act of communication design in the process of radical change away from creating single artifacts to creating design processes that need to have a life of their own over these networks.

Youʼre not just talking about how the information appears on the screen, youʼre talking about how itʼs designed into the architecture of the machine, and of the language. You have different capabilities, different constraints and variables than you have in any other medium, and nobody even knows what they are yet.”

[…] Muriel’s greatest asset may have been her refusal to specialize. She recognized that the discrete roles which industrialized production of the assembly line had delegated to its workers were beginning to dissolve

Steph’s notes