The head of MIT's Visible Language Workshop had a lasting impact on how we design for dynamic media.
Imagine swooping into a typographic landscape: hovering above a headline, zooming toward a paragraph in the distance, spinning around and seeing it from behind, then diving deep into a map. A virtual reality that has type and cartography and numbers, rather than objects - it's like no landscape you've ever traveled before, yet you feel completely at home.
This is Muriel Cooper's world. It is just one of the creations of MIT's Visible Language Workshop, the research lab she directed for 20 years. Cooper, who dies recently at the age of 68, co-founded the workshop with Ron MacNeil in 1973. She was 49 and already famous in the design world. Cooper won prestigious awards for graphic design created at her own studio, at the MIT Publications office, and at the MIT Press.
Cooper saw typography as a prime element for visual experimentation. Students and staff at the workshop developed a whole range of tools to create type that responds to its content and its environment. There is watercolor type, which responds to virtual paper - the fibers and pigment of the paper, gravity, and the amount of water applied. Cooper encouraged her students (I was one) to borrow metaphors from other media, like using pull focus, a technique of blurring less important type and bringing other type into focus to draw the reader's attention.
Now, take this a level further. Think about very smart text and graphics, objects that not only know how to react visually to the content but also how to react structurally. Cooper described this "programming by example" in an interview with Ellen Lupton of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum a few weeks before her death.
"Ron (MacNeil) has a project that's a map of Boston with a subway map superimposed. He taught the system to make a generalized subway map of the city. If you tell the machine how to do Boston, then it can generate a subway map of Atlanta. You've given the machine an understanding of the problem"
Traditional VR is cool, but it's so literal. The workshop's landscape gives you context and continuity. Anyone who has tried to design interactive media knows that the most important thing is to keep the user from getting lost. The workshop's landscape uses abstract elements, it mixes metaphors, and it works! Typography takes on real world characteristics: it blurs, it spins, it grows and shrinks. You fly past a headline and drop into a diagram of a network; zoom closer and you're in the corridors of a building. The design necessary for this medium is not a noun. It's a verb.
That is just one of Muriel Cooper's legacies.
