 So good evening or good afternoon for those of you who don't know me. I'm Nicholas Negroponte. I'm one of the co-founders of the Media Lab and I'm not gonna really be the emcee But you're gonna see me come and go and if people take too long. I might be pushed out to grab them off the stage I was not only a colleague of Muriel's. I think it's fair to say she was my best friend. I've known her since the early 1960s and She had an enormous influence on me and even though she was Roughly 20 years older than I we did things as almost like brother and sister. We traveled together We worked together. I was in the architecture department at one end of the building on Massachusetts Avenue and she was on the other end and We really spent so much time together. I would say on average dinner twice a week obvious that's average And partly that was because her house and MIT if you drew a straight line I was in the middle of it. So she would pick me up with this Chevrolet Impala that was infested with dog hairs I would get into garbage bags because I wore a suit and a tie in those days And I would get into the car with my garbage bags We come to she dropped me off at building seven and she'd go to the MIT press And then when the media lab got created On the visible language workshop, which you'll hear a lot about Became very much part of the initial groups that that sort of formed the media lab and Muriel worked here as One of our most colorful and important faculty members now There are two murals There's a mural that we know from her work and there are quite a few people in the room who didn't know her as a person a because you may be too young or you just didn't have the the chance to know Muriel and The Muriel that we see in her work is crisp It's incisive It's almost Cartesian, it's maybe even Helvetica if you could use the word generally to describe something rather Swiss and precise And the Muriel the second Muriel the persona I Guess the first word be much more colorful much less decisive For those of you who remember going out for dinner with Muriel and how she ordered food at a restaurant Drove waiters crazy. She'd say well No, I had no well, can you make this without actually I'd prefer that if it doesn't the suck attached without the corn and so on And it was it was a much it wasn't crisp And so that the two the two murals created an Influence that just never left this laboratory and I'm sure many people who Didn't know the persona will by the end of today because a lot of the speakers knew Muriel very well a Lot of the participants also did so coffee break Everybody will have Muriel Cooper stories and I'm not going to bore you with with too many of these But in the early days of the Media Lab We had a lot of funding from the military and There was a general who was in charge of what I think was then called the seventh army Which was all the army in Europe and not who came to the Media Lab and met Muriel And when he meets Muriel, he says how much do you know about theaters? And she said I know a lot I studied I would study to be an actress And he said that's not that kind of theater and he then sort of he says to these guys don't come alone there's privates of people and He says where's the men's room and a private says a hand grenades throw down the corridor, sir Muriel used that expression For the next ten years. She would tell people. Oh, you need the men's room It's a hand grenades throw down the corridor. So that's the kind of person Muriel was When Jerry Wiesner and I were raising money This is before this bill the either building was built he brought Avery Fisher around and he says let's go introduce Avery Fisher to Muriel and he introduces Muriel says Muriel this is Avery Fisher and Muriel says oh, are you the fat cat and Jerry Wanted to die he never forgave her he quoted the story over and over again, but he always did it with a lot of laughs so I think Today you'll hear if you don't hear explicit stories. You're gonna hear about a person who really made the Media Lab different We pride ourselves in being different, but boy Muriel was very very different So in keeping with that when we did this event or when we were starting to think of this event It's almost the case that the people who aren't here Are dead That was the only excuse Almost everybody else came and the really it's almost a hundred percent showing in terms of the who was invited And and who actually got here and then when we asked People to help with the graphics and people to help do the event We go to our usual port of call the gold standard of graphics. We went to pentagram now we go to pentagram for everything so going to pentagram wasn't that special but pentagram Thanks to Aaron thanks to Aaron Fay Michael Bay root and I don't know if I know Have I met Daisy Lee? Are you here? She does all the work well, she's not even here, but you guys You know you hit it out of the box, and I know exactly why and We're gonna see this again over the afternoon. So I don't have to introduce the next speaker Muriel will in a video that I believe will roll in a second. Thank you MIT press for quite a while she's been with the Media Lab for quite a while She's always been two or three steps ahead of me with everything she did and It's an honor and a pleasure to have Muriel join us today. Thank you. I have a confession And I hope that everybody in the audience will forgive me In those early days when we were both very young and terrified I Made the mistake. I remember How I did it I remember when I did it and I think I remember where I did it But I'm damned if I know why I did it I introduced Nikki to Ricky Can you turn I know you're filming this or doing something but turn the lights down so I can see the audience please Please just turn them down. Somebody has a switch for the lights, and I know you don't want to do it But it'll be fine. Just turn them down, please so I can see the audience Those lights that are in my face. That's just better. Oh, yes I have to do that every time you give a speech. You can't see the audience and if you can't see your face How can you give a chat? Oh my opening lines were not Nikki to Ricky, but I was going to say that Nicholas. I Was introduced to Nicholas by by Muriel She changed my life Yeah, there's lives have moments Lives are not continuum. So you might look back and think they're continuous No, they're just moments and you forget a lot of the shit between the moments, but the moments they really change you and It's not that you should forget that there's stuff between it, but it really is just stuff a lot of stuff Like George Carlin used to talk about stuff Anyway, she introduced me to Nicholas in the when he had the architecture machine and That was a change in my life and her wanting to introduce me to somebody else who she felt was very important Was a change in my life Recently people have been telling me that I'm abrasively charming and and There's a certain truth in both those things that I am abrasive and I am charming I know you're not supposed to say either about yourself, but it's perfectly clear what I'm saying And if you're clear that beats every other thing just being clear as enough and so I could never get any I Wouldn't have gotten them the media the MIT press or or anybody else to publish Any of my little books and I have been doing books for a while I just have an idea and I do a little book and I don't have a publisher. I I spit it out But she she indulged me and got them to do exceptions about a whole bunch of little booklets that I did over the years and They really they really she really changed my life. I did something for her, but I didn't know I was doing it And she didn't know I was doing it But in the last year of her life, I finally got to her and she's everything that Nicholas said The dogs the car her taking off her shoes Walking around her socks. I mean just but she didn't know she was doing it It was just what she was what you know if I I used to dress funny when I went to pen But I knew purposely I was trying to get attention. She wasn't trying to get attention She was just being herself just about as genuine as she could be. I mean that was just her I Was always more phony than she was Well came and saw her stuff here a number of times By the way, this is I said it to To Juan Enrique's as I came in we had a quick conversation and for some reason I had never said that before but I realized that it's something I should repeat This is you know the greatest Real school in the world There's some woo-woo schools schools that are probably nice That little kids count beads and they do things and they think they learn to be nice people and and all those things There's a lot of little woo schools of different things and experimental schools, but this school is extraordinary we What Nicholas has done the others following Nicholas Paralleling Nicholas the effect he's had on well, this is I walked around. I was early because I had nothing to do and I walked around the school and my goodness it really is Disneyland for grown-ups. It's it's it's a dream. It's it's the waking dream And so this is a great place that we're all sitting in here and Great places attract great people and Mirio was a great person. She was just simply a great person and I finally convinced her at I started a conference I ran for a while called Ted and I finally convinced her to come to one of the fifth Ted conference and She came with David Small who's in the audience here and they came and I had her scheduled I think for the second day for I don't remember when you were scheduled David But I think it was the second day might have been the first and she came with David and they had nothing They had nothing to show. They hadn't worked on it. She just came in and I was just depressed about that and So I changed the I could do what I wanted I changed the program And I think they were on the fourth day and then they stayed up for three days and they developed They developed their presentation It was it was a charrette beyond charrette. It was amazing I Told David if I say something that at least makes the story understandable not to stand up if I say something that really Disturbs him and is not factual so it does that he should stand up and stop me I'm just telling you my memory of it, right? And then they did this amazing presentation and it was live They had computers all over this is a long time ago This is just a long time. It's when when nothing worked I mean literally nothing worked you you knew that anybody who was doing a Presentation with a computer wasn't going to work. They'd have to boot it up again. It was just the way it was It was acceptable and it was astonishing It was just astonishing and And It was my dream It was a dream And I always stayed on stage. I think I left the stage to watch it that time I always used to stay on stage so I could stand behind people to have them stop talking And I left the stage and watched it and I just I was transparent. I didn't think you could do that I said it was like flying through information Thrying flying through understanding It was something new. We've gotten so used to it. We see it in all the goddamn ads now We're always flying through letters and flying through things that that was murial on her students It was something that was broke through it was a breakthrough and thinking about computer graphics and content Not computer graphics and just graphics and pretty And flexing muscles it was with content content and time And it was three-dimensional maps of time It was all kind of aerial maps. It was With Cirque du Soleil with people with printouts on them. It was special It was really special and uh I recorded I didn't record it. I can't even type but I had people record record things and that little video Is as far as I know the only evidence That uh she and David and her students and her head and her time and her dog and her car and the You know and everything put that together And it's become a icon an icon of a moment in history When some things came together It's like the photograph that Watson and Crick Used to build their tinker toy model is a moment in time that put something together that We can stamp when people started thinking that way and it allowed people to think differently because the tool Allows you to think of things you couldn't think of except for the first person Who does that? Michelangelo stands in front of a huge piece of stone And uh He wouldn't be able to do anything about it until somebody had invented prior to that a hammer and a chisel And that'll says well I could let Moses out Because he has a hammer and chisel, but he couldn't even think of doing that. It was he couldn't scrape them out with his fingernails So her tools were these abilities To think of things that have changed Uh our lives Somebody came up to me before this and I forget the conversation. I forget who it was But what came up was something I was thinking about a few weeks ago of how my life changed at a certain time when I was at Penn Uh I'm 82 so you can know how many years ago that was and I was doing the student magazine then and it was There wasn't such a thing as offset printing except by an experimental printer in downtown Philadelphia Gene Feldman at falcon press but before that everything was done You know the way you set type and do it so you couldn't think of actually doing something else You couldn't think of all the things that pentagram does that everybody they wouldn't come into your head because you didn't have a They couldn't be actualized So that the they aren't the creation, but the tool allows you to think of things and her She skipped the idea that without the tool she broke through and asked Asked of our new inventions do something that she was her waking dream And we benefited from that. Well, I won't beat that dead horse. There's a little Light there and I'm gonna I don't know how much time I spoke I know I have 15 minutes and I have this takes six minutes And I realize I can't write better than I wrote then it's just six minutes and this was the I did a book called information architects and I dedicated it to my old many many many years ago and This is what I read I put that in the book and this is what I read at her at the The services for her after she died and I was with her the day before she died or a day and a half before she died She was in an agi conference over in Cambridge and we're hanging with Bobby Greenberg she and I and a few others And she had to get back home Nicholas's memory is slightly different than mine. I don't know what's right, but it doesn't make any difference That's right. She came home and Nicholas asked her to introduce somebody and we know that she passed away suddenly at that at that moment But uh She showed twice the thing that you've all seen I think or it's around this show or their show it today I don't know what the program is today But it was shown uh, we saw it live at Ted. It was shown one other time Afterwards and then the last time was at the agi conference in Cambridge and It was remarkable first day. So I'm going to come down here and read that I do have six minutes left Whoever's keeping time. Do I still have six minutes? Say yes, please Okay I'm coming here because I saw that there was more light here Somebody turned down those lights Yeah Okay, I'm not good at reading. I'm sorry. I I'm better at talking but this is good to read I believe that Muriel has wings We met I was 29 and she was 38 We last left And planned together on the day before she was to die. I was 59 And she was 68. I knew her for 30 years On my first meeting I felt those wings as they wrapped around me around me like a mother hen I was sharp tongue arrogant coming to MIT the MIT press trying to get my ideas published And she walked me through the door after door that I couldn't myself navigate or open I next saw the wings as they created a wind And showed me the wind of change She introduced me to Nicholas And the notion of dreams of finding your way through information A different kind of navigation The next winds wings I saw I saw her wear were the wings of A piece of as she read eyed and passionate Struggled to get Mcluan's book is any one Taking any notice published That poignant book about the vietnam war and death She wore wings on her many cardiographic exercises Flying on airplane wings flying in space over maps over information Watching as the aerial perspective changed with clouds refocusing her vision Of a man created reality The wings of triumph and the aura of discovery were all around Muriel at the Ted five conference She worked with David small for three days to assemble together the premiere of a presentations which she Hesitantly at first then with noticeable joy Showed to the extraordinary audience of that conference It changed forever the visual paradigm of information for all who saw the presentation As I came on stage holding back the tears of joy that come when you when you've seen some something absolutely magnificent I said muriel I believe we've all had dreams of flying And here you allowed us To make those dreams a reality As we're flying through information. It was a real-time display of heavenly navigation Later here at the media lab. She once again went through the presentation with bill Mitchell and myself as bookends and the three of us talking to nicolas's class And then three months later Having retitled the presentation flying through information. She showed the videotape To the alliance grapica international algae at cambridge england henry steiner Who is from kong kong and then president of algae had seen it ated bob greenberg and I spoke with her Of what was going to happen next and what the dreams of flying through information released in each of us For me, it was the ability to control one's personal understanding That was the day before she died I do believe muriel has wings They are wings that will encourage her students to be more of themselves That will allow the people seeing her epiphionic and empowering information structure to dream of understanding She was an architect of information She now has the wings that few get in death She will be in the waking dreams of those who are touched By the wind From her feathers of change and discovery. Can you see me? There are two very important things that the visible language workshop is is looking at One is the way in which Graphics which we define in the broadest sense can be used To filter define qualify and edit that information and secondly what The interface or the relation that the surface or the access Of the person to the machine can be like to promote the most creative And the most generative means of communication And again, if you look at the computer as an environment in which you which you do multiple tasks And which is ubiquitous in in your life, then it's even more important that this Personalization and configurability take place Because today I may want to work on music and then go to my cookbook And then read my newspaper or design my newspaper Don't go away. Where's my note? On the back of this now I've lost my fucking notes Huh? No So oh Jesus here it is on the floor. Okay. Don't stop. Here we go I'm ready Pennegram we've assembled a panel to talk about muriel as a designer Like some of the other unlucky people here. I don't think I ever met muriel. I sent her a letter In the late 70s that rob weisberger Found and sent me a copy of that seems to indicate that I may have met her I can't really I don't remember writing the letter and I don't remember what provoked me to write this letter But I corresponded with her in some way and so at least we have that remote connection But her influence as As nicolas said is so broad and so deep That almost anyone practicing graphic designs today would say that they have somehow met muriel cooper We've got three people who can talk about this in more depth erin vinegar who's a professor at The university of oslo and the author of several books including i am a monument which is about muriel and her work on Learning from las vegas the epical volume by Denise scott-brown and robert penchuri ben fry the creator of the programming environment called um They're called um Processing I'm sorry You need a better catch of your name than that venison. I'm just basic something He's a Winner of the national design award from the kubernetes museum for for interaction design as is at least one other speaker here this evening And then finally ellen lupton who is the senior curator for contemporary design at the national design museum And so she's a person who sort of hands out those awards And I will point out this very evening is the evening of the national design awards in new york city ellen is honor bound to be there but instead Here So that just shows where the priorities are when muriel cooper has something to say about them So I'd like to invite ellen to talk about muriel. That's great. I did get to meet muriel Very profound and I was in the audience when ricky Didn't take his shoes off, but she did and showed that amazing video And I was trying to think what would she have made of this today All of you hear A giant book about her work An honorary elevator button Her name typeset and 35 000 point purple helvetica I think she would have liked it You know girls are supposed to be embarrassed by all the attention, but I'll tell you a secret. We like it It's good. It's good Um And what would she have thought about the world of media today this exploding Uncontrolled metastatic network mess Of digital communication She said it all she really knew what was happening And it's been a great pleasure to kind of think again about her work and to read the wonderful essays about Her voice and her students In the book that rob and david put together Muriel can't be here today But I want her to be here And so I pulled together some of her words because she needs to speak And she was so articulate about the questions that Obsessed people like me and michael. Um, what is the book? What is an author? What is the role of graphic designers in all of that? What is the nature of communication? And what what is it that we do dammit that adds value? um to communication um, I pulled out a couple of her most Stunning and important or famous books, but they're the books in which she had the most Role as an author and then her decades at MIT and her role at MIT press She was creating systems and ways that books could kind of generate themselves But she also really got her Fingers and hands and mind into certain books that very much bear her stamp as a co-author of information She thought that books were like movies She wanted to eliminate the Gap between the designer and the process of printing and shaping information Um, so she played with offset as this kind of live medium a motion medium She used the grid in her amazing bow house book As a way to um to give structure and architecture, but also to create constant change and surprise My favorite part is the index I'm sure she spent a lot of time on that index um, and I think This is this is a this is actually the manuscript for the bow house book This is what we do. We take a pile of shit like that Right these thousands of pages that is not a book It is not a book Until someone comes through and gives it shape and makes it accessible To human beings to find their way in and out And she talked about that she talked about Graphic design as a kind of filtering Of this mess the stream of information The junk that authors hand us and that we make into something coherent And she saw that the future Would give readers and writers better ways to find their way Through information To give it a better shape And she was interested in information that should go away She didn't feel that everything should stay on the planet forever And she thought that designers had a role in making data disappear I wish more people had paid attention to that I think that's really important and in this book which erin will talk about more We can kind of see the the battle for authorship Between two great women of design theory and thinking Muriel Cooper and Denise Scott Brown The real author and the graphic design author And Muriel I think was frustrated by being told what to do by the author And she created this incredible book that provided a kind of new interface For connecting image and text For allowing us to absorb the image as a kind of text And to kind of fit those things together in an incredibly eloquent way So if you come in close to this book You'll see that that wide letting made space for these little figure numbers Which are keyed to the pictures And allowed the reader to go back and forth between the text and the image In an absolutely brilliant way Apparently Denise Scott Brown didn't like that very much And there exist in the papers of Muriel Cooper Interchanges between these two great women fighting about the book And Denise thought it was too interesting To Bauhaus Too much noise of the graphic designer in there And what she wanted was something more conventional, which is what she got later, right? I'll let Muriel have the last word on that Talking about the author And you can see here the kind of frustration Of graphic designers feeling boxed in and told what to do And what she really wanted is for us to all have tools To be authors and designers and publishers and boy, did we get those tools Okay Thank you. Thank you Thank you very much. I uh Came um to Muriel Cooper's work directly through her design work. I never met her in person Um, I first encountered actually when I started working on learning from Las Vegas like many people I first encountered the book on the right, which is the revised version the boring version, I guess That was designed by Denise Scott Brown and then worked myself back to the The original version designed by Muriel Cooper And I I guess I was kind of stunned by her approach to design and vision Which I initially, you know was directed towards the design work This kind of complicated. I think prefiguring her later interest in the visible language workshop on texture layering Transparency a kind of dynamism to the text Interrelations between text and image as Ellen said you can see the extreme letting the triple spacing of the main text juxtaposed by the very tight text in the margins And so forth Here's another example of the layout of Muriel Cooper's design And then you can see the difference That uh, Denise Scott Brown, uh, really did not like the swiss treatment of her book And really wanted a much more boring or she called it deadpan Approach to the book with very regularized text and image Um The the kind of the the the images grouped together here Here you can see the the use of the grid This was drawn for me by sally steiner In showing you the grid that uh muriel cooper used And then again this image which was also supposed to kind of Replicate the movement through the city and the lines of the text are kind of the roadways or the highways And the uh numbering of the images are meant to be like signs So your way of reading is like moving um through the city And this kind of sense of movement has also kind of demonstrated in these layouts This is a layout for part one of learning from las vegas So muriel cooper could see the arrangements of text and image and flow and so and so forth And the filmic dimension is really important here But i think i want to mention what i learned from her what i think about her work that's important And this is the kind of triadic relationship between Communication movement and experience and i think i have a little bit of a different attitude to what communication is Perhaps then traditional designers i'm not a designer and to me communication is exposing us to the risk of experience That means traversing something pushing against limits Undergoing something and this kind of attitude towards experience Really is about discovering a path. It's not formulating a method It is not uh deploying kind of preconceived formats whether those are grids or not It is really at the exposure for us to experience something new and to undergo it Not to have an experience But to and not to own it or anything like that But to actually undergo it and and move along a path So a hodos a path method is the word method Consists of the word hodos which is path and i don't think she ever deployed anything You know preconceived although of course she was deploying swiss kind of graphic design But the the kind of material spills out over this and i think what she brought To her further work invisible language workshop is that the book was undergoing a really rapid change in 1972 Things were opening up and this was a site of experiment The book was no longer an archaic stillness, but was being opened up and kind of proliferating By the work of people like You know designers at the time uh and theorists and so forth and uh Miro Cooper was at the forefront of that and that kind of issue about movement and information and complexity Um a book isn't just to be read for information But something like the size of the Learning from las vegas book the original version you can't sit there and read it right you need to place it on a table You need to move it around Explore it move through the information and this kind of attitude gets carried on and carried forth in her later work With the visible visible language workshop But a lot of that was enabled by her exploration of book design I think um so that's uh What I was impressed with with her work and my encounter with her work Thanks everyone so uh I don't typically read um When doing a doing a talk I've been Uh ill lately and I have a four month old at home. And so I have the memory of a mosquito And uh, I want to make sure that you know this uh sort of give the subject. It's it's due here Um, so at the risk of dating myself I think I probably saw the work of mariel and the vlw uh first in a wired magazine Uh a couple years later. I um Uh was this senior at uh Carnegie Mellon and uh recent vlw alum Suguru Ishizaki brought Dave Small and john mighta to speak and this was the first time that I saw how my interesting graphic design and computer science Uh might actually be combined in a more interesting way than just sort of you know jamming them together Uh as a student I'd already worked professionally as a graphic designer And separately as a software developer, uh, but I'd always kind of hated computer graphics Because I found them to represent everything I despised about the usual collision of art and engineering A bunch of engineers trying to replicate a Mondrian painting and calling it art Or 3d graphics with spheres and cubes and incandescent rgb colors So synthetic an alien that they hardly seem at home on computer itself I love that mariel remained a designer first and it shows the influence of her work as seen in her students Often when designers start working with computation as a medium There's a tendency to shut off their design instincts because they're in this foreign and sort of technical space To make the transition you really need to think Keep your critical eye and treat computation as in just another medium that is you know as as imperfect as any other And learn from its working within its constraints by also trying to challenge yourself to overcome them Mariel did this with her students with the vlw exploring things like depth of field and blur and antelius text many years before These would become commonplace These came from an approach grounded in fields like photography and film and typography And a desire to make this cold medium a little bit more human humanistic In 2001 I had been a student of John Midas for three years and began working with Casey Reese on what would become Processing a project that seeks to make it easier to merge these disciplines of design and code And it is a direct descendant of coding libraries that date to the vlw Plus the pedagogical side of what we did at the acg and finally the desire to sketch with code So right writing short programs that are easily iterated upon The same way that you work in your sketchbook The the vlw name even lives on as the font format used by processing Which stores information in exactly the same way as the type used in that information landscapes video We saw earlier Millions of users later we have a mission statement for the processing project which reads Processing seeks to ruin the careers of talented designers by tempt tempting them away from their usual tools and into the world of programming and computation Similarly, the project is designed to turn engineers and computer scientists to less gainful employment as artists and designers And I hope that point would resonate with mariel after she took a class with nicolas nirgrapanti She's quoted to have said that the code on screen didn't make any goddamn sense I've always felt that these are precisely the people that I want to bring into the field the technically inclined will always find their way regardless and But they'll also make things that are more suited to their technical interests And so a field gets interesting however only and only really truly evolves When it expands by bringing in people with different abilities and kinds of experiences And as far as accessibility we've come a long way since the vlw era Where this work was limited to research labs using computers the size of a mini fridge By the early 2000s you could buy a computer for a few hundred dollars to do this type of work Which meant that the means was in place. We just provided the platform Or we just needed to provide the platform which case and I sought to do with processing And now in the current decade the means is ubiquitous and processing Continues with newer initiatives like the p5 js project which takes the same ideas and tries to rethink them for you know sort of contemporary web setting But more importantly lauren mccarthy has led the project with a renewed focus on inclusion and diversity Meaning that we're at a point where we have more room to consider what this means socially And how we can really extend the boundary of those participating in the field The evolution over the last couple decades reminds me of a wonderful john adams quote Paraphrase goes something like i must study politics so that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy And my sons will study geography and commerce and agriculture to give their Children the right to study painting poetry music and architecture We own We owe an enormous debt to mariela and our students for providing this basis for us And i'm honored to be participating today. Thank you When um ellen and then erin We're talking about the tension that occurred between murrow cooper and Denise scott brown in the design and production of learning from las vegas One of the things that that actually throws in a sharp relief is That period when Authors actually did turn over to designers a pile of manuscript that looked like that photograph that ellen showed and then There was no choice, but to have a designer or some appointed professional with arcane technical skills Knowing the names of typefaces knowing how to do Color separations and how to create mechanical artwork that could communicate intention to a printer All of those things were like, you know, what uh Um Abbey miller calls black arts in a way that like civilians weren't didn't know and we're meant to know and certainly authors Were not meant to know or even have an opinion about and so hence that collision was so acute. I think Now, you know and then as um, uh As benja said now we're in a period where indeed, um The means of production are in everyone's hands and um Is it for the better? Do you think then? No question I because I think the um Again, it's it only gets interesting as you bring the other other kinds of people into it. And so it's kind of a um, you know, you have people who come in who are Beginners, but they're experts somewhere else. And so I think it's really fascinating to uh to take somebody who has that, you know You know something that they are expert at but they're you know, kind of bringing that into Into something new And that's only you know, and so the the idea that the Where mario was bringing things like from typography or from, you know, just obvious things like, uh, you know So for somebody who's a who's worked with film or photography that Motion blur and depth of field are are just you know the norm But for somebody who's thinking from thing about things from a, you know, engineering perspective Well, I'm trying to get the shapes on screen, you know, and it's like well So being able to kind of merge those things together in a way that You know, it's just that's what you get at that sort of That intersection essentially and so I think the only way you can do that is Get as many people as possible kind of using you know, using these kinds of tools and Making messes with them first Aaron, just a clarification the this is not an answer to that question, but a bit of the detail Um with the learning from las vegas book. It definitely wasn't dumping A pile of papers like these are people who had very strong denise cop brown Robert venturi had very strong design ideas and thought of themselves as designers So it was very overdeveloped or thought About in in kind of very specific ways by the time it arrived there That's interesting. I this takes us down to kind of dangerously arcane graphic design road, but love it Love it. Then you're in favor of that on good. Um, but um I think it's it's easy if you're um a graphic designer to look at muriel's design for that book as being the design one and for um to look at the second the the revise edition and the one that I in fact first saw and only knew for many years Is being sort of like this Undesigned piece of crap that was like done put together by untutored people but When I I you know, um The intention behind it was very very powerful in term and and and denise scott brown's objections to muriel's design were really articulated and Very you know, can you sort of like describe what the what denise wanted out of that book? I think it's all a matter of timing. Um, so actually it's odd because much is made of the conflict between muriel cooper and denise scott brown as as um Mirror cooper said it was a battle of wits, you know, and it was a real kind of a real conflict But you know, they had many things in common. I could go through them. It's um interested movements They both were interested in multiple graphic modes of Representing or accounting for sensory plenitude and information landscapes. I could go on and on So why was the conflict and of course a lot of it is is about timing and so forth, you know That second book you could say is a treatise. Yeah, it's an idea of a text. It wants to be a book You know, it wants to you know Get across a set of premises or polemics Right and the first also more accessible and accessible a little paper bag Inexpressible I'm keeping away from the more pragmatic economic But that's key. I think as a reader much as I love the big book I don't want to actually interact with it that way But the other one was a kind of sense of the text or what You know, jj gibson would call a sensory ecology that you don't get text Purified of its, you know sensory plenitude and that's what you get in the first Book is a kind of a sense of the text and the second book you get the idea of a text or a treatise Or a polemic and those are kind of different desires, but you know, originally Denise Scott Brown, they wanted a huge book Right at the beginning. So, you know, they got it. They kind of yeah belatedly and so these kinds of sense of of timings and and what you want to kind of achieve Polemically with your your body of work shifts over time and and what's interesting of course is that that's the the revised edition There's nothing to do with that book except read it Right like looking at it. It's no fun For me at least, you know, there's some plates in it that you can look at but basically you have no choice But if you want to engage with that book, you have one way to do it Which is reading it whereas I would maintain the first edition and newly re-released is You can really engage with that book without actually Reading it and without actually perceiving any of the ideas in fact and people will You know have done and will do that. So there's I think I sort of get I dim in the the the Those two ways of looking at text is really pronounced And I think um, it's like so one of the things that I wonder is Was Was she Was she a reader did she was she frustrated by um By kind of the limited the linear nature of a traditional book And you know that information landscapes, you know, I didn't get the opportunity to work with yeah I mean, do you get a sense from uh, I think from the I think what's interesting about the information landscape thing and that, um Richard touched on it earlier as far as this idea of How you actually move through a space of information and I think it's kind of the Um for people who you know like working with information that that's kind of these are the things that like roll around in in their heads our heads And keep us up at night. And so I think That was the kind of thing that's kind of rolling around for her and that this is like This is just you know the way it's working in her head. And then When she makes a you know a layout for a book like the Um The Las Vegas book that's kind of a moment frozen in time of that picture that's been Yeah, you know, it's it's been in constant motion. And then all of a sudden here's this snapshot that we're You know putting out in front of people and so I think um that sort of thing You know is really what what comes through is how do you capture that that motion and movement through the through the information and you know, I think um Nicholas and um ricky both kind of referred to Um The revelatory quality of that presentation of information landscapes, particularly the first time at ted 5 and I says and what what strikes me if you sort of see it today, it's You know, there's not a single kind of um, you know Candy bar commercial on television that doesn't use some sort of You know kind of move that kind of first saw the light of day and that thank you. I mean and so is um is Have we reached some sort of You know Endpoint. Yeah, Ellen is a curator for every time recent sort of endpoint. We're like, you know Where now we await the next thing the next kind of transformation, which may be just emojis or something. I don't know Well, I think you know now we're talking about You know having text everywhere on our glasses and that we're going to look around and everything is going to have text All over it. I think i'm waiting for that With enthusiasm Sure, sure Yeah, I think that There is always this hunger for More and different But I I do think that that paradigm of the information landscape from that conference You know, what was it 30 years ago? Was like a profound moment Because it wasn't just Layers of of text that were parallel to the screen But the fact of this moving like this Was mind-blowing because it was just taking the perspective in a different way Also, I think what and then it was live text. It wasn't pictures of text. It was Actual language that could be edited I think also a lot of what you see in the Advertising and sort of the versions of this that are really pervasive Are really kind of the side effect of it, you know You love when type moves around and 3d on on a screen and like We're very drawn to it and we're really drawn to language and things like that but I think the fundamental kinds of issues that Marilyn the vlw were going after as far as how do you actually move through a space of information? How do you actually interact with it? How do you you know understand this? We're still a long ways off from actually You know fixing a lot more of those core ideas and how do we You know spend more More time kind of focused on on packing some of those issues that they had just kind of started to scratch the surface of I think Sometimes when the argument is how she progressed from book design the vlw that it was a limit The book was too still like, you know all kinds of things that stayed Were kind of intervening on the kinds of movement or That she wanted but I actually think actually some of that stillness Remained in the design and I think that's what's been lost this kind of gap Or temporal gap between the acquisition of data and the plane of discovery and those have been compressed And here with her work. You always had that The time to do that and that temporal kind of Extension and duration has been rapidly Closing and I think that that's that's an issue or what gives her work that kind of interest or depth. I think yeah and I think um when I look at her at Miro Cooper's later work when it's um the screen-based work and the digital work It always really seems to have Like if not a literary route to it at least it's sort of thought it's you understand that that the information's meant to be Interpreted and I think if you sort of want to take it right up to the present day Um, you know one of the reasons that we have this crisis of you know You know what is truth and what is fake news is that? Information comes to people from all sorts of different angles links to things You know it always looks good. Yeah. Yeah, and yeah and things were linked off of things and they all look legitimate They all they're all sort of coming out of the same pipe and people make up their own minds about what's true or not I think that that sort of is You know that the the authorial of the you know the authority that uh that authors bring to things no mistake those words I think at the same route. Um, you know, I which the difference between the treatise and um a pile of manuscript Is sort of I think a little bit what You know that that gap is defines the the confusion that pervades the world today comments Now go ahead Yeah, so ricky points out if you didn't hear it that it was really an attempt to create a Conversation on the page of conversation with the text and sort of uh, the ideal illness of talmudic Talmudic commentary on a set text and there's you know, I would guess there are some authors that actually don't like that That don't want to have a conversation. They just like to have the Yeah, leave me alone. Yeah, leave me alone Let me just say my piece and read all the way through and that wasn't muriel's point of view or muriel's point of view I think was uh To enable people to access tests in a lot of different ways and to interact with it right actively So, um, so, um, is there Is there one big lesson that we could learn from muriel today that would solve our problems as a currently devil Ellen I think she really what was really driving so much of her work was the desire to break down the mediation between authorship and Getting it out there um, and that the idea that you could have direct access To both the content and its delivery I think that was just a driving thing that she Wanted to get rid of that Person you have to call up and ask, you know, I have a typo. Will you fix it? Yeah, right? People don't want to have to do that. They don't want to have to call michael bay root and say fix my typo They just want to be able to fix it and I think that desire to get rid of that mediation was really profound for her and um Is really important to me as an author who also uses in design. Yeah, I want to fix my own typos. Thank you muriel Thank you Ben Um so most of my Work is about, you know, sort of understanding and working with information and basically this this idea of, you know, there's this massive information out there and that Design is essentially the lens through which, you know, the only lens through which we're actually going to get the understanding out of it And uh, as far as I'm concerned, you know, muriel really represents sort of a patron saint of that that type of thinking in the that way of How, you know, how an individual actually interacts with the information as mediated by You know by code and by the by the computer is a As a digital tool, so yeah, that's remarkable. Yeah for me. Um, I think it's that Communication is not just conveying information, but it as I said exposing us to the risk of experience and that it's it's a as you pointed out a conversation an encounter and those kinds of things are precious and need to be fostered and that illegibilities and Incommunic abilities are not external errors, but they're generated internally And those are productive of some of our most interesting encounters. So when those texts are shifting There's certain points where plimpsest happens where it erases Information and just doesn't reveal it and those are important points and those I think those Opacities blind spots illegibilities are being kind of wiped out and We need to find new ways of preserving those kinds of things difficulties Well, um, I'd like to thank our panel erin vinegar ben fry ellen lupton. Please join me Thank you very much Thank you This is a an unscheduled introduction because I'm not supposed to be doing it But I thought you would like to know something which john might not tell you when we opened up the media lab in 1985 One of the less colorful groups was an advanced television program Which was a very engineering approach to high definition and stuff like that And there was this young graduate student from electrical engineering named john mayeda Who was awfully unhappy with his six foot two germanic heel clicking advisor? And he says, oh, I'm so unhappy and I will really want to be an artist And for one reason or another he drops out. He goes to japan I think his parents may have blamed me or other people, but they weren't happy And john goes to japan end of story Nine years later muriel dies 1994 may 28 and After recovering which you can't really do very easily. We set up a search an international search For who could replace muriel cooper? Well, the answer is nobody can replace muriel cooper But who could we get? That would be somewhat in the same domain and this was not a fixed wired search This was a real honest global search and John mayeda appears From japan and applies comes here gives the talk and won that search Hands down and came back as a faculty member, which i'm sure his parents Also loved us for and now that you were back john Wow, that was a nice introduction I am a dropout It's true. Um, also a faculty dropout now too So, uh, I have a few presentation slides Because I thought it should be visual I arrived roughly three hours ago and began in the lobby to make a presentation And I was trying to understand like what I could say to all of you because I know you'd all be here So first of all, who knew muriel raise your hand Okay, so those who didn't know muriel What did her work change you in any in any tiny way? Come on. Those who didn't know. Yeah, they didn't know but you just kind of like can I hit you? Grace colby over there just threw a button at me It changed her life as a student and I see so many students here of muriel's you'll you'll get to see Dave small later Who where's dave dave's going to be talking later? Like dave was that sort of magical link between What muriel's group did and what my group did and uh, I feel very lucky Okay, let's bring up the information Okay, I don't know if I don't have a fancy pentagram video Oh video problem Oh, no problem. Okay. So, uh, first of all Uh, I want to note something that ben fry didn't mention. Where's ben been over there. Thank you Press play There it'll come ben. Where are you ben ben coming you're back there So I arrived here at the media lab and I had to like find students That's something you have to do when you become a media professor And I had no experience doing that So what I began to do was I was surfing all kind of websites looking for people Kind of like, you know an x-men or something trying to find the mutants that can do the visual And can do the code and I located this one person named ben fry who was at this nominal company called Netscape They were trying to make this thing no one's was gonna it was never going to take off whatever and But somehow I convinced ben to leave that early stage startup. Sorry ben to come to the media lab and also Uh, like a year later So a gentleman appeared a named casey reese who told me that he really wanted to come here He was a graphic designer, but didn't know how to code And so I said well, you're gonna have to learn how to code And he said what I have to learn if learn c++ you have to know open gl and he said And wrote it down in his notebook I gotta tell you I'd tell like all kind of people that same thing and they go. Mm-hmm. They never come back But a year later casey shows up with his laptop And he says hi I said you came back and he says yeah after I met you I quit my job And he was at a dot-com thing a really good one And he quit his job and began focusing on computation and blew me away So I just want to say that this place is very special And this place really happened because of a few people in this room But most only Nicholas over here Who had this vision that like a george cluney style oceans 11 or something Um that this mix of people could create something And I think that that catalyzing force is so powerful because yesterday I was at sponsor day, you know sponsor day. It's like special Private viewing of things and so I was blown away. First of all, I was seeing nary oxman's stuff and it was like amazing I was sitting over there Oh, nary. Yeah, I should see you're like blowing my mind like whoa, you can do that now um And I also saw gloriaina special cameo Um, and Joe Joe Paradiso was showing his leg weird stuff, which is always good It's like, you know a lot of bass and mysterious and sensors and everywhere And I saw also Uh, I'm turning my left and there's like huge legs and like, okay cool, right? um And then I saw chris met now chris is the person who invented the car navigation system, right? If you imagine like the media lab saw all these things had these ideas They were outlandish at the time. Why would you ever need your car to tell you where to go? Right, um And of course my dear friend Hiroshi ishii. I got to see his lab Hiroshi makes everything like vibrate and shake, you know, whatever and so I had a great time. I felt very media labby How the stuff you can see here Um, but I came here today from muriel. I saw also saw the special like, you know branded floor Uh, I was a little bit early and I don't have a place here anymore So I hung out in the lobby to sit in there in the uh, wiesner sort of like special place Who knew jerry wiesner who knew this person? So an amazing figure of mit stood for world peace like really important stuff, right? So I thought so I just hung out there and worked Um, and as I worked there It's great because when you're in this in this little place Suddenly you see all the details, right? Because I've I've been to here like four or five times But by sitting there I was looking at a video conference and like wait There's a picture and I saw this picture and this is like a really good picture This is like a good picture, right? Um, and when I saw this picture it reminded me of what to me mit meant Because uh, I really had never heard of design when I came to mit I was a classical engineering student My parents didn't have much money or education So just coming here was the whole goal by the time I got here. I wasn't sure what to do Uh, but I remembered looking at the media lab and thinking well, that's a really weird place That seems very unconventional very impractical You know like it's it's a big format. It's got images everywhere. I don't understand it Let's make it cheaper and simpler, right? And I was like, uh, I don't know what that was And um And I was talking to the person at the front. There was the person from member relations And Sharon Who is she what did she do? What'd you find out Because she like knows everything in the media lab you can ask her anything and the front desk So I said, who's meryl cooper and she wasn't sure So we cut the camera then and then we did cut to Famous person with a wonderful legacy. Yeah, how does someone have a wonderful legacy? What's the secret? What's your name? I'm Sharon a little class for Sharon, right? Just you just kind of nailed it And I thought about these things these four words And I thought about passion And to nicolas's point, you know, I did have this very special professor Uh here at the media lab who made my life a little bit difficult and retrospect. I'm very grateful, of course everything is better in hindsight, um, but um, I decided to leave but I didn't know what to do And meryl told me to go to art school and it was the best advice to give to me She said that I wouldn't learn what I was wanting to learn at a technical school Because I had done all the technical education The problem in engineering education is you learn how to build anything But you don't know what to build or why to build it And so but when art school it really changed my life really so I I thank meryl Um Now this word enthusiasm is interesting Uh because something about enthusiasm Is something that you might have as a as a rising person someone who's going to figure stuff out And enthusiastic people tend to need Aspirational people right like how many people had a hero? Come on. You had a hero and heroes and so that hero was someone who was aspirational And someone just my friend told me recently jesse my dear friend an artist told me how Aspiration and inspiration are two different things Aspiration is what you're trying to see and you understand Inspirations what's awakens inside you And is the fire that someone else gave you through having the aspirational being So well, I remember like leaving here Not sure what to do in japan I rebuilt my career as a designer I came back to the computer and Figured out that this skill I had to make code to ben's point I knew what to make suddenly It was so much easier And I began publishing things in japan And I made this little book called the reactive square which is 10 squares that respond to sound delivered on a floppy disk I know very ancient But I remember like oh, this kind of feels sort of right, you know And I remember emailing muriel and saying hey, I think I figured it out And she wrote back to me and said show me And then a month later she passed away So I remember when I when I heard there was this call for someone to somehow come here I thought I could never do that. That's that's impossible But I'd love to show my respect And what happened is The day before I came to the media lab to give a faculty talk I was visiting this idol that I had paul rand Again, I didn't know about design when I came to mit once I saw the media labs world I thought I want to learn more about learn more about design And I found a book by paul ran by accident And the mit's wrote visual library. I don't know if it's still here, but I was like, whoa, what is this book? This book is so fascinating. Ah design really interesting I think I want to do this. Anyways, years later in japan The paul rand of japan ikotanaka befriended me And said hey, um, if you're going to united states, you should visit my friend paul ran I said cool I went to visit mr. Rand And um, the next day was my faculty talk So what a good day to do like any job talk, right? I was like so happy I like met my dream person. So when I came here I wasn't nervous. Luckily. I should have been nervous But anyways, that was a big moment. And so when I when I arrived at mit Um, I asked nicholas if we could bring paul rand And I remember nicholas said paul rand. Is he still alive? Is he still around? I said, oh, yeah Yeah, he's around And we were worried if people would come to see paul ran talk and also Paul made it much more difficult by saying he wanted to speak at 10 a.m And nicholas might not remember this but nicholas said no no no one's going to come at 10 a.m 4 p.m Have them come at 4 p.m. I said, uh, can you come at 4 p.m. Professor nigger ponti says no i'm coming at 10 a.m If no one's going to show up at 4 p.m. I never wanted to talk to them anyways so He showed up at 10 a.m. And i'm sure nicholas remembers the the auditorium was packed. It was standing room only Uh, it was an incredible outpouring Uh for mr. Rant and design in general, which was exciting arrogance i'd loved That moment where she says arrogance and everyone kind of like bristled would like yeah You know, but there's a bob Sutton book about you know, the no assholes, you know, but wait a second. I don't understand this Well, it's a fact that artists might appear arrogant But as uh, when I when I ran red island school of design I was able to work with many artists and I found this one thing. I didn't understand at the beginning um, well, I used to uh Visit all the uh, the lunch rooms and bring my food around and sit with students randomly to see if they let me sit with them Sometimes I know no no no sit with us and like come over here You know, but one day there was this young woman say come here come I was like, oh no, she wants to sit with me So I sat with her and she's saying, you know, I'm a I'm a freshman. I thought oh no complaints. It's coming. Something's coming I'm a freshman and it was really hard that first semester You know, I come from the midwest. This is all new to me. I didn't understand it Uh, I didn't understand the teachers. It was just so hard every day. I just didn't know what to do And she said now I'm in the second term And I know where things are. I know what kind of questions to ask. It's all working really well But I have to have confession to make oh no confession. I have to confess that I don't feel alive And so I remember like walking back to my office and the elevator opened and my friend jesse She was the provost at the time. She was right there I said jesse this thing interesting thing happened to me sitting with a young woman And she was saying this thing and jesse looked at me and said well, well, of course She's an artist Our artist doesn't feel alive unless they feel the struggle It's through that struggle that they feel alive So you may look like Aryans, but it's that Strength to be different that I see is there And lastly persistence, right? What a good one to end on Think about it. I mean when you tell like younger people today that There was a time when there was this like dot matrix typeface not like, you know an anti alias version of it But like five dots by seven dots was all you got And I'm now a product manager design lead at a company where I'm trying to tell everyone like do this No, that's not the way you have to do it Do it this way. It's better. No, I think it's good this way It gives me a sense of how how how easier it is now compared to when muriel Was able to convince people that maybe you need this thing called helvetica on the screen Maybe it has to be anti alias. So it looks much more smooth to the eye pleasurable so That kind of persistence I can't imagine how hard it was for her in the team back then to do what has happened But look how amazing information is today on our devices. So Persistence good persistence So all I can say now is I am at the very end and I'm zero zero seconds And I want to leave with this thought that muriel was one of the great teachers And all of you are teachers in different ways too. So please consider your yourselves as intellectual philanthropists people that can give this away to other people they give opportunities And and I used to raise money So I will do a thing for MIT press if you have not bought this book or aren't buying it yet By many for your friends because it's a way to carry muriel's legacy forward Thank you I'm going to introduce you guys so give me two seconds because I also have to say one other word Which you may you guys may not know, but there's apparently a new fund that's been created By the Wade family. I believe it's Emily and Jepta. Is anybody here from the Wade family? No, but anyway, it's a new fund at the MIT press which will bear muriel's name And Its purpose as I understand it is to help Make the art and architecture and design books Easier to do and and subventure them and do whatever And yours is the first so we not only Want to hear about the book, but you should know it's the first of the muriel cooper fund I guess it's a little nepotistic for it to be funding the muriel book, but at any rate Please come Thank you, Nicholas Um, my name is rob wiesenberger. This is david reinfert. We're co-authors of this book, which we hope you'll see soon Entitled muriel cooper And we just wanted to make a few very basic Observations about the book about its structure about the intent behind it Before that we wanted to thank the MIT press for It's enthusiasm about the project for investing in it. Thank the media lab for hosting and thank so many people in this room from the family and The colleagues and friends of cooper's the archivist the librarians all these people who helped make this material come alive for us So just a couple words on On this this book The first observation is pretty pretty straightforward about its scale and hopefully you'll appreciate it. It's a big book And we were really happy to see that this book Uh can stand up beside cooper's two great tomes the bow house of 1969 After which this book takes some inspiration visually and learning from las vegas of 1972, which is mercifully back in print So we really like that this book can hold its own this book dedicated to cooper beside those two Great tomes and that this book is also about the person who helped take us beyond the book So it feels appropriate When you get into the book, uh, you'll see that the epigraph To start off with is a sort of confession of cooper's and she says I guess i'm never sure That print is truly linear I guess i'm never sure that print is truly linear And she said this in the 90s when she's already working in the digital realm and it's To to us it seems like a nice way to start a book Because it's a kind of it's a statement of ambivalence It's a statement very typically of cooper. It's a statement of ambivalence. It's a statement of possibility as well She's just gotten done explaining the the specificity of the printed book versus the possibilities of the digital And then she track tracks and says actually, I guess i'm never sure that print is truly linear And so it seemed like an appropriately self-reflexive way to start a book But also appropriate to her who felt even as she moved into the digital world that the book was a specific kind of technology The codex book had its own set of possibilities And uh Simultaneity for her versus linearity. She really strove for simultaneity Not that you start here and end here But in all of her work, whether it was a highly layered image that comes at you all at once or can be accessed in different ways Or a video disc that you can skip around from based on your own path Or the hyperlinking of of of the world we now live in Simultaneity non-linearity was so important to cooper and I think she showed that books can do that And so we kind of wanted to start with this very equivocal and self-reflexive Um Acknowledgement of the power that books still actually hold that she she showed to us um Very very sort of basic observation, but in the table of contents We separated out There's a text portion and an image portion And that's the structure of the biohouse book that cooper designed as well I mean she inherited that from the it's german predecessor But we both wrote essays on her early and late work respectively her work in print and software respectively um And their essays their attempts their brief and then we show you the work And we really wanted to foreground the work and let people enter in either direction And we think that you know at different times Maybe the text will be galvanizing for people her words at other times the images will be At other times still the images may feel dated and then they'll feel new again So so we wanted to provide these two ways of accessing it and you'll see that there are these two These two texts and then there's these um These three sections we call them portfolio sections And they respectively they represent her work. They are design And teaching and research and they were successive categories in her career She did them one after another and of course they're they bleed into one another. They're not such crisp distinctions But the point I wanted to make that that struck me that struck us about cooper was that design and teaching and research We didn't write those categories that she did And that I think we've heard tonight that her career intersected with a lot of interesting people It's actually paul rand who we just heard about who recommended her for a job at the mit press It's uh, you know Great design luminary georgie keppisch before that who brought her onto mit She designed the barhouse book uh when herbert bayer the great barhouse master wasn't available She's at the mit media lab with a whole set of luminaries Many of whom are in this room And yet she designed and redesigned her own career in really interesting ways. So these chapters Design and teaching and research We quote her in the book as saying, you know, I very deliberately decided I no longer wanted to be a designer in traditional sense And she uses the word deliberately about three times in in a sentence or two And that idea of the deliberate the purposive the intentional that she was forging her way Creating careers in in a field that simply didn't exist with a lot of assists from the brilliant minds around her But that she wrote these chapters so the uh The last thing I wanted to say is You know, it's it's striking when you hear about when when when we hear about muriel tonight I mean, we didn't know her personally and we're very aware of that. I mean, uh, I was I was 10 when she died Uh, you'll David will tell his his, you know passing connection But you know, we didn't know her and we respect, uh, you know All of the help of those who did and we want to provide this way in and it's striking that She's simultaneously by everyone's account this kind of firecrack or this incredible personality So idiosyncratic and yet is not well known and didn't really have the time in her own life Because she was working so hard Often behind the scenes To really consolidate her work in a clearer way and say this is my career And it probably wasn't even in her character to talk about herself or her work in that way to her great credit So this book is that attempt To to with a little distance to consolidate Her career and I look at it with some perspective so Um, we hope you enjoy it and uh with that I wanted to turn it over to David Okay, uh, I did not know Muriel Cooper either as rob made clear. Um I did however in I think it was january of 1995. Um I was a young designer working in new york not knowing what I was doing And I thought it would be fantastic to come and study at the media lab And I arranged to make a visit up here in january of 1995 to visit the the vlw And at that point I saw some of the work on screen actually lisa strausfeld was a student here At the time and was I remember Thinking that was fantastic that she had studied that she was an architect before But when I saw this work then the next time I I ended up not coming back to graduate school because I went to go work At ideo in san francisco in 1995 and I went to work for gita solomon who was uh student from the media lab and Who had finished and what was striking at the time out in san francisco? I was hired as an interaction designer, which was a fairly quite a new field at the time Muriel cooper's work and specifically the information landscapes Um were presented as kind of primary material as I as I was starting to understand What might happen on a on a screen in this relationship to design? um so that was that was soon not so long after the uh ted talk in monterey, which we've heard described a couple times tonight from people who were there um and who organized it um uh anyway when I first when I first saw this Saw the information landscapes work. It was but it was first as printed images an article by jan abrams in id magazine I think um and uh As soon I later saw it moving not very long after that and I was struck as a designer with the way in which Uh familiar typographic relationships, which which conveyed meaning which usually were done with bold or size or two-dimensional Approaches seem to be completely intact, but just another dimension was added to it And of course that's a dimension of that's a third dimension but it's also a dimension of time more consequentially here and I recognize this as work that was happening on screen that opened up a whole set of possibilities But I recognized it coming from specifically a kind of design um place It was about 10 years before I Came into contact with her work again And during that time I was shocked that a lot of the um A lot of this work I didn't hear discussed within Graphic design or interaction design Uh extensively during that time period made with my own remove from whatever scenes we're talking about it But it was just absent and in 2005 I came back to mit And I was doing some graphic design work with the center for advanced visual studies, which was at the end of its kind of uh run and I stumbled into a closet up there, which was filled with posters um They were just stacked one on top of each other absolutely fabulous fantastic things very excited to find these things started to pull them out And uh at the same time I found a a res like a cv from muriel cooper at the center for advanced visual studies from I think step 1971 And I I I expected that these posters were likely designed by muriel cooper. I was uh quickly corrected as many of them weren't But what I recognized in these was a similar approach to what I had seen in the information landscapes, which seemed to be a kind of um Deep investment in the kind of temporal aspect of making a piece of graphic design work so whether it's the rotations that are in the print on the left which use the kind of uh Staging of a printing press as a way to generate form or on the right Which is made with a split fountain, which is another way of kind of using the tools to um To produce the graphic effect essentially Now in the book these are these are several spreads from the book um In the book we've made a real attempt to show the things that we found pieces of muriel cooper's work and or students work and ancillary materials As much as artifacts as possible and so you see something like the mechanical artwork for the mit press logo, which is presented with the Masking tape on it and the sketch the original sketch that looks like it led to this Proposal for a logo on the left These are largely left unframed by kind of um writing essentially and the idea as rob described as well Was to make this a kind of source book for other people to continue this work it seemed Given our distance from the material and the real situation it also seemed like a Uh The most productive positive thing we could do was present this work so that other people can take up the project um so that other people can get excited about the this um Singular collection of uh design Of design and and continue it forward whether through research or taking the ideas etc um Now you know it gets sewn up in this giant in this rather large book which is very beautifully produced by the mit press We're thrilled with the way that it came out. Um But on the on the spine of this book is down in the bottom You know, you don't have to see is is a piece of muriel cooper's work that we all know well But seen in situ not removed and so this Uh This would have to be one of my favorite pieces of graphic design And the way in which it oscillates between a kind of figurative typographic thing and what looks like a machine readable graphic But here we see it doing the work it was meant to do which is identify this book as mit press And I just think we both of us feel quite honored to to have it published by mit Given the subject matter that's in it. So we hope you'll look at it. Enjoy it and make some work from it Hello everybody, uh, i'm todd mack over and we have a wonderful Panel here to talk about muriel as a teacher and I think we'll have an opportunity to talk about the culture of the visible language workshop as well um We have ron mcneill who was really muriel's partner for the entire time Uh that the visible language workshop ran and uh really ran it together So we're going to hear from ron about how it started and what it meant and how it worked Lisa strausfeld who was was mentioned started out as an architect but came Studied design with muriel and visible language workshop as one of the world's most prominent designers worked with pentagram independently and now is at the new school university and david small Who when he started working with muriel? I told me just before I hadn't remembered this. I hadn't done any design work at all and found his way to muriel through photography and became a designer In muriel's tutelage started Small design firm Which is one of the most prominent design firms in the world. So we'll talk to them in just a second I just wanted to make a couple of comments first one is that um I was one of the very first people to be hired at the media lab people like muriel and nicolas were at mit before the media lab But when the building opened I was one of the first people to come here and muriel was One of the very kindest people to everybody, but but I remember certainly to me You know, I came here. I was 30 years old. I think I was a musician an artist and muriel understood That it wasn't so easy to be an artist In a culture even like even the media lab, but a culture like mit So she never said too much about it But she always found time to check in just to see how I was doing to see if things were okay And to see if that part of my creative work here was was being nurtured. She really cared And now one of the things that I'm proudest of of all the things that I do Is that I'm the muriel cooper professor here at mit And not a day goes by when I don't think about Somehow trying to live up to her example as a designer and an artist and as a mentor and as somebody who helps to shape this place And and as a human being because she really was As close to the soul of the media lab as as anybody And I'll just tell you one little story before I turn it over to our panelists And Ron will recognize this but but you too won't it has to do with her as a teacher and as a mentor So in the early days of the media lab the place was small enough That when we would go through the admissions process to pick our students We'd actually all sit around a big table. We do this a few times iteratively And all the folders for all the students would be on the table And the place was small enough that we'd all read the folders for everybody and we'd pass them around the table And the idea was we'd have three or four of these meetings and each of the meetings you were supposed to Make a shorter and shorter list you'd read the folders and you're supposed to say, okay There are 50 people who want to be in my group and now my job is to figure out the 30 and now it's the 10 And every time we'd make a list on the board and Nicholas You know runs a pretty tight ship and he would you know, make sure that every time we'd kind of winnow down the list And we'd even write the names on the board of our short list and you know It's an important thing to do one of the biggest things is to pick the right students here And I'll never forget, you know all of us, you know, we wanted to follow what Nicholas wanted us to do So we would winnow down our lists And sure, you know, we get to the second third You know, we get to the final list And we'd have okay. Here are the two people I really want to admit and we'd get to Muriel and we say, okay Muriel What's your short list? She said, well I've got 20 people And Nicholas I go what 20 people no and just I need more time as 20 people And so part of it was the Chinese menu thing about maybe not being able to decide But I really think it's because she took so much time To think about every single one of those applicants and to figure out Where there was something special which might not be so obvious at you know In the normal way of judging a student and to figure out not only who she wanted to nurture But what kind of group she could bring together to make the visible language workshop special It was really amazing. It drove Nicholas crazy But she was also the only one I think it's because you were such close friends But also you respected each other so much. He's the only one who he would let get away with that But she always so here's here are the kind of people she Admitted so I'd like to maybe start with Ron Just to you because you were here at the very beginning to tell us how the visible language workshop started Why it started how it worked? I thought that it would be nice to see the very very grubby Beginning of her third act Where we started the the vlw So the vlw story starts in the early 1970s Way before the internet Way before the pc with me a photographer turned printmaker In my workspace on the fourth floor of building five of the department of architecture Slating over a hot offset press Teaching a class in non-silver imaging Image making called photographics So before I met her muriel and I shared a friend tom norton Who told her about my offset press and as it turned out muriel was looking To to start act three of her career outside of mit press So you might imagine that muriel was visualizing something like this When tom told her about my press But of course you'd be wrong because That's what she was imagining, right? The scene of a a group of eager very smart future designer disruptors With muriel as the lioness den mother teaching them the ways of disruption So after she came on board officially what muriel soon created was an iconic Humanities distribution class called messages of means It was consistently oversubscribed because it asked students who normally spend all day thinking abstractly To connect their imagination in their hands in creative exploration And of course many of them had never ever even tried to do that before So muriel felt strongly that the author and maker should be the same person Or more practically Back then that the gap between the author and the maker should be collapsed as much as possible And in search of the closest thing to an interactive experience possible Muriel threw out all of the then conventions of reproduction technology To get as close to a hands-on interactive design production Experiences as was possible Often going from concept to mask to plate to printed piece in one class So she called this iconic class project a rotation Where the students would use square paper Create the mask by working directly on acetate with press type But use only one plate and rotate the paper between color changes Notice the female press operator So sadly very few of these pieces have actually survived and the ones that i'm going to show you are not fabulous but You know they're still i think worth seeing Here's the split fountain very very popular The third color Here's another approach And yet another So she also inherited a basic visual literacy freshman seminar called creative seeing She had three assistants in a class of 60 bright eyed bushy tailed students And here they're taking Part in a sky art event So here they're mapping their physical social and family relationships And then below exploring instant reproduction technologies And of course they explored the book form Just a few examples of probably an incredibly varied class So our computational explorations started in earnest when i got a grant to build a billboard painting machine As you see here It worked well for about an afternoon But the part of the project that really excited both Muriel and me Was the interactive color computer Graphic image and text editing system that was needed in order to create the images for the billboard painter So after a three-year collaboration between mini grad and undergrad assistants We had one of the first artist workstations capable of Synthesizing image and type in near real time Sadly the crude image type handling capability was a constant frustration for muriel But it was also extremely hard to fix because the cpu that we were using Was about as fast as the first macintosh So there was a time just Sort of the middle of the project Just about every morning I would come in and see a new function or a new image added by one of the student artists That were informed by work by other students that had been done previous days The 300 megabyte Image map disk space was a big canvas that let everybody else Share ideas in a free and easy way And of course muriel was not off limits as a subject So when we first moved into the media lab the tools were still just as frustrating for muriel as ever But things began to change for the for the good when david small Seguru Ishizaki His sister ausfeld and earl renaissance began the information landscape work Over to david. Okay david. Do you want to take it from there? It's a good introduction. Okay. Thank you So so as I think has been mentioned multiple times. I was involved in that famous a couple of days in monoray at the ted 5 conference and I was that waiter that nicholas described That I thought we were going to go to monoray We were going to speak on the second day and then I was going to see big sir And It was going to be like a fantastic thing instead Muriel angled from like the moment we landed to get us almost like the very last spot On the schedule and we spent those three days me hunched over the computer and her changing her mind Now we're really so if we can switch to the To my phone here One thing that's always bothered me about that piece was that we really didn't have at the time any way of documenting except to make a kind of videotape, which was always so like fuzzy and and wasn't alive And two years ago When the museum of modern art acquired this piece for their collection I said, well, what do you mean acquire the piece? So you you want what what is it? And they said, well, I guess the videotape I said, well, okay, but maybe we can do more and I there's a Group here at the media lab. There's a lot of different research groups, but there's another group called nexus Which manages the network and all the computers and I wrote to them I said, do you have our backups from 23 years ago and they were like, oh, no, we they're online I'll just email you the data. So all of the original source code was there. It's still there And I My husband to port everything to the phone over the past couple of weeks So this is the this is a facsimile Of the presentation that was given at ted From the original source code And this is unlike the videotape. This is really what it what it felt like and so imagine You know this we can oh, I can see it from this angle and I could see from this angle But then you have mural over your shoulder saying like should be learning and common sense I don't know about that color. It was like changing over and over and over again Up until like an hour or two before we went on stage. It was like one of the most terrifying My life And then she talked I had no idea going into it what she was going to say She never made a note or jotted anything down. She was going to say she just talked and I like Latched on to everything she said as as much as I could and and try to keep up with her So so anyway, I just I just wanted to to I didn't want it people to not have sort of a feel for what this actually was So the end of the little story hopefully not the end end of the story But the end for today was that we submitted it to the apple app store last night Because I was hoping I'd tell everyone you could just like go to the app store and download it And they they kicked it out. They said it had insufficient functionality Or minimal sorry minimal functionality. I'm like, yeah, it doesn't do anything That all right But yeah, so it was just about going down and down tighter and tighter And then and then this idea too of you could look at something one way But then maybe you could look at it a different way You can go back to this way and that this way and and to me like I just sat there for weeks flipping back and forth like now I can read this but The other thing is still on the screen, but now I can read that but now I can read this and It was just like one of the most exciting times of my life to have been involved in this and I'm just happy to be able to share it with everyone here. So Lisa thanks, I'm going to start with a little detail Um So when we got those silicon graphics workstations at the media lab, which happened just after I arrived, um, they came with built-in fonts And uh, they they were awful, but they also in 3d I think all of them had um thickness Like you were almost sort of required to use a z dimension And the I think that you know implying that the software developers From sgi were focused on um, you know a big extruded text and one of the I think it's an important detail because The way those fonts were built, um by david and the team, um Was really not something that was really designed into The software that you know landed on those workstations And it was very much that condition that they They had absolutely no thickness and the ability for them to disappear on rotation That was really so much about what that time was about But backing up, um, I just want to I'm so grateful that this event is happening Especially grateful that this book exists. Thank you to rob david and mit press For making it happen and to the designers. The book is so beautiful and it will It's a it's such a perfect tribute to muriel cooper's work I was really honored to be asked to do the forward And I was given um Not a really impossible deadline to write the forward for the book I thought there's no way I will meet this deadline And um, and it did much to my surprise um And The the words the the anecdotes the experience really just kind of came out of me. Um And it was such a pleasure and really meaningful right now I'm assuming no one's read the forward yet, um, but The um it in many ways it reads as a kind of instruction manual for how to run a really successful research lab And sort of serving my own current agenda um part of muriel's Brilliance I think was in her collaborators and I also I mean You know the vlw would not have been the place. Um, it was of course without ron and dav So guru, I know louis whitesman's here. I mean the whole the group of people that she carefully curated Um, it was really extraordinary So I I encourage you to actually read the whole book the essays are incredible Nicholas's afterwards, um is incredible And again, if you want a sense of what it was like to be in the vlw, please Please read it just a couple little anecdotes to share. Um Uh And this is something that um, so maybe we'll have a conversation about this at some point, but um Muriel forbid come uh technology conversations At the vlw Literally, this is something that I write about in the forward. Um, you could not talk about technology In front of her. She would tell you to go to another room It's true, right? Yeah And there's something incredibly important about this and absolutely key to What she was able to do in separating These conversations that were really about experience about design about communication about messages From how it was done. She never let technology lead. I mean we had those conversations, of course, but they did not lead And I I write about this in the far. I I feel like I did um bring This ethic what I learned um to pentagram, which of course now When I joined pentagram, I was the kind of the first digitally fluent partner to join My team was very much. Um, I mean I built my practice doing the you know digital interactive work of My partners who were doing these, you know, still doing these amazing identity programs for corporate institutional clients Um, but what really became strategic, of course as we knew was to Have that type of work. Um Be done by all the partners for their identity programs and again, um You should read the forward but um when when years ago when people came to pentagram When I started they asked for a certain artifact of design a poster an annual report a book And that has completely changed and again, it's something that um So what what clients now ask for is we've educated the clients to ask for their message to be communicated to an audience And it's the work has become really media agnostic. Anyway, all of these things I I really took away from my experience in the vlw um I I talked about uh There there was You know a group of students with diverse set of backgrounds from the computational side architecture design The work um mural had really guided us. She didn't um she taught in a very unusual way. I didn't even Know that I was being taught exactly. Um, but I was really being guided and In hindsight I look back um and in some ways the heaviest hand was really in the choice of typefaces And there was there are many weights, but there was one typeface, which was helvetica So this diversity of work that we produced had um came together in that way. Um, and lastly I had to write About what I wanted to write and sort of conclude the forward with what I felt really motivated her um, I think she was there were contradictions in that Um, I I distinctly remember this conversation with either ron or another designer graphic designer who was visiting And they were I was just overhearing this conversation with mural and they were talking about the one word That would be kind of devastating to hear About their work. Do you remember this? Oh, yeah, and do you remember the word? Oh, yeah Nice. Oh, okay I had a different I had a different memory of the word It didn't matter what the word was as long as you cried The word I remember was decorative. Oh, yes similar similar So um, so on the one hand mural You know wanted there to be meaning there. She wanted to communicate. She wanted it To map to the experience of the content. She wanted to represent the content She wanted her work to represent the content on the other hand another memory I have is I was On the reality engine Flying her through a financial visualization I had done She actually gave me the morning star floppy disks so I could use that information and I remember Uh, you know, I was kind of driving the the demo And she was sitting back in the chair and she really she asked me to kind of pause She really wanted to occupy the space of numbers. She actually Despite the other comment this contradiction is that she wanted to feel it. She wanted to be seduced by the form And I think it was really those two things of wanting the meaning You know wanting the content and wanting just the the seduction and the pleasure of you know, beautiful form And flying as as richard said she wanted to fly So, uh, and lastly when I tried to sum this up in the forward I it was writing this sentence about what really motivated her There's an m dash. I was trying to put the words together and I concluded that what motivated her really was what was possible So, thank you and great to be here I think we're running a little late. So we'll just take another couple of minutes. David. I was gonna ask you you you said outside He said boy, I'm looking back and gee. I didn't really study with Miro for all that long. It was Only 10 years And uh, my recollection much longer Yeah, but my recollection is you changed quite a lot over those 10 years I just thought maybe you'd say a little bit about what you were like when you started with mural and yeah She I mean like many people she changed my life, but I I feel like wow She really changed the trajectory of my life I when I started I I hadn't written any software per se At least not at mit as a as an undergraduate I'd worked in the dark room, but that was all just with chemistry and I didn't really know anything about design And I had finished my undergrad. I didn't have a job. I didn't quite know what I was going to do and I don't recall if it was she or I but we talked about like well, what should I do next and she said we'll come you know do do work in the visible language workshop and Uh, you know, thank god that I did so I started out like that Bob Savison taught me All he knew about software and I taught other people and we all taught each other None of us a lot of people came to the VLW not knowing how to program and none of us Started by taking a computer science course and had a program we taught each other and that was going to be enough um And yeah in those 10 years like everything changed so dramatically in the way that I I had absorbed All this idea about stuff and I never felt like she taught me like I was being taught I I kind of complained about it sometimes Where's the textbook? Is there ever going to be a textbook? Are you even working on the textbook? No, there was no There was no chance there was ever going to be the textbook to come out which you know a lot of People at the lab. They had a group and they slowly developed that book That was not going to happen. But it was like this, you know, it's like this This is the Bob Savison view of Visible language workshop and it was like tied together with duct tape and there's a bunch of speakers and smoke coming out of things and um And at the end of it, I had learned all this stuff and I didn't even quite realize how much she was teaching me Yeah I have two more really quick questions Once for you Ron It's it's I was thinking at the end of the day these last two days have been our um Members sponsored days at the media lab At the end of the day yesterday after you know, it was hectic all day our newest faculty member Danielle wood Who's a remarkable young woman who's who's works at nasa and also works on community activism Was walking around looking at demos and she came to our group And my students were all around and she she asked you know, she's she's just starting at the media lab And she said what is it that makes a group bond? What is it that makes a group feel special? And I immediately thought that of all the groups I've ever seen at the media lab There was something about the feeling at the visible language workshop that was just special And I was wondering, you know just in the few words. Can you think what how that worked? Why that happened? Tell Danielle because right Well, as as you saw We chose superb people Uh, and there really was no roadmap There were there was a work space and some some, you know General ideas of things that and we all sort of dived in and got to work I mean, I don't think it was much more complicated than that Yeah, and my my last quick question for lisa is um You told me before that you have a daughter. She's 13. You said she'll be 10. She'll be 10 to be 10 Who who's interested in design interested in MIT and just thought maybe you'd tell her what what her name is Her name is muriel Thanks, I'm muriel's nephew Jonathan And on behalf of muriel's family many of whom are here tonight a big Thank you to the press and to the media lab for hosting and including us in this great event Much of the talk today has been about muriel's role as a teacher designer But before she was either she was the first born child of immigrant russian and polish Parents living in brookline It was a typical middle-class family jack her father was a master electrician And her mother jenny stayed at home to take care of the family Muriel or candy if she was called was her nickname Was followed by the birth of my mother haleen who was also known as honey And lastly charlotte who is here tonight. Uh, who is known as chicky Wonderful names Muriel had a pretty normal childhood the only hint of what was to become a brilliant career Might have been a passion for doodling and her being what at the time was called a tomboy But today would simply be described as being fearless strong-willed and independent When it was time for college muriel attended ohio state with the goal of getting her bfa But when jack and jenny or parents visited her on parents day weekend They were shocked to discover that the dorm that muriel was staying in was filled with girls of questionable Archer who were smoking leaving clothes all over the floor and god knows what else And their opinion ohio state was far too racy a place for their little girl And so muriel was allowed to finish the year and then was brought back to boston Where she enrolled at the massachusetts college of art to pursue a career in art education When i applied to art schools and was obsessing about which art school i should attend muriel calmly told me to relax The school is an important she said it's who you go to school with And i can see why she felt that way muriel's classmates at mass art included a who's who of future designers and artists including tom wong and jackie kasey Both of whom could often be found sitting around the cooper dining room table Pulling a charrette for the next morning's class the three became lifelong friends Jack and jenny often worried about muriel. Why wasn't she married? Why didn't she conform like her siblings? Why did she dress the way she dressed? They could only see that muriel didn't fit the mold that her younger sisters did and they didn't see her brilliance Muriel was my aunt but she was much more than that to me. She was my mentor my idol and my best friend She was cool. She was loud. She could be brash And she was a big part of why i became a designer Well to be honest in large part. It was because of her basement Every year it would start with a call muriel asking if i'd like to come by some weekend and help Clean up her basement and every year I left at the chance I would spend hours upon hours in that basement with muriel asking her questions about where she had gotten this or that object Where she thought a particular item should go and she would patiently show me how to plan categorize and organize Looking back. I guess it was the equivalent to mr. Miyagi's wax on wax off method of karate training except for a young designer To me that basement was a playground a library a time capsule and a toy store all rolled into one And I can remember the contents of each box and shelf like it was yesterday Walking down the steep basement stairs. I spy a rusty erector set barely contained by its decaying box It was a gift from muriel's parents to keep her occupied while she was covering from appendicitis When she was 10 years old and charlotte recently told me when muriel first asked for an erector set Her mother replied what on earth would a girl do with an erector set? And great things apparently A large walk framed by bamboo steaming basket sits in a shelf part of a collection of kitchen gadgets A byproduct of muriel's adventures in chinese cooking My brother david Lived at muriel's house while he attended bu in the 60s And we remembers going with muriel to chinatown where she would spend half of her time purchasing exotic ingredients With barely pronounceable names and the other half chatting with the store owners muriel loved exploring world cuisines long before it became commonplace And one section of the basement is filled with clothes A few from india with fantastic colors and patterns Some from japan rich in their simplicity and detail And many many many from fileen's basement I think it was a least brink a good friend of muriel's who told the story of how she joined in on one of muriel's famous trips to fileen's muriel went up to the returns desk and placed a very large pile of clothes in the counter And the woman at the counter slowly looked through the pile and shook her head and explained They couldn't accept the return the clothes had been purchased over a year ago It was too late to return them and without missing a beat muriel calmly explained that the reason she hadn't returned them sooner Was because she'd been locked away in a mental institution For the past year and that she had just been released They nervously accepted her return There are watches some analogue and some digital Most are broken which might have been a factor in her seeming inability to arrive anywhere on time Large piles of parking tickets held together by rubber bands or a souvenir of her apparent refusal to ever pay for parking Causing the cambridge police to show up at her office at mit and threaten to cuff and arrest her on the spot In order to get her to pay them And there are family photographs magazines and clippings one clipping features a photograph of muriel Standing in an all-white room in the headline states designer boldly paints home interior white And the article goes on to describe how muriel cooper of brookline in a radical move Breaking with tradition has decided to paint the interior of her house completely white I know crazy On the floor since an unopened pack of cigarettes And as I bend down to pick them up I get a clear image of muriel's habit of approaching a random smoker a total stranger Asking if she might smell their cigarette She would hold it in her hands delicately like a wine connoisseur might hold the cork or the fine vintage wine Deeply inhaling from the glowing tip a look of ecstasy spreading over her face I've quit smoking she'd explain But god I missed the smell There's a box of calculators on the floor a souvenir of a calculus class one of many that muriel audited mit I remember how frustrated she would get doing problem sets often cursing and swearing out loud And how at the time I wondered why anyone would take a math class unless they absolutely had to There are cameras lots and lots of cameras 35 millimeter four by four and larger slide projectors movie cameras 16 millimeter eight millimeter super eight and of course polaroid cameras a medium that she loved Right next to them is what can only be described as a shrine to all things sony recorders microphones headphones walkman beta max cameras and players laser discs editing equipment I'm really realized that i'm looking at the complete history of sony corporation up to 1994 Is curated by muriel cooper There are toys in a shelf mostly robots from japan her latest fascination And they trigger a memory of the elaborate viking ship muriel gave me when I was five or so complete with articulated ores That would row and sink as they it slowly moved sales billowing across the floor It was and continues to be the best present I ever got But most of the basement is taken up by books And I take frequent breaks having picked up a book to place it on a shelf only to stop Sit on the floor and leaf through its pages Bauhaus learning from las vegas vial under architecture the whole earth catalog Books by paul ran joseph albers pushpin magazine uppercase lowercase comic books Not even reading just absorbing the pacing the structure the color The visual impact that each page contained and I was mesmerized by the cover designs the fonts and the images And at the time I didn't even realize her connection to these books that I was falling in love with Every item in that basement was precious to muriel If I asked why I couldn't throw out a calculator a beta max player or a gear bag All of them long since broken or obsolete muriel would comment on how the interface packaging or design was cute And cute Was the highest form of flattery that muriel could be stow in an object or idea We spent many weekends together at the flea market in squantum Coming upon a vendor selling an interesting old sign or piece of equipment or poster Muriel would immediately start a conversation with the seller She was not only curious about the story behind an object But the story of the owner as well and after 10 minutes or so of chatting She would stop pause look out over reading glasses and remark cute And the poor vendor would look so confused was cute meant as a put-down. Should they be Offended or complimented they didn't understand that coming from muriel cute was the highest of compliments I was with muriel when she died in mass general hospital in may of 1994 And I can honestly say like many of you not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about her I'm not a religious man But I've always liked the song rock and roll heaven which goes if there's a rock and roll heaven Well, you know, they've got a hell of a band So who knows maybe there's a graphic design heaven And jackie tom and muriel are in a white cloud filled room Sitting around the table laughing and drinking wine They're solving design problems. We can't possibly imagine. It's just another day of a perfect never-ending charrette Then suddenly at this very moment muriel pauses gets that twinkle in her eye Peers out over her reading glasses and comments on how cute our celebration here today has been Thank you two more short speakers and I'd like to thank you for coming you will not see me again and joey ito is our Next speaker and amy brand who's the head of the mit press is our last speaker If a parent can give their child To a foster home or to somebody else and be really happy with where that child is placed I in some sense gave my child to joey ito Who's been the director of the media lab for he reminded me yesterday. It's almost six years I think of it as yesterday And when joey joined it was the best thing that happened to this place So joey, you didn't know muriel, but you're cut from the same cloth Thank you everybody. Um, and I really appreciate everybody coming together to celebrate muriel and it's Interesting. It's it's not the happiest thing, but we've recently lost Seymour and marvin and this Feels to me like a kind of culmination of this sort of historical retrospective of the the founding faculty of the media lab and and I think it's uh for me in addition to hearing about all their Work through students and faculty for nicholas meeting all the people who were connected to them is and listening to the Conversations really helps me understand where a lot of this stuff comes from and this kind of very strong creativity disobedience And this sort of fearlessness that sort of embodies the media lab Now I I I've known nicholas for a long time But as I start to see these other people who were involved I I I'm starting to understand more and more about the dna and And it's and it's I think quite a testament to the founding faculty at the Media lab that 31 years now later You can still feel the dna and I think that you know this The fact that we're still You know on a trajectory that was set by the original founders And set so strongly is is a it's a testament to both their vision and their character And so you know today has been really wonderful and sort of understanding that I'm peculiarly sort of overlapping with maryland that I'm also on the board of the mit press On author there and also the director of the media lab And so and I think maryl played a really important role in sort of bringing the press and the media lab together And we're also continuing that and we uh, I think there's a demonstration in the in the auditorium But we've launched a journal called the journal of design and science So a lot of art nary has this sort of wonderful Krebs cycle that I think I got from job. Maeda who got it From rich gold but but this this sort of four quadrants where you have sort of art and Science and design and engineering and we've done a lot of art and Engineering at the media lab But the sort of design and science access had hadn't been fully explored in my view And so we created a journal and the idea was really that we brought a lot of hard sciences into the media lab And what you realize when you meet hard scientists is that they tend to be very focused and not very aware of the context about the Sensibilities that you need when you think about things and not really responsible necessarily for the sort of overall Sensibility of the stuff that they're interacting with And conversely a lot of the designers we've talked to Or I've talked to especially when you look at it might you have hundreds of classes that have the word design But the sort of design Merle has sort of morphed into Systems design and design of business practices and design of all kinds of things. It's become very engineering And there are even sort of moves to sort of remove the aesthetic side of design And one of the things that I've noticed as we look at complex self-adaptive systems like the climate like The human body that what's missing is the kind of sensibility It's it's you're doing things without this approach of trying to make the thing work in a wonderful way and that in fact the Future of design is probably going back to a sensibility and aesthetics a kind of a vision that I think we goes back to Where we were starting and so so to me designing bringing design and science together bringing a new science into design Bringing design into science is really important. I think that that's very much media lab very much MIT press very much Merle and so so that's the journal that we launched And we're launching it also on a platform called pub pub Which was developed at the media lab and it's a weird Platform that allows people to make comments allows you to version Track the versions and it's it's very much a sort of living document of a and it creates sort of a new way of thinking About peer reviews, so it's much more participatory So we'd love you to take a look and tell us what you think And I think let's see what else I'm supposed to talk about Yeah, and I think that the the main thing is that you know As we as we sort of embark on this next journey thinking about how The work that merrill has done and the work that Amy brand who you'll meet is the new director of the MIT press How we can move this forward is is is one of the core missions of the media lab So I really appreciate your past support and your future support and with that Oh and one last thing is I'm supposed to say is that There's going to be in that room in the alex drafus auditorium There'll be a video of muriel's ted 5 talk from 1994, so please take a look at that during the reception So with that I'd like to ask amy brand the director of MIT press to come up. Thank you I Just think this has been a wonderful occasion And thank you joey to mark this enduring partnership between the press and the media lab the way that joey was was talking about the media lab and You know this this sort of quadrant or nexus of Design and science and art and technology is very much the dna of the MIT press as well And I think a lot of that does go back to muriel So just 30 seconds for me lots of thank yous I wish to thank all of our amazing speakers and panelists and in particular I really want to thank nicolas for co-hosting this event I know that it's Really really heartfelt for you nicolas and I appreciate that given your deep friendship and I only wish that I had no muriel too One person that we haven't mentioned this evening, but really needs to be thanked is roger conover who's sitting right over there roger is celebrating 40 years as the art and architecture editor at the MIT press and he's created this incredible legacy Around publishing and art and architecture and design So please talk to him You um now you might have thought listening to john mayeda that you're actually going to have to buy The book but in fact Due to a generous gift from the school of architecture and planning and hashim sarkis Everybody who was invited to this event will leave with a copy of the book So I would like to thank yes all that's up there So thank you hashim But please if you have you know more people you want to buy books for they're there for purchase as well And pentagram, um, we're just in awe of you And in particular again, I'd like to thank erin fey and daisy lee who produced those really gorgeous Animations, um, we're definitely going to try to make use of them at the MIT press Especially the call of fun one at the end Many people at the press in the lab were involved in making this event possible I can't try to list all of them, but there really are three Heroes of the evening. Um, they are ellen hoffman and kate shanagan and kate strauss A really incredible and tireless event planning trio They have impeccable taste. They have good humor and they made being involved in planning this event a real Joy and privilege for me. So thank you for all of them Um And and thanks to all of you for coming and please go and enjoy the reception. Thank you