ODE Magazine by gustavovigna

INDEX Editorial

In Memorian

Muriel Cooper An Introduction to M. Cooper

Visible Language Workshop

Media Lab

Quote #1

First M. Cooper Then J. Casey

Jacqueline Casey A Forgotten Design Hero

Woman at the Edge of Technology

Quote #2

Muriel Cooper and her Visions of the Future 24

IN MEMORIAM

Professor Muriel Cooper (1925-1994), a designer, educator and researcher whose work has been internationally acknowledged in exhibits and publications, died of an apparent heart attack on May 26 at the New England Medical Center. Professor Cooper, who a in Brookline, was 68. Ms. Cooper, professor of interactive media design in the Pro in the Media Arts and Sciences at the School of Architecture and Planning, cofounded and directed MIT’s Visible Language Workshop at the Media Laboratory. “She was a remarkable woman,” said Professor Stephen A. Benton, head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences who has worked closely with her over the years. “As a founding member of the Media Laboratory, she was a wise counselor in shaping our evolution. After 15 years of leadership in graphic design, she was just reaching the fullest expression of her computational design genius. Professor Nicholas P. Negroponte, director of the Media Laboratory, said, “We have lost the leader of the most revolutionary thought about graphics and computers. All of us at the Media Lab and elsewhere, who learned so much from Muriel, are now tasked to carry those concepts forward without her, which will be very difficult but very likely, given the large number of creative minds she spawned in her teaching, her research and her very being.” Ms. Cooper’s teaching and research at the Visible Language Workshop focused on how computers can enhance the graphic communication process and, inversely, how high-quality graphics can improve computer information systems. “When you start talking about design in relation to computers,” she said in a recent interview, “you’re not just talking about how information appears on the screen, you’re talking about how it’s designed into the architecture of the machine and of the language. You have different capabilities, different constraints and variables than you have in any other medium, and nobody even knows what they are yet.” Ms. Cooper came to MIT in 1952 as director of the Institute’s newly formed Office of Publications, now known as Design Services. After leaving MIT in 1958 to take a Fulbright Scholarship in Milan, she returned to Boston and ran her own graphics studio for several years, with the MIT Press among her clients. During that time, she designed the world-famous logo for the MIT Press. In 1967, she joined the MIT Press as its first art director and became widely recognized for her innovations in book design. Her work in print includes over 500 books, more than 100 of which have been awarded recognition in various competitions. Her best known book was the Bauhaus volume. After seven years at the MIT Press, she started teaching a subject at MIT called Messages and Means which looked at graphics in relation to technaology. The course was co-taught with Ronald L MacNeil, now a principal research associate in the Media Lab. She became an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture in 1977, the first graphic designer appointed to the faculty. She was promoted to associate professor in 1981 and professor in 1988. She was the first recipient of the Robert P. Gersin Design Excellence Award given to a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art. A memorial service will be held at MIT on a date to be announced.

Jacqueline Casey (1927-1992), a graphic designer internationally recognized for her “elegant posters” for the MIT, died Monday, May 18, at her home in Brookline after a long struggle with cancer. An exhibit of her work, “ MIT/Casey, Jacqueline S. Casey A retrospective: MIT’s graphic design in evolution,” is currently being shown at the Compton Gallery at MIT. Ms. Casey joined MIT in 1955 and was assigned to produce summer session materials. She quickly became an important figure in MIT’s pioneering Office of Design Services which was among the first in the nation to hire a designer (Muriel R. Cooper, now professor of visual studies at MIT’s Media Laboratory) to represent it graphically. Ms. Casey remained with MIT until her death and was director of the Office of Design Services from 1972 to 1989 when she retired and became a visiting design scholar at the MIT Media Laboratory. Ms. Casey and Professor Cooper were students together at art school and became friends and colleagues. Professor Cooper said. The MIT Museum, which mounted the exhibit currently being shown at the Compton Gallery, also published a book on her work, “Posters, Jacqueline S. Casey: Thirty Years of Design at MIT.” Joseph P. Ansell, chair of the Visual Arts Department at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, in an appreciation of her work written for the book, said she created “some of the most elegant posters in America. Her sense of proportion is at once precise and measured, organic and humane. These seemingly opposite qualities are clearly appropriate for her subjects and her audience. Most of her posters announce arts events at [the] MIT, an institution known primarily for teaching and research in science and technology. Yet, surprisingly, those posters for other events (scientific lectures and academic programs, for example) are equally imaginative, lively and personal. Through careful analysis, Casey uncovers the essence of each subject and communicates the creative spark which is the source of all .” Nicholas P. Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Laboratory, writing in the same book, recalled meeting her when he was an 18-year-old sophomore at MIT. “We had lunch together almost every day for four years. During that time I loitered in the offices of Design Services where I learned all I know about graphic design. I learned how a design could be at once Swiss in its cleanness, Italian in its imagination, and playful like Jackie herself. Jackie always says she cannot teach. Ha! She doesn’t need to. She has already taught thousands of young designers through her work. Those of us who have had the privilege of working with Jackie did nothing but learn from her insights. She captures the essence of a design program in less time than it takes most of us to understand its constituent parts. ” Examples of her work have been acquired for permanent collection by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, the USIA, and the Library of Congress. Her work is also represented in many graphic design magazines and annuals and in books on the history of graphic design. A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10am Friday, May 22, at St. Columbkille’s Church, Brighton.

AN INTRODUCTION TO M. COOPER In 1951, John Mattill, an administrator in MIT’s News Office, established the Office of Publications to centralize and manage the growing quantity of communications across the Institute. The Office was to provide writing and editing services, in addition to giving these materials form. Mattill’s sensitivity to the importance of design came, he explained, from a summer course he had taken at the University of Iowa, where he was inspired by the typographic quality of the university’s Prairie Press iWmprint. In past, when a Dean or other MIT administrator had needed a flier or notice, he or she would go directly to the printer, resulting in diverse and often visually uninspiring results. Mattill did not know whom to hire as a designer, but asked his colleague Gyorgy Kepes, who had been teaching visual design in the Department of Architecture since 1945, for a recommendation. Kepes suggested Cooper. It is likely that the two met in Boston’s design circles, but they would have interacted, at the latest, when Cooper was working at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art in 1951, while Kepes was designing the exhibition and publicity for the 1952 retrospective of his friend, Walter Gropius. On Kepes’s recommendation, Cooper became the Office’s first in-house designer. She liked to claim, though it is difficult to verify, that the Institute’s Office of Publications was the nation’s first dedicated, in-house design office at a university. Mattill, more cautiously, agrees that it was in any case one of the very first. In her time at the Office, Cooper designed prospectuses, fliers, and even record álbum sleeves for MIT courses and events. Perhaps her largest output was of fliers for the Institute’s summer session courses , generally between one and three weeks long and taught by [Muriel Cooper] Institute faculty. About 30 such courses in technical subjects were offered each summer to scientists, engineers, and industry specialists. For each summer course, Cooper created a unique flier. Courses in 1954, the first year for which she would design pamphlets, “I have been particularly concerned carried names such as “High Temperature Ceramics,” “Transistors with the urgent need to make more and their Applications,” “Soil Technology,” “City and Regional Plan- intelligible the highly complex ning,” “Transonic Aerodynamics,” “Control Problems of the Exe- language of science, and have cutive,” and “Digital Computers: Advanced Coding Techniques.” attempted to articulate in symbolic, Cooper’s bi-fold fliers, roughly eight inches square, tended to featu- graphic form the order and beauty re bold, colorful graphics on the cover that used either illustration, inherent in the scientist’s abstract photography, or photomontage; a title, often in sans serif type, some vision. The growth and success of of it rather eccentrically spaced to suggest physical effects, such as this program has demonstrated movement or vibration; and conservative, serifed body copy inside, that a responsible design approach describing the course. To create these fliers, Cooper consulted the can interpret between scientist instructors to understand the material better, and to find artwork she and layman; influence the aesthetic might use in her design. At the start of her forty-year career at MIT, values of people within such an Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) introduced a modern visual language to institution; convey the character of the MIT Press, rationalized its production process, designed its ico- such a large, specialized institution nic logo, and gave form to seminal publications like The Bauhaus to the public; and can encourage (1969) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972); at its premature end, she the development of similar design presented a radical computer interface called “Information Landsca- programs in other institutions.” pes” to an ecstatic audience at the 5th TED conference.

Throughout, Cooper’s approach remained consistent: creating tools and systems for rapid feedback, dissolving boundaries between design and production, and restlessly seeking out new problems. Messages and Means, Cooper’s graphic course in the Department of Architecture at MIT, testifies to her distinctive, workshop pedago- [MIT Press logo designed by M. Cooper] gy, which produced some of today’s leading designers. In 1967, Cooper joined the MIT Press full-time as its first Design and Media Director. As she explained, given the growing number of freelance projects for the Press, her studio “had to either get much bigger to the exclusion of other things, or had to be made much smaller to make room for other interests. Meanwhile, the Press had developed a variety of design challenges, so I joined the Press to get at the ultimate informational design problem, the book.”1 That year, she began work on her largest project, and the one that she would consider her calling card for years to come. The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, was published in Fallw 19w69.2 aIn its nearly 700 pages, the book contains some 200 archival documents and 800 illustrations relating to the legendary German school of art and design. The book measures, including its slipcover, 141/4” tall, 101/4” wide, and 21/2” thick, tipping the scales at about 12 pounds. The Bauhaus remains in print as the authoritative collection of archival material on the subject. While Cooper spent some two years designing the book, the story of its gestation as an MIT Press project extended back eight years prior. Likewise, the book’s afterlife in other media, both realized and conceptual, extended many years out from its publication. [Bookcover Bauhaus designed by M. Cooper]

VISIBLE LANGUAGE WORKSHOP Cooper’s most sustained role at MIT was not as a designer, but as a teacher and an administrator. Equipped with her experiences at the Press, Cooper designed a program to teach undergraduates and advise graduate students in the Visible Language Workshop (VLW), and later educated industry professionals on the possibilities and future of print media: freshman looked to her as na arts instructor, while graduate students and technology companies looked to her as a kind of seer, prophetic about a rapidly changing discipline. Cooper was not teaching her students typography, or even graphic design, per se, but rather her own peculiar hybrid of media design, hands-on production, visual studies, and to some degree art history. Consequently Cooper, and the facilities she designed at MIT, came to serve as a nodal point for new arts practices across the Institute, and she found herself uniquely positioned to think and work at the intersection of art and technology, new and old media. How she did this, and did so within a school of architecture, is the subject of this chapter. Examining the distinctive nature of Cooper’s program, and her teaching—her pedagogy, her classes, and her lessons—offers unique insight into her thinking as a different kind of designer and media artist. While much of this teaching may seem elementar in retrospect or in isolation, in total it represents a new mode of thinking [Visible Language Workshop’s Black Binder] about design and media,one that Cooper actively helped to forge. Cooper was trained as an educator. After graduating from the Massachusetts School of Art in 1948, she returned there, and received two degrees, in 1951: A Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) and a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Education. Both Cooper’s siblings were also teachers: Charlotte (Lopoten), the youngest sister, taught elementary school; Helene (Jackson), the middle sister, was a professor of psychiatric social work. The practical decision to become a teacher, after studying studio art, was also not unusual for women at this time. Before and during her time at MIT, Cooper worked at other institutions. The teaching at MIT, however, star[Muriel Cooper in a meeting of the MIT PRESS] ting in 1974, also signaled a new direction in her thinking based on her research at the Press. At MIT, Cooper focused on visual communication, print, and production, rather than on typography as such. Some of the techniques she taught she would have learned in school; others she learned from peers, or came upon herself by experimentation; and still others, especially of a high-tech nature, would have been unthinkable without the expertise of one largely unsung figure, the physicist-photographer Ron MacNeil, who co-founded and co-directed the Visible Language Workshop. In 1985, the VLW moved to the MIT Media Laboratory as one of its founding research groups. There, Cooper developed the “information landscape,” a radically new interface design for text, in which the user could fly through three-dimensional textual spaces. years later, the potential of the interface is still being explored. Recognized in computer and graphic design circles as one of the greatest designers of the 20th century, Muriel Cooper trained many of [A page from the Black Binder] today’s leading practitioners, including Joel Slayton.

“The professional designer or user is separated from such communication tools and an entire intermediate language is devised for the user and the printer. Once the commitment to print is made, there is no return without great cost. Mistakes are irretrievable. Options minimal. Creativity is confined to the beginning of the process. Mass production requires this in order to survive.”

The Visible Language Workshop (VLW) was home to “Messages and Means,” a consistently oversubscribed class that introduced students to graphic design, giving them access to methods of production and encouraging them to pursue new forms of graphic communication. Led by visionary director Muriel Cooper, and embedded in the rich technological environment of MIT, the VLW was ideally positioned to innovate those new forms. As early as the 1980s, Cooper had recognized that “the shift from a mechanical to an information society demands new communication processes, new visual and verbal languages, and new relationships of education, practice, and production. In 1985, the VLW moved to the MIT Media Laboratory as one of its founding research groups. There, Cooper developed the “information landscape,” a radically new interface design for text, in which the user could fly through three-dimensional textual spaces. Years later, the potential of the interface is still being explored. Recognized in computer and graphic design circles as one of the greatest designers of the 20th century. In order to be realized, this participatory, non-authoritarian pedagogy also required a particular kind of space. While Cooper’s design work was limited to the screen and the page, she considered the creation of a production-oriented, pedagogical environment at the VLW to be one of her lasting contributions at MIT. Indeed, while Cooper played a significant role in shaping the design studios she helmed, first in the Office of Publications and then at the MIT Press, the VLW, in its various iterations, was the first full-fledged environment she created. Looking back on her career from the vantage point of the 1990s, she reflected: “My personal statement... is in building environments in which I would like to work and other people can work productively.” Later in her career, especially as computing became the VLW’s central focus, she would continue to describe the VLW as an environment, not just housing tools, but itself as a tool, or a kind of machine for image-making. For example, in draft materials for her 1981 Summer Session in “Computers and Design,” Cooper wrote: “The environment (VLW) functions as a large, interrelated, interactive, hands-on tool in which mechanical, photo-mechanical, ccccccccccccccc and electronic inputs and outputs may be used generatively.” The first course offered in the Visible Language Workshop, in 1974, co-taught by Cooper and MacNeil, was called Messages and Means. As Cooper described it, and as the course poster read, Messages and Means was about “Explorations of multiple forms of visual and verbal communication in print.” Cooper designed the two-foot-square course poster, whose credit indicates that it was printed by MacNeil. The words “Messages and Means,” in primary and secondary colors against a black square, seem to revolve around a central point in a multilayered and dynamic composition; course information appears in neat columns in the unprinted margins along each side of the sheet. The poster exemplifies Cooper’s favored “rotation” printing technique. Instead of producing negatives on multiple printing plates, the rotation method involved applying press type to acetate,

exposing the plate directly from it, and running a sheet through the press four times, changing the orientation and ink with each pass. This technique also formed the basis for her students’ first assignment. As a sign-in sheet for the first meeting of Messages and Means read: “Tonight will be a guided tour of the workshop, in particular the offset press, and we will be making participatory plates”20 The participatory aspect was that a group of four students each contributed to one quadrant of the plate, creating a cumulative design. Cooper called these “onenight” prints, and they moved from conception to result much faster than a traditional offset print, using multiple plates, would. The student prints that resulted were considerably more chaotic than Cooper’s tightly controlled design advertising the course. While the layering of information was of great interest to Cooper, the intended lesson was not merely formal; neither, for that matter, was it supposed to demonstrate a chance operation. Instead, the rotation print served the aims of the Messages and Means course, and emblematized it, in a number of ways: It helped students to learn their way around na intimidating piece of industrial machinery, and to repurpose that tool, intended for mass production, to productive ends, producing a one-off object by way of a novel design constraint; it created a direct relationship with the tool, such that the process of thinking and making, cause and effect, conceptualization and result, could be brought closer, enabling course-correction and even play. For Cooper, the idea of “connecting concept with product,” as she put it in one course description, by “using the offset press interactively,” was about increasing the rate of feedback between thinking and making, an essential thread running [Messages Means Poster by M. Cooper] through her teaching and work, in print and in software alike.

Visible Language Workshop at MIT

THE MEDIA LAB

The building, at its opening, would house the Media Lab, the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center (MIT’s contemporary art gallery), and the Council for the Arts at MIT. Pei, a graduate of MIT who had designed three previous buildings on campus, did not consider this one “a major architectural statement,” but it was nevertheless distinct from his earlier work, in form and design process, and from other buildings on campus. As built, the Lab is wrapped with a grid of white-painted, modular steel panels interspersed with tinted ribbon windows.The effect is of a hermetic, high-tech corporate center, rather opaque to the outsider (and indeed, quite compartmentalized within). The Boston Globe’s architecture critic, Robert Campbell, saw “a slightly frigid austerity” as the building’s defining trait: Rather than signaling its special status as an arts building on campus, he noted, “it looks very much like the kind of slick, anonymous corporate package you might find occupied by a computer firm in a suburban office park.” Reading the building’s skin elsewhere, Campbell noted that “The grid surface of the exterior is, whether intentionally or not, itself a metaphor for technology—immediately suggesting, by association, a positivist world of graph paper and number matrices. Yet the building’s design also telegraphs its status as a certain kind of media architecture. Reinhold Martin has analyzed the curtain wall in postwar American architecture as essential to “the new physiognomy of the office.”6 Martin describes, here in the context of a 1958 facility designed by Eero Saarinen for IBM, the “project of dematerialization associated with the reflectivity and transparency of many curtain walls and—through a common commitment to image-based communication—with postindustrial capital and media technologies.”7 While not employing a curtain wall, the Media Lab fits this description in form and function. Indeed, this postwargenealogy brings us directly to the present: “the architecture of the curtain wall,” Martin writes, “haunts all debates in today’s digital age, which is to say today’s globalized age.” The Visible Language Workshop’s presence in the Wiesner Building was a departure from the inky chaos of its first home: in its sleek new facility, the VLW manifested as rows upon rows of computer workstations in a cool, air conditioned space. The VLW’s place within MIT also represented a reorientation of the design profession at a crucial moment of technological change. As Sharon Poggenpohl, design educator and former editor of the journal Visible Language, observed in 1983, the gap between design practice and advances in computer technology was expanding at a disconcerting pace. Though she is not writing about MIT, her diagnosis of this broad cultural problem, and her suggested solutions, suggest what it is that made the VLW different. Poggenpohl first cites prevailing attitudes within computer science that make new technologies seem inaccessible to designers. [Massachusetts institute of Technology Media Laboratory] The VLW, from its founding through its later years, displayed a consistent interest in designing the tools of design themselves. As Cooper put it, in a programmatic summation of the group’s work: “We

aim to make the tools and to use them.” Even as early as her time exploring experimental technologies at the MIT Press, Cooper emblematized the figure of the “designer as producer,” a phrase coined A considerable amount of mystiby Ellen Lupton with reference to Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The cism surrounds the computer and Author as Producer.” As an alternative to the notion of “designer as its use. Certainly its special languaauthor,” Lupton borrows from Benjamin the idea that artists must ge is no small barrier; easy entry revolutionize the means of production and distribution for their work. into computer literacy is impossibThe materiality of design was mainly a phenomenon of Cooper’s le. Within computer science departmid-1970s work in the Visible Language Workshop, while her later care- ments at the university, the attitude er would involve more immaterial technologies. Lupton’s larger point, is generally, “Learn my language however, is that the designer must be in control of his or her tools, be and then we’ll talk.” they digital or analog, and indeed empower users in a similar way. The essential transition that Cooper negotiated in her late years was from the computer as one tool among many in creating visual messages to the medium itself, within which all other media would circulate. The titles of Cooper’s summer session courses over a short period reflect this shift: In 1979, the VLW presented “Graphic Design: Computers and Other Tools”; in 1983, however, it offered “The New Graphics: A Computer Workshop in Visual Communication,” suggesting that the graphics field itself was now the domain of the computer. As Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg wrote in 1977, imagining the possibilities of their “Dynabook” as a personal computer: “What would happen in a world in which everyone had a Dynabook? If such a machine were designed in a way that any owner could mold and channel its power to his own needs, then a new kind of medium would have been created: a metamedium, whose contente would be a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media.”57 Expanding on this coinage of the metamedium, Kay reflected in 1989 on the lessons he had taken from Marshall McLuhan. The sum total to me [of McLuhan] was a shock that reverberates even now. The computer is a medium! I had always thought of it as a tool, perhaps a vehicle— a much weaker conception. What McLuhan was saying is that if the personal computer is a truly new medium, then the very use of it would actually change the thought patterns of an entire civilization. Within this medium, in all its fluidity, diverse content could coexist and be accessed in the nonlinear way Cooper had sought from all media: As she conceded in the 1990s, “I guess I’m never sure that print is truly linear.” Likewise, the use of videodisc technology at the Architecture Machine Group, and the appeal of hyperlinking— as Cooper reimagined a digital version of The Bauhaus—all underscore her interest in new media’s properties even as she worked in the world of print. The VLW, as it appeared officially, two years later, within the MIT Media Lab, would solve many of these problems: it aimed to educate a new kind of designer, conversant in computers and competent with diverse, time-based media.

In 1955, Jacqueline Casey was recruited by fellow MassArt alumna Muriel Cooper to work at the Office of Publications at MIT. In 1972, Casey became Design Director of MIT Press, taking over this position as her colleague joined the MIT faculty. As Director of Design Services many of her posters have been created to publicise exhibitions organised by the MIT Committee on the Visual Arts. She adopted the new Swiss typefaces Helvetica and Univers almost exclusively, combining typography with bold geometric forms and contrasting planes of color. The precision and clarity of post-war Swiss design, on which her work was based, were often tempered with metaphor, witty word puzzles and double meanings appropriate for her academic audience. Using striking colors, humor and modernity. Speaking of her designs in 1988, she said: ‘My job is to stop anyone I can with an arresting or puzzling image, and entice the viewer to read the message in small type and above all to attend the exhibition.’ In 1989, Casey retired and became a visiting design scholar at the MIT Media Laboratory. Today, Casey is admired as an innovative designer who broke professional gender barriers and elevated design within the culture of MIT.

A FORGOTTEN DESIGN HERO The uprising of female activists pushing for gender equality is a prevailing following that can be seen throughout the world. With gender equality issues being prevalent throughout centuries, the new wave of self emancipation and freedom has seen the fight for women’s rights in equal pay, abolishment of domestic violence and overall equality. It’s a known fact that the workforce, politics and many more fields were predominantly male driven. Similarly, women working in the design field lacked recognition, whereby their primary role was within administration and assistant positions. This dramatic change now sees women worldwide as Directors, Presidents and Senior Designers, coming a long way from what the design industry once was. However, many female artists and designers go unrecognised. When even searching for graphic, industrial or fashion designers more than likely a male designer will be the first listed. It is a fact that since 1970, female students have comprised over 50 per cent of graphic design graduates. It is this ongoing push to have female designers recognised and rewarded for their work which they execute equally as great as their male counterparts. Jacqueline S. Casey; a female graphic designer born in Quincy, Massachusetts, is responsible for introducing the International In 1972, Casey took over as director Typographic Style to the US. Casey is best known for the type pos- of the Office of Publications, ters she created for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). where she designed a series of However, majority of designers will have never heard of Casey, in posters to advertise MIT exhibitions comparison to someone like Joseph Muller Brockman, whose work and their events events, alongside is at equal talent of Casey’s. It is blatantly clear that design has sha- her fellow male designers Ralph dowed women in the industry, despite the large group of women Coburn and Dietmar Winkler. working within graphic design. Casey’s posters focused on the use This already gives evidence to a of a striking image combined with bold typography, with hierarchy women working in a mans world. at the forefront, having small supporting details in small text. Casey’s work pays homage the influence of the Grid, established by the post-war graphic designers in Switzerland. Research in the secondary education system today shows that women have a better self concept of ability in all female learning environments. This alludes to the idea of mwarginalised and sidestepped women in design industry, where a predominantly male environment can potentially hinder female design capabilities where equality isn’t evident. There a many barriers that can determine women being successful at work. These include their work being ‘task oriented’ instead of ‘career oriented’, the latter requiring experience with liaising with the client, taking the stance to make decisions to influence the running of the firm, acquiring the confidence to put forward one’s own designs as being the most creative and best solution and so on. If the organisational culture is male dominated, [Jacqueline Casey] women get the subtle message that they are not really expected to do those things, or at least to do them well. Casey’s design style was strongly influenced by the Swiss designers. It is a blend of the cleanliness of Italian and Swiss design. The most common typeface used which can be seen in her artwork, were Helvetica and Universe; making these typefaces work in clean and neat conjunction with the geometric structure of her design.

This use of proportions in designing publications series became a useful tool for developing MIT’s image.’ In Casey’s ‘Goya’ Poster, it’s clearly evident that Typography plays a primary role in Casey’s artwork. In each of Casey’s posters, a visual element attracts the viewer and the text provides supporting information. The female stereotype in the design industry, notes that women designers do sedentary work on textiles, fashion and ‘pretty pictures’ (graphics), while the men do the ‘rougher’ ‘more practical’ work of designing consumer and industrial products. Casey challenges this stereotype, in most of her best work she includes a visual metaphor, as is evidently included on her ‘Goya’ Poster, with the use of a ‘blood splat’ as the forefront symbol for her poster; Goya: The Disasters [Goya Poster by J. Casey] of War. Casey’s designs emit simplicity, structure and functionality. By adhering to the grid structure, and formal use of hierarchy through type, Casey’s designs create a consistent series with the hope to challenge our imagination, and to search and discover a more profound understanding of the intentions of the design. Casey’s legacy should be noted. Her work has been permanently stored in art museums such as in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the USIA, and the Library of Congress. Casey’s design work is also displayed in many design magazines and and is in the books on the history of graphic design. When reflective upon Casey’s success, McQuiston explains how it can be seen why so many women in the design field want to be acknowledged for the ideas and work they produce. It is opposed to the traditions of being singled out for the fact that they happen to be women.

[MIT Gospel Choir Poster by J. Casey]

[Lecture and Performance Poster by J. Casey]

WOMAN AT THE EDGE OF TECHNOLOGY There are many women designers who deserve to be recognised for their immense contributions to the field of graphic design, but few so deserving as Jacqueline Casey. A 1949 graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art [now known as Massachusetts College of Art and Design], Casey joined the Office of Publications at the MIT in 1955, serving under director John Mattill and staffer (and fellow alumna) Muriel Cooper. In 1972, Casey took over as director of the renamed Design Services Office, where she created a series of iconic posters to publicise MIT events and exhibitions along with fellow designers Ralph Coburn and Dietmar Winkler. She was a woman in a man’s world, not only in the publications office, but also in the MIT community that served as her clientele. Casey’s visual language style was strongly influenced by the Swiss designers Karl Gerstner, Armin Hofmann and Josef Müller-Brockmann and the International Style. Thérèse Moll, a young Swiss designer who had been an assistant in Karl Gerstner’s Basel office and who briefly worked in the MIT publications office in 1959, is the one person Casey credited with her introduction to the grid and its design philosophy: ‘She introduced the office to European typography... This use of proportions in designing publications series became a useful tool for developing MIT’s image.’ Typography plays a fundamental role in Casey’s posters: a complete visual image can be created entirely from the message content and the image becomes the message. ‘My job is to stop anyone I can with an arresting or puzzling image, and entice the viewer to read the message in small type and above all to attend the exhibition,’ she told Liz McQuiston in Women In Design (Trefoil, 1988). In each of Casey’s posters, a visual element attracts the viewer and the text provides information. She is at her best when she employs a visual metaphor, as she does so brilliantly with the use of a ‘blood splat’ as the solitary image for her exhibition poster ‘Goya: The Disasters [Intimate Architecture Poster by J. Casey] of War’, where the interplay of visual and verbal ignites our imagination and encourages a more profound understanding of its subject. And another astonishing visual statement for a poster announcing the exhibition‘Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design’, Casey, working with Robert Mapplethorpe images, places the typography without interfering with the striking photograph. Her concept incorporated the text by gently following the folds of the dress in a manner that achieved seamless integration between type and image. Casey was also known for her word play and inventiveness while using the highly ‘rational’ Swiss design methodology. ‘Russia, USA Peace, 1985’ is a poster commissioned by the Shoshin Society (also known as the Hiroshima Appe- MIT is renowned for teaching and als peace campaign) to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the research in science and technolobombing of Hiroshima. Using a predominantly black poster with a gy. Casey’s work for its academic clear varnished image of the planet Earth in the upper right-hand community engaged the intellect of corner, Casey discovers the word USA nestled within the word her audience by its ability to identify ‘Russia’ and uses colour (red and white) to separate the two su- and reveal the ‘essence’ of each subperpowers, visually suggesting that they were inextricably linked ject in a profound yet human form. in their quest for peace.

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Cooper, who died in 1994 at the age of 68, was considered an influential and pioneering graphic designer during her lifetime, and she’s taken on somewhat of a cult status among a new generation of designers after her death. Tenured at MIT and a fellow of its Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), Cooper also founded the MIT Office of Publications, where she was known for bringing her Bauhaus-influenced style to book design and for creating the beloved MIT Press logo (a highly stylized ‘MITP’ that invokes a shelf of book spines). 2017 marked the 50th anniversary of Cooper’s appointment as design director of the MIT Press, which the school celebrated with an exhibition, symposium, and new monograph published by the press and written by art historian Robert Wiesenberger and designer David Reinfurt. Along with her contributions to print design, Cooper is also widely celebrated for charting new territory for design in the emerging landscape of electronic communication. She did this not as a designer (despite attempts, Cooper never did learn to code) but as an educator. Through her own work and that of her students and fellow faculty at VLW, she was one of the first to see the incredible potential in computers for design, understanding them not only as a tool for engineering and calculation, as her contemporaries at MIT did, but as an inventive means for organizing information visually and for the design process. In our contemporary life surrounded by screens, the work of VLW is “ambient and pervasive,” Reinfurt says, even if it’s not entirely “visible.” “Cooper and the VLW’s research is in the anti-aliased fonts that we read on screen,” he tells me. “[They] made possible the rendering of text on-screen which was readable and expressive. They imagined that reading and writing would increasingly happen across a network. You can see it in digital animation programs. You can recognize their approach to responsive, immediate interfaces in software design from Instagram to Photoshop.” This malleable, experimental thinking was a staple of the workshop even before computers entered the picture. The first document in the VLW binder shows, in fact, is a poster produced by students in which each section appears to be charging static type with a sense of movement. The swirling formations of type were likely devised using the “The Rotation System,” which Cooper conceived of as an exercise for the VLW’s influential first course, “Messages and Means.” The technique involved running square sheets of paper through the press four times, rotating the paper and changing the inks with every pass. From time to time Cooper would create typographic compositions in this way—as in her famous “Message and Means” course poster—or use a similar technique on abstract shapes. In addition to producing expressive typographic pieces, the exercise was also meant to encourage a direct and immediate relationship to tools, and it would influence the way that Cooper went on to think about computers in the years proceeding. As Reinfurt and Weisenberger suggest in their book, Cooper’s early print techniques are key to understanding her later interface design. Weisenberger writes that throughout her career, Cooper’s concerns “remained remarkably consistent: she turned

reproductive technologies to productive ends; made or modified tools and systems to achieve quicker feedback between thinking and making; and dissolved the lines between design, production, and different media.” These concerns are visible in her early print work and they became “evident in her exploration of software starting in the mid-’70s.” In 1985, the VLW became one of the original research groups of the newly founded MIT Media Lab, which would eventually be comprised of 13 departments—including telecommunications; film and video; speech recognition; and the cutting-edge Architecture Machine think tank. Cooper’s VLW lent tools to the other labs and worked together with them on various research projects. Her collaborative spirit was evident in her pedagogy throughout her time at MIT. She had an “open source” ethic before the term was coined during the free software movement; the code developed by VLW staff and students was available to classes of subsequent generations, allowing new students to pick up threads of research or a code base to develop new design work. Cooper complemented the multidisciplinary intellectual environment with a modular physical environment, which allowed students of the VLW to fluctuate between editorial, platemaking, printing, typesetting, and, eventually, the various possible techniques afforded by digital tools. As early as the ‘70s, Cooper predicted that in the future, there wouldn’t be as many sole typographers or plate-makers or other design specialists. Rather, she imagined that a new kind of “design generalist” would take over the industry—a description that could be applied to many graphic designers working today. In the monograph, Reinfurt quotes a conversation between Cooper and Steven Heller in 1989 that underscores this prediction. “I was convinced that the line between reproduction tools and design would blur when information became electronic,” Cooper said, “and that the lines between designer and artists, author and designer, professional and amateur would also dissolve.” Before I leave the archive, Grubman shows me several posters by Jacqueline Casey, another female design pioneer at MIT who Cooper recruited as her replacement at the Office of Publication in 1972. Inside a press booklet designed by Casey on the occasion of the Media Lab’s Wiesner Building opening, there’s a photograph of Cooper with her large ‘70s spectacles, vintage curly hair, and good-humored smile standing surrounded by her students. This is how she presented herself, as a member of her own workshop—one mind among many others who were driven by the special energy of her vision. Casey’s work carries an echo of Cooper’s special brand of ‘70s Swiss modernism, which, as Grubman points out, is a legacy that permeates through the general look of contemporary MIT. Stepping outside of the Wiesner Building, I can see Cooper’s design style tracing the campus: It’s especially clear in the Helvetica wayfinding. But I can also appreciate her invisible traces, the less obvious and less tangible work that took place in this building and that has carried far beyond this campus—into the ethos and ideas of digital design, and even to the screen inside my pocket.

[Multiple Interactions Poster by Muriel Cooper]