Design Research help me understand what differentiates designers from each other, considering their cultural factors that shaped their environment, understand the specific elements of inspiration and possibly that can personally help me to create original work. Also this course have helped me to understand how to define the characteristics of the design elements associated with designers work, color, typography, textures, shapes.

 

In my personal opinion a leader and pioneer was Muriel Cooper, who founded the Visible Language Workshop at MIT in 197X.  Cooper called the basic elements of this language ‘geometric primitives’, defined by relationships of size, brightness, color, transparency, and location in 3-D space, variables which can shift in response to the user¹s position in a document(typotheque,2004). She conceptually and literally transformed conventional principles of design into new strategies for visualizing information.  She was a leader integrating words and images on screen in a way that filtered and communicated information based on the reader/user’s interest (MITNews, 1994). 

 

Ms. Cooper was a pioneering book designer, digital designer, researcher, and educator. She was the longtime art director of the MIT Press, instilling a Bauhaus-influenced design style into its many publications.  She moved on to become founder of MIT’s Visible Language Workshop, and later became a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab (MITNews, 1994).  In 2007, a New York Times article called her “the design heroine you’ve probably never heard of.”  “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.”