At the VLW, Cooper taught design using interactive media, a relatively new concept. VLW co-founder Ron MacNeil described the workshop as “the very grubby beginning of her third act. It was way before the Internet, way before the PC.” MacNeil was not a computer programmer and neither was Cooper, though she was among the first to see the potential of computers as tools for inventing new ways to organize visual information. With MacNeil, she created a learning environment that shaped the future of interface design. The students came from diverse disciplines. They were architects, artists, graphic designers, engineers, computer scientists, teaming up on experimental design ideas. “It was a group of eager, very smart future designer-disrupters,” MacNeil said, “with Muriel as the lioness den mother teaching them the ways of disruption.” Eleven years after its founding, in 1985 the VLW became one of the Media Lab’s first research groups. Cooper, who was the first graphic designer on the MIT faculty, became the Lab’s first female faculty member to be awarded tenure. “Muriel really guided us,” said former student Lisa Strausfeld, who studied with Muriel in the 1990s. “She taught in a very unusual way. I didn’t even know that I was being taught.” Strausfeld stressed that technology did not lead the work. “Muriel wanted there to be meaning. She wanted to communicate… She wanted the work to represent the content.”