Legacy

Professor Muriel Cooper died unexpectedly of an apparent heart attack at the age of 68, on May 26, 1994 at the New England Medical Center in Boston. At the time of her death, she was still active as a full-time professor and was the first and only female tenured professor in the MIT Media Lab.[6]

About a year later, a retrospective exhibition at the Media Lab reviewed her life and career.[5] In 1997, the Design Management Institute established a prize in her name that "honors an individual who, like Muriel herself, challenges our understanding and experience of interactive digital communication".[18] In 2014, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University hosted a retrospective of her work entitled Messages and Means: Muriel Cooper at MIT.[19]

In 2017, MIT Press published a large-format, slipcased hardcover book, reviewing Cooper's career and providing many examples of her design work.[4]

Archives of Muriel Cooper's work and papers are held at the Morton R. Godine Library at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, her alma mater.[7]