[6] In 1952, Cooper was recommended to and then recruited by John Mattill to join the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology Office of Publications,[7][8] which would eventually become MIT Press.

This project dominated her work for nearly two years, to enlarge, revise, and completely redesign an American version of an earlier German edition.

[9][12][14] Cooper also made a film rendition of the book, which attempted to give an accelerated depiction of translating interactive experiences from a computer to paper.

[12] Cooper maintained her full-time position with the MIT Press until 1974, and oversaw the release of multiple series of titles in architecture, economics, biology, computer science, and sociology that formed a critical discourse around systems, feedback loops, and control.

[citation needed] Cooper taught interactive media design as the founder and head of the Visible Language Workshop (VLW).

[1][3] Although she never learned to program computers, she could see the design possibilities opened up by the technology, and worked closely with programmers and engineers to experiment with new concepts in the presentation of complex information.

[9] In 1976, her students literally broke down the (physical and metaphoric) wall between design and production of media, experimenting with a wide variety of new computing, electronics, and printing technologies.

[9]: 14 The MIT students had very diverse backgrounds and interests, and Cooper emphasized a generalist approach, encouraging them to switch flexibly among editorial, platemaking, printing, typesetting, and design tasks.

[9] In the early 1980s, Cooper secured major funding from the Outdoor Advertising Association, and pioneered the development of large-scale printers that could quickly produce billboard-sized high-resolution graphics and eventually full-color photographs.

[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".

[21] In 2014, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University hosted a retrospective of her work entitled Messages and Means: Muriel Cooper at MIT.

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

[4] In 2023. the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City acquired her MIT Press colophon design into its permanent collection.

[22][23][24] 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.