About Professor Michael Cooley

Professor Michael Cooley was an Irish man born in Tuam in County Galway in 1934. As a child he was always interested in making things. This interest sowed the seed for him on his path to becoming an aerospace engineer.

In the 1970s Cooley worked in England in the Lucas Aerospace Company that produced armaments for the British government. The 1970s was a very difficult time in England and the company was facing rationalisation by the government. A ‘combine committee’ was formed (a type of trade union) by the workers. The workers then set about coming up with ideas for socially useful products that could be made with the same equipment and skills that they had. They came up with ideas ranging from a battery car to a road rail bus to portable kidney dialysis machines to name but a few. This was an example of a bottom up approach being used in an effort to save a company.  It became known as the ‘Lucas Plan’ and it has been widely studied by researchers including trade unionists and academics. Cooleys employment was terminated by the company and later on he went to work with the Greater London Enterpise (GLEB) board.

The Lucas Plan formed the basis for Cooleys ideas for a Human Centered approach to systems development. Cooley understood deeply what it meant for people to work under a scientific method. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1981 (the alternative nobel peace prize).

In March 1981 he also completed his PhD study entitled "The Impact of Computer Aided Design on Designers and the Design Process" in North East London PolyTechnic. His hypothesis was "That the introduction of Computer Aided Design(CAD) will produce in the Design Activity similar Technical and occupational problems to those which are discernable in the field of skilled manual work when subjected to technological change". It is stated in his thesis that "The findings in total tended to support the hypothesis.  They provided indicators that in consequence of CAD, some of the problems associated with Tayloristic forms of work organisation are beginning to be evident in the field of design".

His seminal book is “Architect or Bee” which forms the first in the Cooley trilogy.  It was followed by ‘Delinquent Genius: the Strange Affair of Man and his Machine’ and ‘The search for alternatives, Liberating Human Imagination: A Mike Cooley Reader’. These are but some of the books written by Professor Cooley.

Architect or bee internet archive link in irish and English - www.archive.org/details/architectorbeehu0000cool/mode/1up

He is known for his work on human centered systems across the globe and is also known for his eloquence and love of literature and poetry. He has written a number of poems one of them called “Insulting Machines”.

He along with Professor Karamjit Gill and Howard Rosenbrock were involved in setting up the journal AI & Society in 1983.

Sadly he passed away in 2020 and in 2021 prior to a webinar on ’The legacy of Mike Cooley’  Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland gave the opening address. Both he and Mike had been childhood friends. A signed and dedicated transcript was acquired by the I-CRL for the Cooley Archive, a copy of which hangs on the wall outside the I-CRL lab.