Michael Cooley was born in Tuam in the west of Ireland in 1934. He was educated at local Catholic schools and later studied engineering in the UK. In industry he specialised in engineering design and gained a PhD in computer-aided design.
Mike Cooley was national president of the Designers' Union in 1971 and a TUC delegate for many years. A design engineer for eighteen years, he was a founder member of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards' Committee and one of the authors of its Plan for Socially Useful Production.
He has lectured at universities in Australia, Europe and the United States. He has been a guest professor at the University of Bremen, and visiting professor at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He has written for a variety of publications world wide including the Guardian, the Listener and the New Statesman. He has produced over forty scientific papers and is author or joint author of eleven books in English and German and has contributed to some thirty-five more. His work has been translated into over twenty languages from Finnish to Japanese. He is an international authority on human-centred computer-based systems and in 1981 was joint winner of the $50,000 Alternative Nobel Prize, which he donated to the Lucas Combine Committee.
Mike Cooley has been chairman and director of several manufacturing companies in his capacity as director of technology of the Greater London Enterprise Board in the 1980s. His book, Arhcitect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology was re-published in 2016 and Delinquent Genius: The Strange Affair of Man and His Technology, written in 2008, was published in 2018 by Spokesman.
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