The Gospel According to Jan

From her stylish (but not trendy) clothing to her “ermine”-colored Audi A4 and mid-century modern Danish furniture, Janet Abrams lives, breathes, and sleeps design. But, she’ll be quick to tell you, so do you. Because, in her words, “the world is design.”

Abrams is the ultimate connector. She relentlessly networks in her industry, finds just the right academic or cultural reference at just the right time, and works hard to create pathways where they don’t exist. Making these connections seems to be second nature to her, which is a good thing because a vast part of her job requires her to do so. As director of the University of Minnesota’s vaunted Design Institute, Abrams connects designers with design students, faculty members from one discipline with faculty members from another, industry leaders with community leaders, and the rest of us with our urban environment.

You may not have heard of her, but around the globe people with an interest in design surely have. Abrams’s Rolodex is a who’s who in the design and architecture worlds and includes luminaries such as Michael Graves and Charlie Lazor and entities such as MOMA and MIT. Her boss, Tom Fisher, dean of the U of M’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture—the auspices under which the Design Institute operates—says that though Abrams is often underappreciated and sometimes misunderstood in the Twin Cities, her expertise is widely acknowledged internationally.

With Abrams at the helm, the Design Institute has, for the past five years, made waves around the world and here at home. Her staff—Peter Hall, Pat Hemmis, Deborah Littlejohn, and Wendy Friedmeyer—has researched and synthesized such seemingly disparate areas as architecture and fashion design and continues to move toward its objective of educating the public on what makes “good” design—and why we should care.

To Abrams, design is architecture and product packaging. It’s the layout of a city and the resolution of a television screen. But design is also how each of us experiences these things and why we interact with them the way we do. Your cell phone fits in your palm—or doesn’t—for the same reason your car’s bucket seats support—or don’t support—your posture.

Abrams, a London native, recently extended her contract at the institute by three years—long enough to see major initiatives to fruition. She has played a leading role in this year’s merging of CALA with the university’s College of Human Ecology, which includes the design, housing, and apparel program, and is currently involved in planning a product-design curriculum that will probably be offered in the fall of next year. She has helped restructure the U of M’s design minor and has developed the U’s popular Design Camp for high school students. She has also overseen a multifaceted design fair, coedited a book published this spring, guided the institute’s fellows on diverse projects, and written dozens of grant proposals to fund future fellowships and projects.

The Design Institute, simply described, is a think tank for designers and design-minded students. Behind Abrams’s leadership, says Fisher, it “has brought some of the leading thinkers about design here to broaden the scope and increase connections to other disciplines. Connecting design and biology or design and digital mapping technology are examples of how [the institute] has expanded what we think of as design.”

It’s no accident that the institute was created in the Twin Cities—or that it has flourished here. “We’re talking about the place where the Walker is, where Target is, and 3M, and where all these major companies that really make the history of industrial design are located,” says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. “So Jan has a lot of great material to work with. But I think that the kind of collaborations that she established with these companies really contributed to putting the Design Institute on the map.”

Headquartered in an airy space in Northrop Auditorium, the Design Institute is decorated with Blu Dot furniture and posters created for its conferences and classes. Down the hall, Jan Abrams’s office is its command center.

Her personal workspace can be described as organized chaos. One wall holds a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf overflowing with printed matter, running the gamut from books on political philosophy to programs from some of the many conferences she’s chaired. Stacks of magazines, posters, and other materials cover the floor perimeter and every elevated surface. “My office is overwhelming,” she concedes, “but I know where everything is.” When she wants to show you a journal citation, she springs off her chair before you know what she’s looking for and finds it at once.

It’s here where she writes grant proposals, helps define fellows’ proposals, and persuades industry leaders from around the world to come to Minnesota and speak at a conference or teach at Design Camp for a nominal fee. “Jan has an amazing list of contacts,” says MOMA’s Antonelli. “When you get an e-mail from her, even if it’s an e-mail sent to an enormous number of people, you don’t discount it. You see what she has to say.”

When she’s not at the office, speaking at a design summit, or visiting her family in England, Abrams is renovating her Prospect Park home—a 1941 gem that she affectionately says is of the “California–Prairie School–Moderne” style. It’s the quirky home of a quirky owner. From each corner of the two-story structure the opposite corner is visible. The front door has a porthole that complements the nautical pipelike railing leading up to the front stoop. In the living room, Abrams prominently displays her collection of about sixty laundry-detergent boxes, which she describes as “varied and colorful—great examples of typographic exuberance.”

At forty-six, Abrams is petite, but commanding. Her working wardrobe comprises classic pieces, and each has something unique, be it a sweater’s embellishment, a skirt’s pleating, or a jacket’s distinctive collar. Her hair—dark brown, with a natural wave—is cut short. She loves documentaries and foreign films (especially Iranian), plays classical music on her baby grand, and attends pottery classes. She says she’s “single and interested in not being single.”

By training and experience, Abrams is a journalist. She spent the better part of two decades writing and editing stories about design and architecture for industry journals in the United States and abroad and for organizations such as the Netherlands Design Institute. Six months before she was recruited by the U of M, she launched Leading Questions, a New York–based design-research consultancy. She is currently on the editorial board of Dwell magazine, a trustee of the Van Alen Institute (dedicated to improving public design in New York City), and an education committee member of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a New York outpost of the Smithsonian Institution.

When Abrams arrived at the U of M in November 2000, the design minor was a fledgling program set up with money from the Design Initiative—the precursor of the Design Institute and one of five initiatives created by Mark Yudof, who was then university president. The program has since become part of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, enabling the institute to receive revenue from tuition for design minor classes—its only income from tuition.

“We needed a leader, and we got one,” says Yudof, now chancellor of the University of Texas System. “She held conferences attended by design luminaries, she made contacts with local governments and businesses confronting design problems, and she brought faculty from multiple disciplines into the enterprise.”

Shortly after Abrams’s arrival, Minneapolis-based Target Corporation gave the institute a $1 million grant to develop a design camp for high school students and a design fair for the general public. The fair—called the Twin Cities Design Celebration—was held in 2003. The fifth camp will be this summer. “[The Target grant] raised the stakes immediately,” says Abrams. Without it, she acknowledges, the agendas of her first few years here would have been less ambitious. As it happened, she and the institute were off to a fast start.

The Big Urban Game, a well-publicized part of the design fair, was an experiment in promoting public interaction with the physical community. Teams moved giant, brightly colored pawns around the Twin Cities, following a route voted on at a special website the institute created for the game. “BUG was a game, not a conference,” Abrams explains. “It wasn’t a set of lectures about urban design.” It was an attempt, she says, to get people to look at their city in a fresh way and to ask, for example, why city planners chose to put a particular park across from a particular school or lay a walking path under a bridge instead of across a road. In four days, some 3,000 directional votes had been cast at the website—an early sign of Abrams’s unconventional ability to connect strangers with one another and with their environment. “There are other ways than the normal to get people thinking and doing things together,” she says.

On a somewhat more predictable level, notes Twin Cities architect Julie Snow, Abrams and the institute “play an important role in developing design strategies for projects that might not otherwise be inspired by design,” such as the Midtown Greenway bridges concept plan that Snow developed with the institute’s backing.

It’s no surprise that BUG, a navigational game, has been one of the Design Institute’s most successful public projects. Jan Abrams is obsessed with maps. Geographic and topographic maps, sure, but also conceptual maps of perspective that help reveal how you, your neighbor, and your uncle view and experience your world, not to mention the path you take to get from one website to the next and the one after that, and the train of thought that created that path. By Abrams’s definition, a map is not only something that is designed or a tool with which to explore design—mapping, as an activity, is a fundamental part of the design process. Her new book, Else/Where: Mapping (also funded by Target), is entirely about the process and phenomenon, and after four years of research she still isn’t tired of the topic.

A map would be useful when listening to Abrams speak. Typically, she jumps from one reference to another: from a personal story to a quote from a book; an academic theorem to a pop culture quip. “She has an incredible memory and ability to connect seemingly disparate lines of thinking and research,” says Else/Where coeditor Peter Hall, the institute’s senior editor and a visiting graphic design professor at Yale University in Connecticut. Her tangents circle and wind and weave their way back to their original course, but the listener often finds herself as interested in the way a conclusion was reached as in the conclusion itself. It is Abrams’s belief that the journey may be more revealing than the destination that helps motivate her to continually reevaluate what design is and could be.

“She unwraps an argument to find its core material,” says Julie Snow. “She is not afraid of being the provocateur”—a term, interestingly, also used by renowned architect and designer Michael Graves when he talks about Abrams.

Both her curiosity and eagerness to challenge conventional wisdom should put Abrams in an excellent position to help shape the curriculum of the U of M’s new product design program. “I feel like for the next few years I have an opportunity to really rethink and ask some serious questions about what I believe design is in the context of developing a curriculum with colleagues,” she says. “Questions like, What is design? What should we ideally be creating for a new degree at this point in the twenty-first century? What kinds of opportunities are students going to [find] professionally?”        

The new program will feature design studio classes, seminars, and history courses. “Students will be able to go to a museum or shopping mall and start to use critical intelligence to assess what they’re seeing,” Abrams explains. “They’ll learn techniques of observing people’s behavior with objects and look at marketing trends and business models for putting a product into development.”

Abrams plans to teach a class on mapping and information visualization. “I’m coming to recognize a tendency in myself to see the world as this very interconnected, complex experience,” she says, “and I want to share that. Not to dish it out and say, ‘This is how I see the world,’ but to provide a way for others to experience the world that I experience.”

She’s also interested in the life cycle of the myriad consumer products that surround and threaten to inundate us. “Right now, everybody talks about the iPod,” she says, “but when I was a child it was the transistor radio, it was the Sony Walkman. Let’s look at what becomes of the discarded objects. Where is your Walkman now? Is it in a cupboard or in a landfill?” She notes that twentieth-century product design didn’t solve such problems. “That whole cycle of the new, the unprecedented, becoming the obvious, becoming old hat is also part of the story of design,” she says.

Ideally, she hopes, the new program’s grads will help create a future of eco-friendly product design, finding ways to design products that provide more meaningful experiences for the user, thus extending a product’s usefulness and minimizing wasteful byproducts. “There’s a lot of interest in sustainable design and biomimicry, using models from nature as the principles by which to develop new products,” she says. “What we’d like to do here is breed a whole group of very sentient designers.”

One measure of the Design Institute’s success under Jan Abrams is its ability to attract big names in the industry. The big names, in turn, attract media attention that helps draw corporate sponsorships and other financial support. Of the first half of that proposition Abrams says, “Success is when you call someone in another country and ask them to give up their salaries for weeks and come here for much less money, and they say yes without hesitating.”

Bill Moran, owner of BLinc Publishing in St. Paul and a U of M lecturer on the history of typefaces, says, “Jan is very thorough about bringing in nationally and internationally known designers to teach and present, and these individuals act as ambassadors for the vibrant design community she fosters. These ambassadors [then] encourage people in their communities or countries to take a close look at what’s going on here. It’s typical for her to start a response to an idea with the phrase, ‘You know who you should meet . . . ’ and proceed to introduce you to five people who can share ideas about what you’re doing.”

Abrams’s next projects include taking Design Camp and BUG to other cities, possibly starting a study-abroad program for design industry professionals, and creating a K–12 design-education research center at the college.

“Like many strong leaders,” Tom Fisher says, “she has largely defined the vision and scope of the organization. The Design Institute is an entity that does not just do teaching, research, and outreach related to design, but is also an experiment in what higher education might be like in the future, with a much more fluid structure, doing highly interdisciplinary research, teaching a wide range of traditional and nontraditional students, and serving the community by helping envision new forms of community, new kinds of economic activity, and new possibilities of professional service.”

“Doing something differently,” says Abrams, “causes me to think about how it has been done before, to question what is normal, and to realize that just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s the only way or even the best way.” This is her argument behind what makes good design—and how we can encourage better design—and how she approaches forming the new program’s curriculum.

“What is interesting to me are those designs that open up new kinds of experiences. A chair will change your posture—hopefully mine,” she says, chuckling. “And an angle or a finish on a pen will change the feel of writing.” But a design’s perception is subjective. “These are total constructs in the eyes—or the butt—of the beholder. How comfortable is this chair? Different to me than it is to you.

“A definition of design is solving problems,” she adds. “But that definition gets you stuck if you think that’s all that design is, or that good design is form that follows function, because there can be many functions, and one function could be to prod you out of your complacency.” 

Megan Wiley is Mpls.St.Paul Magazine’s online editor.

Intelligent Design As you would expect, Jan Abrams has strong—and sometimes surprising—opinions about what is good design. Here, in no particular order, are a few of her local design favorites. * The Hiawatha light-rail station at the airport and the Hiawatha system’s graphics, which she describes as “clear and consistent, in contrast to the disappointing jumble of station architectural styles.” * The Uptown Theatre’s “beaconlike” sign. Her second choice for neon is the sign outside the Arby’s restaurant on University Avenue near Huron Boulevard. * The original auditorium, now the cinema, at the Walker Art Center—“a perfect size and atmosphere for performances of all kinds”—and Edward Larrabee Barnes’s “luminous” spaces everywhere. * Charlie Lazor’s Kenwood house—“a breath of fresh air” from the creator of Blu Dot furniture. * Bill Moran’s loft studio in St. Paul and Types of Insects/Insects of Type, a book he designed and published with a Jerome Foundation grant. * Any stone-carved lettering by Janey Westin, such as that in the sanctuary at Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka.   —M. W.