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.”