The Gospel According to Jan

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.