The Gospel According to Jan

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.”