The Gospel According to Jan

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.