Janet Abrams
jabrams@umn.edu

Janet Abrams is Director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute. Since November 2000, when she became its first full-time director, Janet has launched numerous educational and public outreach initiatives, including an annual summer Design Camp for high school teens, the Big Urban Game, and Seven Pines Design Summit; expanded the U's undergraduate Design Minor program; developed the international DI Fellows Program; and initiated a multimedia publishing program that has yielded over a dozen titles, including Knowledge Maps, DVD films, TV programs, and two books.

Before she moved to Minneapolis, Janet worked as an architecture and design critic, editor, and conference producer, based (between 1983 and 2000) variously in London, Princeton, Chicago, Amsterdam and New York, where she launched her own consultancy, Leading Questions, in 1999.

A well-known critic in the fields of architecture, design, new media and the visual arts, her writings have been published in U.S. and European newspapers and magazines including Domus, Blueprint, New Statesman & Society, Sight & Sound, Form, Frieze and The New York Times Magazine. She served as U.S. correspondent for Blueprint, the British design monthly, from 1983-87; as architecture and photography critic for Britain's The Independent newspaper from 1988-91; and as Writer-at-Large for I.D. Magazine, the U.S. bi-monthly design magazine, from 1993-1997.

In 1998, while based at the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam, she edited IF/THEN: PLAY — Design Implications of New Media, and also served on the programming committee for the NDI's fifth Doors of Perception conference.

Janet and DI Senior Editor Peter Hall co-edited ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, a 320 page anthology on mapping in diverse disciplines (from urban cartography to visualizing the human genome) published by the DI in March 2006.

Among her other recent publications are:

• "Julie Snow: The Rugged and the Refined," the introductory essay for the monograph Julie Snow Architects: New Voices in Architecture , Princeton Architectural Press, 2005;
• "The Choreography of Site-Specific Media," a profile of designer Lisa Strausfeld, in Profile: Pentagram Design, Phaidon, 2004;

• "Inside Mies," a reminiscence of living at 880 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray, University of Chicago Press, 2005;

• "Flashback: Muriel Cooper's Visible Wisdom," in I.D. Magazine, May 2004, a reflection on the work of interaction designer and MIT Media Lab professor Muriel Cooper, a decade after her death, and the publication of "Muriel Cooper's Visible Wisdom" (republished on the AIGA website by permission).
• "Six Degress of Unreality," on the Mohegan Sun casino, designed by Rockwell Group, in Domus May 2002;
• "Wherever: Your Final Destination. Maybe" on the design of international airports, in Next, the catalog of the 8th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2002.

  She has developed or co-produced international conferences, including: Excavating the Archive: New Technologies of Memory (Parsons School of Design, New School University, June 2000); Doors of Perception 5: PLAY (Netherlands Design Institute, Amsterdam, November 1998); Jambalaya: The Design of Culture Meets the Culture of Design, the AIGA National Conference, New Orleans, November 1997; DIALogue: Real Time Blind Date Debates on Design, Technology and Popular Culture at the Cooper Union, New York, 1994-96; and the Long Lake Design Camp, held annually over the Labor Day weekend in an Adirondacks boat-house, 1996-99.

  Janet received her B.Sc. degree in Architecture at University College, London, and her Ph.D. in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism at Princeton University in 1989, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She has taught in the Master's Program in Graphic Design at Yale University, and in the Digital Design program at Parsons School of Design in New York. She serves on the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum's Education Committee, and is a board member of The Soap Factory, contemporary visual arts center in Minneapolis. She served as a Trustee of Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture, New York for over ten years, between 1994 and 2006.

  An avid swimmer, keen photographer and novice ceramicist (a passion she indulged for two wonderful weeks in summer 2005 at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and continues to pursue at Minneapolis' own Northern Clay Center), Janet is always on the lookout for opportunities to extend her collection of international laundry detergent packaging, preferably purchased herself, in situ.