A large crowd packed the McCarty Auditorium in the Art and Architecture building at 5:30 p.m. March 31 to hear Janet Abrams, an internationally renowned designer, present a lecture on mapping.

The lecture was part of the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Series supported by UT's College of Architecture and Design. It was free and open to the public.

Abrams, author of "ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING" and director of the Design Institute at the University of Minnesota College of Design, began with a brief history of herself and her career.

In her early years of tenure at the University of Minnesota, Abrams worked with the Twin Cities Design Corporation. In collaboration with Twin Cities Design Corporation, design minors were to map the Twin Cities in a new way by thinking of a theme of everyday living. One project mapped the city by reading it acoustically.  Other mapping themes included spiritual sites, homes and community gardens. According to Abrams, the topics were diverse but represented the city well.

Another way of mapping the Twin Cities came in the form of racing big inflatable game pieces around the cities, said Abrams. Dubbed with the name "Big Urban Game," or B.U.G. for short, participants raced giant game pieces around the Twin Cities using one of two routes chosen by residents voting online for which one they thought would be the best, or worst, said Abrams.

After discussing her early years of tenure, Abrams continued with her main focus of the lecture: the concepts in her book. Concepts included "the spaces between" Abrams said, and using mapping "as a strategy for comprehending the spaces between people, buildings and disciplines," she explained.

The book, according to Abrams, translates the mapping of a physical space to a world of virtual space. One example Abrams gave depicts the work of Jeremy Woods using GPS technology to draw out "True places never are," a quote by Herman Melville, within various communities.

Another example Abrams gave of this new way of mapping was Christian Nold's emotion maps of various cities such as San Francisco and Greenwich, England. According to Abrams, Nold "looked at emotions and how people were aroused by the urban landscapes." Some of the emotions on Nold's maps included reactions to smells, sights and emotions like love or disgust.

At the close of the lecture, Abrams said she wishes to "take mapping into more knowledge or technological" advances. A question and answer session followed.