Zoë Ryan may hold the title of curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, but she’s also a translator of sorts, helping make serious design meaningful to the public. When the 31-year-old was appointed as the first-ever design curator at the museum, in 2006, she was given the mission of thoroughly overhauling and improving its small collection, an area that had been a quiet backwater. Many in the creative world were happy to hear that she had been given a job that would realize her full potential.

“Her attitude toward design is very open-minded,” says Paola Antonelli, MoMAs curator of architecture and design, for whom Ryan interned 10 years ago. “She takes in everything—from landscape design to industrial design to graphics to products—without making too much of a distinction.”

Case in point: Ryan’s memorable 2006 New York show, “The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation,” curated for the Van Alen Institute. She practiced what she was preaching in the exhibition by choosing an unusual venue – Manhattan’s Pier 40, jutting out into the Hudson River. The show melded the international design establishment—wall-mounted videos of architect Charles Renfro talking about what public space means to him—with innovative neighborhood projects like Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates “floating swimming pool,” a barge-bound recreational facility that delighted Brooklyn residents last summer.

Ryan will solidify her reputation at the Art Institute with the museum’s first show devoted exclusively to the work of a single design firm: London’s Graphic Thought Facility, a cross-disciplinary group with an improvisational, nonsleek aesthetic that is visible in such elements as the textured, perforated pages and rough cloth-bound cover of a monograph on the Dutch designer Tord Boontje. It’s an out-of-left-field choice, but it’s one that Ryan hopes viewers will embrace.

“I realize that a lot of people aren’t coming to the museum to look at architecture and design,” she says. “I want to engage them so that when they see something particularly inspiring or innovative, or a beautiful object, it makes them want to come back and study it.” And just like that, learning is fun again.

"New Blood: Zoe Ryan" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.