Faculty Fellows: John Archer

John Archer, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Design Center/Dayton Hudson Faculty Fellow, 2003-2004.

Designing for Difference

Dr. Archer conducted a project titled “Designing for Difference.” This was a cultural analysis of difference as more than simple pluralism or diversity: it meant analyzing and critiquing current understandings of difference and its place in US culture. He was exploring the positive roles that differences of multiple sorts play in the constitution of human identity, and in articulating the multiple interests and needs that obtain for every person. The overall direction of Archer’s work was to develop a theoretical and critical vocabulary for reframing the discussion of design.

Archer’s approach was in part a theoretical analysis and in part a design analysis of techniques that can afford a greater degree of distinction in individual dwellings, neighborhoods, and communities. Such techniques include: (a) ways of enhancing and expressing multiplicity; (b) techniques for selectively articulating dimensions of affinity; (c) opportunities for selectively appropriating other elements in the environment as part of one’s own subjectivity; and (d) ways of enhancing such relationships by addressing problems of margin and scale. Simultaneously there are opportunities to mitigate many current design conventions that are in fact counterproductive, including (e) prescriptive assignment of people or groups through categorization or stereotypical design; (f) inappropriate normalization of people according to given standards, allowing difference/distinction to be overridden in favor of equality; (g) use of synechdochic techniques—substituting a part for a whole—as a way of accommodating distinction in only nominal terms; and (h) isolation or alienation of distinction through disjunctive or bracketing techniques.

Instead of such manufactured and bracketed differences, Archer developed approaches that emphasize genuine opportunities for difference-as-distinction at the level of self, family, neighborhood, and community.

Download: Making Difference in the Suburbs (2.5 MB)

Dr. Archer is author of Housing Dreams: Architecture and the Self, 1690-2000 (forthcoming 2004) and The Literature of British Domestic Architecture, 1715-1842 (MIT Press, 1985).

Return to the Faculty Fellows page

 





1 Ralph Rapson Hall, 89 Church Street S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455,
Email mdc@umn.edu, Tel. (612) 625-9000, Fax. (612) 626-0600
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer
Copyright Metropolitan Design Center, 2007. All rights reserved.