As a newly minted Ph.D. in anthropology (my ethnographic work was among professors of
architecture, landscape architecture, and sculpture - all engaging in university-community
partnerships doing urban design), I'd like to see more openness to hiring non-designers onto
design faculties, or some further compromise thereof. Perhaps my experience in the US is unique,
but I've found that almost all the job descriptions I know I could fulfill, end up requiring a degree
in design, which I do not have.
I studied designers, and wrote about design, but my contribution is primarily critical analysis of
neoliberal consumer society, societies of control, and taste and class (by comparison, I am not a
"design anthropologist", or an anthropologist who works in the professional, commercial world of
design). In seeking to offer critical analyses of "design" as a socio-historical phenomenon, and
trying to understand how the ideas of design effect social order, which is always embedded in and
constituting struggles over power (meaning, value, truth, control, profit), and in doing this by
placing design within its cultural contexts, as well as symbolic and political economies, the
"sacred" is often made to seem profane, and many designers (in my limited experience) become
uncomfortable with this.
I'd say that one way to get design students to think critically, is to invite critical thinkers from
other disciplines (preferably those that specialize in critical analysis of human behavior,
institutions, and practice), by opening up faculties and curricula to those with an interest in
applying their non-design tools to the world of design. (Again, it appears that this has been more
successful in the UK, but it is difficult for a young scholar like me to 'crack the codes' from across
the pond!)
Juris Milestone, Ph.D.
Department of Anthropology
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA
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