Getting to Defined By Design

Kathryn H. Anthony (School of Architecture - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

EDRA’s 50 th birthday provides a unique opportunity for each of us to reflect upon the value of this special professional organization. For decades, EDRA has provided so many of us with a voice, an audience, and, perhaps mostimportantly, a strong sense of community and friendship that we would not find anywhere else. I believe this is my 24 th EDRA conference. I have enjoyed every single one of them, each in a different way.

Whether it be my early experiences serving as a juror in academic design studios, watching students hold back tears in the face of harsh, public criticism; confronting unfair treatment and gender discrimination on my job as an architecture faculty member; facing my husband’s life-threatening illness for over seven years, a serious and unpredictable form of cancer; or navigating a world not designed for people like me, I was able to use my own situation as a springboard for research. It served as a question mark to spur me on to start researching and start writing.

The social science research skills I had under my belt allowed me to investigate the extent to which these problems were not just my own, and the extent to which they affected others as well. I’ve faced my share of setbacks from rejected grant applications, rejected journal articles, and rejected book proposals, but eventually “the three p’s,” patience, persistence, and perseverance finally paid off. I’m now the proud author of several books, including Design Juries on Trial, Designing for Diversity, Running for Our Lives, and Defined by Design.