Thomas Fisher is the former dean of the College of Design and the new director of the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Designing to Avoid Disaster: The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design. His books The Invisible Element of Place: The Architecture of David Salmela, In the Scheme of Things: Alternative Thinking on the Practice of Architecture, and Salmela Architect are also published by the University of Minnesota Press.