In Design Justice, Sasha Costanza-Chock explores how design processes and systems often reinforce existing social inequalities and proposes a framework for equitable, inclusive design. Rooted in the principles of the Design Justice Network, the book critiques traditional design practices that prioritize profit and efficiency over marginalized communities' needs and voices. Costanza-Chock draws on examples from technology, urban planning, and social movements to highlight the harms caused by exclusionary design while showcasing alternative approaches grounded in collective action and community empowerment.
The book is structured around five core themes: (i) the values embedded in design and how they reflect systems of oppression; (ii) the importance of inclusivity and accountability in design processes; (iii) the narratives surrounding technological innovation, often overlooking marginalized contributions; (iv) the spaces where design happens and how they can connect to social movements; and (v) strategies for teaching and institutionalizing design justice. Through theoretical analysis, case studies, and practical methods, Design Justice offers a comprehensive framework for reimagining design as a collaborative and liberatory practice.
Design Values: Hard-Coding Liberation?
Technology reflects societal power structures, often reinforcing inequalities like racism, sexism, and capitalism through design choices. Platforms like Facebook enable quick mobilization for activism but lack tools for deep community-building, prioritizing profit over civic engagement. Activists often rely on these platforms despite risks like surveillance or harassment. To address these challenges, we must rethink technology design to empower marginalized communities, foster inclusion, and dismantle oppressive systems, creating a fairer and more equitable world.
Design affects who can access or use technology, shaped by privilege and exclusion. Features, or affordances, show what actions are possible but are not equally obvious or available to everyone due to factors like race, ability, or experience. Disaffordances block certain uses, while dysaffordances force marginalized users to adapt, like nonbinary people selecting binary genders in forms. These inequalities, often unintentional, reflect systemic biases in design.
Design justice shifts the focus from fixing biases to addressing the systems that create them. It builds on approaches like value-sensitive design, universal design, and inclusive design but centers marginalized voices and challenges intersecting oppressions. For example, algorithmic fairness ensures equal treatment but may overlook systemic injustices, while algorithmic justice actively corrects historical inequalities. This shift emphasizes justice, autonomy, and decolonization in design, embedding liberatory values to dismantle systemic oppression and ensure equity.
Design Practices: "Nothing About Us Without Us"
The tech industry's lack of diversity leads to biased products that prioritize certain groups, often reinforcing systemic inequalities like sexism, racism, and capitalism. High-profile incidents, like a 2017 Google memo blaming biology for women's underrepresentation in tech, expose these issues, yet progress remains slow. Efforts to increase diversity often focus on financial benefits, ignoring deeper systemic problems. True equity requires redesigning technology and workplaces to prioritize fairness, inclusion, and community needs over profit.
Design justice emphasizes that design impacts everyone, but professional design roles remain dominated by privileged groups, such as white and Asian cisgender men. Marginalized communities, especially women and people of color, are underrepresented, with their contributions frequently overlooked. Beyond diversifying the workforce, meaningful change demands systemic shifts, such as better hiring practices, family support policies, and accountability for equity.
User-Centered Design (UCD) often centers privileged users while excluding others. Designers unconsciously imagine users like themselves, creating a "spiral of exclusion". Initiatives like Trans*H4CK and Contratados.org seek to address these gaps, but systemic change requires fully including marginalized voices in design processes. Design justice prioritizes the leadership of affected communities, ensuring their needs shape the process and outcomes.
Design practices like Participatory Design (PD) and codesign aim to involve users but often fail to address power dynamics or community accountability. Marginalized voices are frequently overshadowed or exploited for ideas without receiving recognition or benefits. Design justice goes further, emphasizing community ownership and non-extractive methods that value lived experiences and dismantle inequalities.
Movements like disability justice provide key lessons, highlighting the importance of interdependence, accountability, and systemic change. These principles inform design justice, advocating for inclusive processes that center marginalized communities and address oppression at every level. Reports like #MoreThanCode stress the importance of community-led technology, avoiding "parachuting" experts and prioritizing local knowledge. Key recommendations include codesign, accountability mechanisms, and sustainable collaboration to create equitable and effective tools.
In conclusion, design justice challenges traditional design approaches, emphasizing community leadership, systemic change, and equity over extractive practices. By centering the lived experiences of marginalized groups and rethinking how technology is designed, it seeks to transform design into a tool for liberation and inclusion.
Design Narratives: From TXTMob to Twitter
Technology innovation is often attributed to individual "genius", but this oversimplifies the collective and community-driven efforts behind many advancements. For example, Twitter's origin story highlights Jack Dorsey but overlooks its roots in TXTmob, a tool created by activists for protest coordination. Social movements, especially those led by marginalized communities, frequently drive innovation out of necessity, but their contributions are often erased as industries adopt and profit from their ideas.
The chapter critiques how design processes and problem framing often ignore systemic inequalities, privileging elite solutions over community-driven approaches. For instance, the Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet Challenge focused on high-tech solutions while neglecting effective, low-cost, locally-driven sanitation methods and root issues like gender-based violence. Similarly, mainstream narratives about innovation often exclude marginalized voices and fail to address the structural barriers they face.
Design justice offers an alternative framework, emphasizing participation, accountability, and equity in design. It challenges the dominance of profit-driven, technocentric approaches and seeks to center the lived experiences and knowledge of marginalized communities. By reframing design problems to address systemic inequalities, design justice aims to create tools and solutions that genuinely empower and uplift communities, ensuring credit and benefits are distributed fairly.
Design Sites: Hackerspaces, Fablabs, Hackathons, and DiscoTechs
Community-driven tech events like DiscoTechs and inclusive hackathons show how technology and design can empower marginalized groups and advance social justice. DiscoTechs, launched by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition in 2009, provides hands-on workshops that make technology accessible to all, focusing on activities like building radios or learning cryptography. These events have spread globally, addressing topics such as surveillance and cooperative economies. Unlike traditional hackathons and makerspaces, which often prioritize start-up culture and profit, DiscoTechs centers intersectionality and community-led solutions.
Similarly, while hackathons often perpetuate inequalities by favoring privileged groups and promoting superficial solutions, inclusive events like Trans*H4CK and "Make the Breast Pump Not Suck" hackathons show the potential for meaningful change. These initiatives emphasize community involvement, accessibility, and equity, ensuring marginalized voices shape outcomes.
Design justice advocates transforming tech spaces—like hackerspaces and fablabs—into equitable environments that connect with social movements and amplify marginalized traditions. It calls for recognizing subaltern design practices, valuing diverse leadership, and embedding justice into all aspects of design. By rethinking how technology is developed and shared, these efforts aim to create sustainable, inclusive systems that challenge oppression and empower communities.
Design Pedagogies: "There's Something Wrong with This System!"
City Life/Vida Urbana (CL/VU) organized community members to fight evictions and gentrification at a Boston housing rights meeting. Partnering with MIT's Civic Media Codesign Studio, CL/VU collaborated on "Change the Game", a project using modified carnival games to raise awareness about housing injustice. These games highlighted systemic inequalities while encouraging public engagement with CL/VU's campaigns. This collaboration exemplifies design justice principles, treating communities as active co-designers rather than passive participants and connecting education with real-world activism.
Design justice draws on popular education, emphasizing collective learning and action to address oppression. Inspired by Paulo Freire's transformative pedagogy, it values lived experiences, critical thinking, and empowerment. Real-world examples, like Detroit's Data DiscoTechs and participatory action design, show how communities can co-create technology and solutions that address systemic issues. Frameworks such as data feminism, constructionism, and decolonized design pedagogy provide tools to reimagine design education around equity and inclusion.
Key principles for teaching design justice include prioritizing community empowerment, centering impacted voices, emphasizing process over product, and ensuring sustainability. Educators must address power dynamics, value lived experiences, and foster inclusive, collaborative practices. Projects should build on existing community strengths rather than imposing external solutions, ensuring long-term benefits and equity.
The chapter concludes by critiquing the unequal access to coding education in the US, where wealthier schools offer better resources, leaving marginalized groups with fewer opportunities. Programs like Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code aim to diversify tech participation, integrating ethics and creativity into lessons. Following design justice principles, coding education can empower diverse learners to design technologies that challenge systemic inequalities and advance social justice.
Directions for Future Work: From #TechWontBuildIt to #DesignJustice
Tech workers are increasingly rejecting harmful projects through movements like #TechWontBuildIt, which began in 2016 when workers pledged not to create tools targeting marginalized groups. Employees at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have protested contracts supporting military projects or immigration enforcement, using tactics like petitions and walkouts to push for ethical practices. While the results have been mixed, these actions have raised awareness of workers' ability to influence the ethics of technology. Organizations like the Tech Workers Coalition and Science for the People link these efforts to broader social movements, such as immigrant rights and Black Lives Matter, showing how collective action can resist systemic injustices.
However, resistance alone is not enough. Design justice advocates for creating equitable alternatives, emphasizing that designers and technologists hold the power to challenge oppressive systems and build more just frameworks. The book highlights how design perpetuates systemic inequality through embedded values, exclusive practices, and unequal power dynamics in design spaces. It calls for a shift toward inclusive processes prioritizing community leadership, equity, and sustainability across all design fields, from software to urban planning.
To achieve this, design justice focuses on evaluating who participates in and benefits from design processes, creating standards to ensure inclusivity, and addressing systemic issues beyond compliance. It challenges dominant narratives, such as tech solutionism and exploitative "sharing economy" platforms, advocating for alternatives like worker-owned cooperatives. Transforming design spaces, like hackathons and makerspaces, into tools for liberation is key, alongside supporting subaltern design sites led by marginalized communities.
Education plays a crucial role in advancing design justice. Teaching methods rooted in popular education and critical pedagogy encourage students to engage with systemic inequalities and co-create solutions. Programs like participatory action design and data feminism emphasize ethical, inclusive design, while initiatives in community-focused teaching connect design education with broader social justice movements. By embedding these principles into all stages of design and education, design justice offers a path toward equitable, transformative practices that dismantle systemic oppression and empower marginalized communities.