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Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

(Information Policy) by Sasha Costanza-Chock

Article  in  Design Issues · September 2021

DOI: 10.1162/desi_r_00661

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Kriti Bhalla Sanjana Shivakumar

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Round Table
Book Review
1 Elie Wiesel, “Hope, Despair and Mem-
ory,” Nobel Lecture, December 11 (1986),
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/
peace/1986/wiesel/lecture/.
2 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
3 Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A
Theory for Women?,” Feminism/Post-
modernism 162 (1990): 157–75; Warwick
Anderson, “From Subjugated Knowledge
to Conjugated Subjects: Science and
Globalisation, or Postcolonial Studies of
Science?,” Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4
(2009): 389–400, https://doi.org/10.1080/
13688790903350641.
https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_r_00661
Design Justice: Community-Led
Practices to Build the Worlds We
Need (Information Policy) by Sasha
Costanza-Chock
(MIT Press, Perspective, 2020) Kindle/Paperback, 360 pages,
19 black and white illustrations, ISBN-10: 0262043459, ISBN-13:
978-0262043458 $18.99/$25. (Round Table Book Review)
Kriti Bhalla, Sanjana Shivakumar,
Tarun Kumar
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There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there
must never be a time when we fail to protest.1
Elie Wiesel
Kriti Bhalla
Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice is a ground-breaking schol-
arship on biased systems and structures of oppression prevalent
in technology design that are deeply entrenched in our ambient
social and economic infrastructure. Marginalized people or
groups, for instance, are highly susceptible to exploitation and are
often subjected to various forms of biases in terms of how they are
treated, what opportunities they gain relative to those in positions
of power, the inaccessibility and disaffordances of technology, and
the systemic discreditation of their contributions despite undeni-
able merit.
This book is centrally themed on the matrix of domination
and intersectionality based on Black Feminist Thought by Patricia
Collins.2 The design praxis for multiply burdened individuals or
groups—positioned at the sociocultural intersections of race,
gender, and class—is exposed to various pressures and injustice in
the framework of supremacy. This book contemplates the causal
interlinkages between the flow of benefits and penalties, which is
reasoned by the dominant and subordinate groups’ positions in the
matrix of domination as a function of their situated and subjugated
knowledge. 3 The author critically analyzes the intentional and
unintentional outcomes of the design process by acknowledging
the impact of counternarratives as a system of representation in
technological innovations and social movements primarily led by
the marginalized communities.
© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
DesignIssues: Volume 37, Number 4 Autumn 2021 103

4 Kean Birch, Margaret Chiappetta,
and Anna Artyushina, “The Problem of
Innovation in Technoscientific Capitalism:
Data Rentiership and the Policy
Implications of Turning Personal Digital
Data into a Private Asset,” Policy Studies
41, no. 5 (2020): 468–87, https://doi.org/
10.1080/01442872.2020.1748264.
104
Sanjana Shivakumar
Analyzing the design process through the lens of design justice,
as Kriti mentioned, explains the prejudices in the existing social-
system design, which works against subjugated classes. This pio-
neering book is an enlivening impression on pragmatic design to
transgress constraints while implementing design justice princi-
ples as a blueprint for future design practice. With its interdisci-
plinary nature, the design justice framework inspires the current
development practices in technology, artificial intelligence (AI),
and participatory design to be more inclusive. The writing style is
grounded and natural, with subtle references to the real-world
recurrent clashes between universal design and design justice ide-
ologies. The reader is left with an important question to reflect on:
“How can we, as designers, bring in new processes, guidelines,
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and standards for equal representation and inclusion of oppressed
communities?” The author discusses the design justice framework
using succinct and articulated principles to eliminate gender nor-
mativity and prevalent inequalities in the existing systems.
Costanza-Chock further elaborates how marginalized communi-
ties often lead a design process but are disparaged and discredited
for their original contributions. In an exploitative design process,
data extraction from participants and communities takes prece-
dence over relationship-building and co-design. The author en-
courages design through personal experience and human-centric
approaches, acting as a passage for perspective transformation and
fair decision making.
Tarun Kumar
Sanjana evaluated the book’s emphasis on harnessing the power of
design justice framework in design praxis to integrate marginal-
ized communities. This book presents a critique of technoscientific
capitalism4 by reviewing the role of established neoliberal design
approaches in replicating the matrix of domination. The author
examines the perils of amalgamating existing societal bigotries
into the algorithms for artificial intelligence (AI) and their effect on
ICT—information and communication technology—products’
affordances. Costanza-Chock further questions (a) the systems and
groups that control the design processes, (b) the majoritarian narra-
tives used to communicate design tales, (c) the characteristics of
design sites resulting in the exclusion of marginalized communi-
ties, (d) the pedagogies followed by design educators, and (e) the
need for integrating design justice framework to the initial stages
of the design process. The design sites—including hackerspaces,
fablabs, makerspaces, and hackathons—and their effect on the
reproduction of exclusionary practices based on race, gender, class,
DesignIssues: Volume 37, Number 4 Autumn 2021
 and color, are highlighted in chapter 4, which presents the case for
reconfiguring these sites, leading to liberatory design practices.
The book highlights the need to redevelop and valorize the subal-
tern sites already present in the settlements’ sociocultural nodes
and reinforce them with design resources and policy frameworks
for their successful upkeep. The author further elucidates the need
to assimilate design justice approaches to emerging technologies
like face recognition, screening, and AI-based data acquisition pro-
cesses for reimagining the sociotechnical landscape.

Sanjana Shivakumar
Tarun mentions the significance of liberatory design processes
in developing emancipatory technologies to uplift the socially and
systematically disadvantaged groups. Technology adoption may

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encourage contributors from various communities to join hands
and participate in the community-based design processes that
could benefit millions of multiply burdened people in neoliberal
societies. The overarching aim of technology is to facilitate conve-
nience, simplicity, and accessibility in life. However, the author’s
narration of the airport incident distinctly identifies simple flaws
of technology-based systems that are still very complex to reverse
or undo. These flaws—system biases based on race, ethnicity,
gender, color, and so on—arise because of limited user-testing, and
inaccessibility to the marginalized communities. The giant multi-
national corporations of today possess severely biased internal sys-
tems. These corporations blindly fund the so-called quick
technological tools before adequate user-testing, where flaws remain
hidden in the initial stages and are often discovered after large-
scale deployments. Holistic changes to the sociopolitical and eco-
logical systems are often beyond designers’ scope, except for
specific innovations originating from radical mass movements.
Increasing the tool’s affordances or modification of the existing
system requires monetary and material resources. Striking a
balance between technology-adoption positives—such as accessi-
bility, connectivity, security, resource sharing, and the other design
justice principles—could help reach larger audiences and promote
an inclusive design paradigm.

Tarun Kumar
Sanjana’s observations on implementing a design justice lens to
technology adoption are noteworthy. This book also envisions plat-
form cooperativism—a term coined by Trebor Scholz,5 where the
citizens or workers have ownership rights on their digital mar-
ketspace—as a liberatory framework in prominent digital plat-
forms, for example, Uber, Airbnb, and other online vendors. The
5 Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism,”
in Challenging the Corporate Sharing
Economy (New York: Rosa Luxemburg
Foundation, 2016): 2–27.

DesignIssues: Volume 37, Number 4 Autumn 2021 105

 author emphasizes on developing institutional mechanisms to fos-
ter community engagement in technology design and incorporate
pedagogies for design justice into the modern education systems.
The author presents a historical context to the countercultural
design sites and their deeply embedded roots in the zeitgeist. Fur-
thermore, the linkages of social movements to hacklabs, maker-
spaces, and hackathons are highlighted and contrasted with the
prevailing narratives of individualism and neoliberal entrepre-
neurial endeavors. The book also questions solutionism, ableism,
masculinist structures, and universalizing frameworks ignorant of
the marginalized communities’ problems, knowledge, and experi-
ences. Mass agitations challenging settler colonialism, heteropatri-
archal power dynamics, and cis-normative systems have led to
more inclusive, and gender-normative design approaches. The

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readers are invited to build a utopian yet pragmatic multiverse—
an exhilarating world with an assortment of cultures, space for
multiple viewpoints, and a rainbow coalition of ideas.

Kriti Bhalla
Adding to the perspectives provided by Sanjana and Tarun, it is
imperative to highlight the hope this book provides by integrating
the design justice framework into sociotechnical systems. This inte-
gration could potentially provide innovative systemic solutions to
the oppressive mechanisms driven by the neoliberal society. In the
current scenario, innovation in design and technology frequently
inherits a predisposition against oppressed and marginalized indi-
viduals. Insensitive technology design and biased data science—
delivering products, services, systems as (popular) social
networking platforms, and generating codes reflecting data bias—
denigrate the marginalized and subject them to hegemonic power
laws. The design justice framework, as the author suggests, is an
embodiment of liberation through non-exploitative, community-
based collaborative solutions implemented in design praxis and
pedagogy. Moreover, the work mainly discusses the disparities
identified in the prevailing design processes. In doing so, it pro-
vides cooperative, democratic design developments highlighting
the value of sensitivity in design. Using situated information and
the perspectives of the oppressed, Costanza-Chock reflects on the
interrelationship between technology design, power, and justice.
Moreover, the subtle infiltration of radical counterhe-
gemonic concepts—such as resisting (a) micro-aggressions, (b)
sociotechnical supremacy, (c) power laws, (d) the pedagogy of
oppression, and (e) the mythology of meritocracy—in the engage-
ments of the contemporary techno-fetishist society impels readers
to incorporate design justice methodologies and pop-ed values

106 DesignIssues: Volume 37, Number 4 Autumn 2021


6 Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is
Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If
People Mattered (New York: Random
House, 2011).
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consciously. Therefore, through this proposition, the author inte-
grates co-liberatory and community-led participatory values into
design praxis, process, and education. The manifestation of the
design justice framework should involve appropriate technology6
and unbiased decision-making systems, which gradually shift the
systemic benefits from people or groups holding power positions
to the persecuted masses. Sustainable development must reflect
inclusive design processes and outcomes by embracing partici-
pants from indigenous and marginalized communities, thus bridg-
ing the gap between design justice and technology design.
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DesignIssues: Volume 37, Number 4 Autumn 2021 107