Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Information Policy)

Design scoping processes that exclude structural problems, large institutional actors, or the state from the field of analysis convert design into an antipolitics machine. Design narratives too frequently invisibilize the matrix of domination and set the boundaries of the imagination to exclude already existing, community-led solutions,

Design generates attention, and attention is an increasingly scarce resource that is not equitably allocated.

one of the most important ways that narratives structure design is in the scoping and framing of design problems.

what stories are told about design problems, solutions, contexts, and outcomes?

Attribution: Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

Beyond employment equity, design justice requires full inclusion of, accountability to, and ultimately control by people with direct lived experience of the conditions the design team is trying to change.

“Appropriation is the process through which technology users go beyond mere adoption to make technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices.”

inclusion of community members with direct lived experience of the design problem, intersectional user story validation and testing, and formal memoranda of understanding (MOUs) or working agreements that set clear expectations about project roles, decision making, and ownership of design products.

Most PD processes also aim to develop feelings of investment and ownership in the outcome by all participants,

but it has little to say about values, community accountability or control, or the ultimate distribution of benefits such as profits or attention.