The Design Justice Project at MIT, founded and led by Anastasia K. Ostrowski, Madhurima Das, and Aditi Verma, is built upon recent scholarship from Sasha Constanza-Chock’s work, Design Justice, and the Design Justice Network that describes design justice as a framework for analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people.

The project aims to develop methods and investigative tools for understanding and further embedding design justice into classrooms, in academia broadly, and in the design process in educational institutions and corporations. Our work analyzes how designers and design educators currently incorporate design justice into design pedagogy, suggesting future techniques to increase design justice’s presence in the classroom, and designing new methods to support design justice in design pedagogy.

There are 5 current active research areas in the project team including:

  • a syllabus design justice audit of MIT design courses

  • an instructor survey to understand the barriers, opportunities and necessary resources for incorporating design justice into higher education

  • literature reviews of several design fields, including engineering design, human-robot interaction, and human-computer interaction, to understand the presence of equity, ethics, and justice in these fields

  • a Design Justice Pedagogy Summit to support instructors in incorporating design justice into their courses, departments, institutions, and fields through a peer-based community

  • [the newest edition] a study implementing design justice principles into engineering capstone design courses

For more information on our active research areas, you can read our blog post reflecting on the project.

Collaborators in this project include: Jana I Saadi, Sara Atwood, Catherine D’Ignazio, Maria Yang, Cynthia Breazeal, Raechel Walker, Jennifer Zhang; Previous Collaborators:  Olivia Dias, Gillian J Roeder, Barbara Adjei, Paige Lighthammer, Kimberley Kimura, Shelly Ben-David

This work has been supported by the MIT d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education and MIT IDSS/SSRC Combatting Systemic Racism Seed Fund Program

Publications from this project include:

  • Ostrowski, A.K., Zhang, J., Das, M., Breazeal, C., D’Ignazio, C., Verma, A., & Yang, M. 2023. Design justice strategies for design education. Accepted to ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2023); Track: 35th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM).

  • Saadi, J.I., Roeder, G., Das, M., Ostrowski, A.K., Breazeal, C., D’Ignazio, C., Verma, A., & Yang, M. 2023. Barriers, resources, and changes of social, policy, and ethical considerations in design education. Accepted to ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2023); Track: 35th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM).

  • Das, M., Saadi, J.I., Santos, M., Roeder, G., Ostrowski, A.K., Lee, S., Breazeal, C., D’Ignazio, C., Yang, M., & Verma, A. 2023. How and why instructors include and exclude social, policy, and ethical considerations in design education. 24th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED) 2023. [link]

  • Ostrowski, A.K. 2023. How do we design robots equitably?: Engaging design justice, design fictions, and co-design in human-robot interaction design and policymaking processes. PhD Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  • Das, M., Ostrowski, A.K., Ben-David, S., Roeder, G.J., Kimura, K., D’Ignazio, C., Breazeal, C., Yang, M, & Verma, A. 2023. Auditing design justice: The impact of social movements on design pedagogy at a technology institution. Design Studies. [link]

  • Das, M., Roeder, G., Ostrowski, A.K., Yang, M.C., & Verma, A. 2023. What do we mean when we write about ethics, equity, and justice in engineering design? ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. [link]

  • Ostrowski, A.K., Walker, R., Das, M., Yang, M., Breazeal, C., Park, H.W., & Verma, A. 2022. Ethics, equity, & justice in human-robot interaction: A review and future directions. 2022 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). IEEE, 2022.

  • Das, M., Roeder, G., Ostrowski, A.K., Yang, M.C., & Verma, A. 2022. What do we mean when we write about ethics, equity, and justice in engineering design? ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2022); Track: 34th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM).

  • Das, M., Ostrowski, A.K., Ben-David, S., Roeder, G.J., Kimura, K., D’Ignazio, C., Breazeal, C., Yang, M, & Verma, A. 2022. Auditing design justice: The impact of social movements on design pedagogy at a technology institution. Design Thinking Research Symposium 2022. [link]