What is Design for Social Justice?

Design for technology, which prevails in engineering design courses, addresses constraints such as budget, time and functionality established by a client. Meanwhile, human-centered design (HCD) emphasizes users' needs, desires, and cultural location, mainly through ergonomics and esthetics.3 Although an established concept and practice in design studies and some forms of industrial design, HCD has evolved to consider low-income and underserved communities as users, challenging engineering design education to incorporate listening to users; accommodation of human capacities, needs, and desires; and attention to people's culturally situated resources, resource limitations, and opportunities.4 Despite its potential to push engineering education in productive directions, HCD also has its limitations, particularly its inability to grapple with the structural conditions that give rise to many of the needs HCD seeks to address. More generally, HCD can direct attention away from the critical and sometimes-subtle dimensions of social justice.5 Design cases that involve, for example, "design for the other 90%"6 or designing for people with disabilities redirect attention to questions of design for social justice. This paper identifies and briefly describes four forms of design: design for technology, HCD for users, HDC for communities, and design for social justice. The paper explores how social justice has been enacted--or neglected--in specific design contexts within engineering education, and how it can be further integrated in each of these forms of design education. This paper is part of a broader project to integrate social justice across three components of engineering curricula--engineering design, engineering sciences, and humanities and social sciences courses. To explore design-for-social-justice education in concrete terms, our investigation provides a specific, field-tested definition of social justice and draws from enactments of engineering for social justice in specific design courses: a human-centered problem definition course in the Humanitarian Engineering Program at the Colorado School of Mines, an interdisciplinary design studio in the Design, Innovation, and Society program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a learning-through-service experience in a first-year Biological Engineering design course at Louisiana State University. Our investigation culled data from semi-structured interviews with course instructors and students, reviews of course documents, contextualization within the literature on design, and our own lived experiences working with design students. Through this investigation, the paper seeks to provide: 1) a set of emerging principles of design for social justice and 2) examples of how those criteria are enacted in instructional design contexts. Such research outcomes can improve our understanding of how design for social justice can inform design in community engagement contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]