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https://www.designforsocialchange.org/journal/index.php/DISCERN-J 
 
ISSN 2184-6995 
 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 
International License. 

 

  

 

 
 
Book review: Design justice - Community-led practices to build  
the worlds we need  
 
Dhriti Dhaundiyal 
Published online: October 2021 
 
To cite this article:  
Dhaundiyal, D. (2021). Book Review: Design Justice - Community-led Practices to Build the Worlds  
We Need. Discern: International Journal of Design for Social Change, Sustainable Innovation and 
Entrepreneurship, 2(2), 1-6.  



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Book review: Design justice - Community-led practices to build  
the worlds we need 
 
Dhriti Dhaundiyala 

 
aSchool of Design, Doon University, Dehradun, India. dhritidhaundiyal@doonuniversity.ac.in 

 

 
 

Design justice - Community-led practices to build the worlds we need, by Sasha Costanza-Chock. 

ISBN: 9780262043458, 360 pp. | The MIT Press, 2020. 

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001 (Open access) 

 

‘Design Justice - Community-led practices to build the worlds we need’ is an essential read for those 

involved with social design and social justice. Defining design justice as “an exploration of how design might 

be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and 

ecological survival”, Constanza-Chock position it as a function of power in design processes, hypothesising 

that design justice is a result of who has power while researching and while designing, the decisions they 

make and how these decisions affect marginalised groups. 

 

 

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001


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Background 

The author, Sasha Costanza-Chock, is a communications scholar, participatory designer and activist,  

using the pronouns she/her and they/theirs. Currently working as Associate Professor of Civic Media at 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, they have published many other defining works on the 

links between information and communication technologies and social movements, such as ‘Out of the 

Shadows and Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement’. Their 

approach is to take the established paradigms of the design process and reassess the fundamental tenets 

with the lens of social justice. They use the storytelling approach of critical feminism to give examples of 

lived experiences that illustrate the norms, values and assumptions encoded in the socio-technical systems 

in our society. They write against the production and reproduction of systemic oppression, with the 

confessed idealistic aims of building a better, more inclusive world. 

 

Constanza-Chock laud Langdon Winner’s thesis ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ (1980) as a driving force for 

their work. They criticise the standardisation of products and services to the exclusion of the minority, 

which was first highlighted by Simone Browne in her book ‘Dark Matters’ (2015). They first gave the 

‘resisting reduction’ manifesto in their essay in the Journal of Design & Science (2018), writing from their 

standpoint of knowledge from embodied experiences as a non-binary trans-feminine person. Their 

competency is based on lived experience and empirically grounded in participatory action research and co-

design, specifically from their association with Research Action Design Lab, Tech for Social Justice and the 

Civic Media: Collaborative Design Studio course at MIT. The book presents a manifesto based on principles 

put first put forward by the Design Justice Network (2015) to transform design for good to design for 

liberation. The manifesto posits that people who are most harmed by generic design decisions usually  

have the least influence on those decisions, and proposes a rethink and reframe of design processes.  

In particular, the author questions the values, practices, narratives, sites and pedagogies embodied  

in design processes. 

  

Book structure 

Constanza-Chock begin by tracing the roots of design justice in value-sensitive design, universal design and 

inclusive design. These shifts in design theory have brought in threads of feminism and anti-racism from 

science and technology studies (STS), in particular the ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins, 2002). The author 

theorises that design justice stems from a core concept of design, ‘affordances’, originating in the 1970s in 

cognitive psychology. Chapter one relates stories of design affordances, products being used in ways that 

were not originally designed or intended, such as the use of Facebook as a site of mobilisation for social 

protests. The author constructs the implicit injustice perpetuated by disaffordances and dysaffordances 

(Wittkower, 2018): one constrains function while the other makes users misidentify their own identity  

to access functions. ‘Dysaffordance’ is driven by gender dysphoria where standardisation becomes 

discriminatory design. The average excludes those who don’t meet the definition of ‘average’. 

 

The next chapter moves the argument from equity to accountability and community control, in the context 

of participatory processes, user-led innovation and feminist human-computer interaction. Constanza-Chock 

note that although all humans design, only some earn a living out of it: generally privileged professionals, 

high in the matrix of domination. These professional networks concentrate agency and power within 

groups of others like themselves, perpetuating discriminatory social structures in technologies. Chapter 

three gives examples of the design of design technologies with a case study of Twitter, where the counter-

narratives of its origins have been forgotten. Constanza-Chock decry the popular and prominent narratives 

of innovation and design as ‘well-resourced corporate mythologies’ (p. 116) that concentrate and celebrate 

the individual genius inventors, discounting and ignoring other contributions like social movements. 



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Another example is the Microsoft ‘Reinvent the Toilet Challenge’, where designers and inventors around 

the world raced to innovate the ideal toilet. The definition of the project’s aims and scope weas controlled 

by the novelty narrative, and the values of social good embedded into the designed objects were  

sadly ignored. 

 

Chapter four covers the changing landscapes of design processes with the newly emerging subaltern sites 

like hacklabs, maker spaces, fab labs and hackathons, community gathering spaces that often reproduce 

social inequalities at the expense of marginalised communities. The author demands a reorganisation that 

challenges the tacit matrix of domination. The following chapter reflects on critical pedagogies and builds 

upon the theories of critical pedagogy, popular education and praxis, practical knowledge for action, 

constructionist design theories, community technology pedagogy and feminist pedagogies of data science. 

It lays a framework for democratising design education, not as a neutral process that maintains the status 

quo or challenges it, but about issues that people care about, teaching people to identify the correct 

problems, identifying root causes to generate correct solutions. 

 

Critique 

The book outlines a manifesto for enabling all citizens to be equal decision-makers in the design process. 

This thought has been around in the design discipline for some time, but this book creates a formal 

manifesto for both design education and design practice. The book builds on the feminist STS approach  

that the world around us is socio-technical, and the infrastructure of constraints and affordances that 

determines how we design and use designed products is led by the codes that have been socially ingrained 

in us. The book is an examination of current design values, practices, narratives, sites and pedagogies to 

incorporate the tenets of design and social justice at the individual, community and institutional levels. 

Figure 1 condenses the progress of the design process in participatory ventures across the spectrum from 

strong control to more consultative control. The aim is to help design for people who have been excluded 

due to omission. 

 

 

 
 

Figure 1: Analysis of community participation throughout the design process  

(Constanza-Chock, 2020, p. 91). 



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One of the book’s main strengths is that it abounds in examples of where design has inadvertently 

disenfranchised marginalised groups due to disaffordances and dysaffordances. This myopia in design 

affects not just tangible objects, images and the built environment, but also intangible socio-technical 

systems. The author leads with the example of the inadvertent prejudice of millimetre wave scanners at 

security check zones of airports against non-binary citizens, which resonates with the theatre of security 

one experiences in airports. Costanza-Chock echo Foucault’s approach to knowledge as a form of the 

perpetuation of social violence if a conscious balance of power is not actualised in participatory design  

and acts of co-creation that jeopardise design justice. The onus is on the designer to reflect and realise 

equilibrium in design methods and design politics. 

 

Costanza-Chock criticise design for its ‘Band-Aid’ approach that ignores rather than examines root cause 

problem-solving. Commercial design processes have been berated as ‘design by committee’, ineffective, 

inelegant and neglecting core concerns. Design justice demands an intentional decision to frame the 

benefits as well as the harms of designed products and systems in a contextual manner. In recent literature, 

Escobar’s ‘Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds’ 

(2018) and Holmes’ ‘Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design’ (2020) also expound on similar concerns  

of social injustice through omission. 

 

Although the good intentions of design justice are undeniable, questions about its practicality have been 

raised by critics. Design justice activists exhort the higher moral goals of creating the world we want to live 

in, but challenges of limited resources and time in the real world lead to trade-offs. There is a legitimate 

fear that no just outcomes may ever come out of the process, a fear that processes of design justice may 

slow real-world design processes down beyond viability, but design justice activists say that is a small cost 

to pay for a more just world, where design is a tool for liberation. 

 

Summation 

Though written before the global Covid-19 pandemic, this book comes at an opportune time. The pandemic 

has exacerbated social disparities the world over, and the time is now ripe for community-led change that 

can help marginalised communities. Exigent times like these can be catalysts for creating the right 

environment for transformational change that can be sustained. Power structures are often bypassed,  

and change can be initiated from individuals across the socio-political spectrum. Designers, developers and 

technologists hold immense sway in the current political economy, and, unknowingly, the infrastructure 

they build perpetuates larger systemic inequalities. Positive action on their part can initiate change that has 

far-reaching consequences. The manifesto of design justice defined in this book can help designers reach 

that distant future in a fairer, more equitable way. 

 

References 
Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press.  
 
Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 
Routledge. 
 
Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design justice: Towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory 
and practice. Proceedings of the Design Research Society. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3189696 
 
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT 
Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001 



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Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of 
worlds. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371816 
 
Holmes, K. (2020). Mismatch: How inclusion shapes design. MIT Press 
 
Lee, U., Mutiti, N., Garcias, C., & Taylor, W. (2015) (eds.). Principles for design justice. Design Justice Zine, 1. 
https://designjustice.org/zines 
 
Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109, 1 (Winter), 121–136. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/i20024643 
 
Wittkower, D. E. (2016). Principles of anti-discriminatory design. Philosophy Faculty Publications, no.28. 
https://digitalcommons.odo.edu/philosophy-fac-pubs/28 
 


