This Design Justice Pedagogy Summit and overarching project is motivated by the pressing need to center and incorporate principles of ethics, equity, and justice into design pedagogy—both in engineering and non-engineering disciplines—at MIT and other technology institutions as well as in the continuing education of design practitioners (sometimes referred to as executive education).
This project from which the Design Justice Pedagogy Summit results begins with the Design Justice framework developed by the Design Justice Network [1], which calls on design practitioners, researchers, and educators to consider how design may perpetuate existing oppressive and exclusionary mechanisms and inequities or create new ones. The Design Justice framework provides guidelines to create designs that are liberatory. In the context of the Design Justice framework, the Design Justice Network calls for considering several areas of design such as: who we design for and with; how we scope and frame design problems; how values are embedded into designed artifacts and practices; and how design perpetuates or alters socio-political frameworks. Our previous work [2] on auditing the inclusion of ethics, equity, and justice content in design pedagogy at MIT which leverages this framework has demonstrated that engineering design courses engage with design justice themes at a much lower rate than courses offered in non-engineering departments such as architecture, urban planning, and the Media Lab, inspiring us to organize the Summit at the MIT Media Lab. In addition to this pedagogical audit, we are also assessing how themes of ethics, equity, and justice are addressed in design scholarship. The syllabus and disciplinary audit methodologies and findings have informed the development of the Design Justice Pedagogy Summit.
August 24th to August 26th 2022, we will be hosting a 2 day design justice pedagogy summit at MIT. This summit is dedicated to working with instructors from MIT and other institutions along with executive education instructors in industry to further promote and develop design justice principles in design pedagogy. The event will also include participation from Media Lab and MIT professors and graduate students leading workshops and panels and acting as advisors and resources for the interactive portions of the event with networking opportunities as well.
Stay tuned for more updates and information on the application process to attend this event!
The agenda is set!
We will update the agenda periodically to add our confirmed speakers and more details about the sessions as we get closer to the date.
If you are interested in participating in the event, please complete this interest form.
Please reach out to us with any questions you may have about the event.
- http://designjustice.org/ and as described by Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
- Das et al. (2022). Auditing design justice: The impact of social movements on design pedagogy at a technology institution. Proceedings of Design Thinking Research Symposium.