Design Justice: Practices for Reshaping the Future

An open roundtable discussion with members of the Design Justice Network, an organization at the forefront of design justice, work aimed at community-led design for social justice.

We are pleased to host a conversation with Sasha Costanza-Chock, Denise Shanté Brown, and Wesley Taylor, with remarks from Professor Alison Harvey and responses from York graduate students Mina Momeni, Brianna I. Wiens, and Dayna Jeffrey.

Marginalized and oppressed communities are disproportionately impacted by inequities in the design of digital environments. These inequities include predictive policing algorithms that target racialized groups, and automated systems in social services that make access to benefits for the poor more difficult. Initiatives aimed at raising awareness of designed inequality are on the rise. The DJN network, made up of designers, advocates, educators, and researchers, are dedicated to reshaping existing practices while fostering community-led initiatives that address injustices in design based on race, class, gender, and ability.

This roundtable is co-presented with the Wendy Michener Memorial Lecture and Design Justice Dialogue Series, and with the generous support of the Division of the Vice-President, Research & Innovation, the Principal’s Office at Glendon College, the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies, Sensorium, Center for Feminist Research, the Digital Media program in the Department of Computational Art, the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University, the Department of Design in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, the Department of Communication Studies at Keele campus, the Communications Program at Glendon College and the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE at the University of Toronto.

Apr 9, 2021 03:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)