Who designs, and for whom? Design Justice places this question at the center of design practice. It challenges the structures through which design unintentionally reproduces marginalization, exclusion, and oppression, and pursues the simultaneous goals of democratizing the design process and advancing social justice.
Little known in Japan, Design Justice nonetheless represents an intellectual genealogy that intersects deeply with participatory design and social vision design.
What Is Happening
Papanek's Precursor
The precursor to Design Justice is the work of Victor Papanek. His 1971 Design for the Real World launched a direct critique of commercial design oriented toward consumer society. His argument was that designers should stop being "servants of the market" and instead turn their skills toward designing for people in developing countries, people with disabilities, the elderly, and the socially disadvantaged.
Papanek's critique targeted the purpose of design. Yet his critique of the process of design was insufficient. He asked "for whom?" but allowed "with whom do we design?" to recede into the background. Design Justice attempts to fill that gap.
The Formation of Design Justice
Sasha Costanza-Chock's 2020 book Design Justice theorized the practices of the Design Justice Network, which coalesced after 2015.
The ten principles of Design Justice that Costanza-Chock articulated connect the lineage of participatory design (the Scandinavian school) with social movement theory. The opening principle reads: "We center the voices, leadership, and agency of communities who are most impacted by the structures we are designing."
There are three intellectual pillars. The first is intersectionality. The concept of intersectionality proposed by Kimberlé Crenshaw provides a framework for analyzing the compound oppressions produced by the intersection of race, gender, disability, class, and sexual orientation. Design Justice applies this framework to design criticism.
The second is bell hooks's standpoint of "from margin to center." Her argument that the experiences of marginalized people are not a "lack" but an independent source of knowledge provides grounds for questioning the standard power relationship in design — in which experts design and citizens use.
The third is Participatory Action Research (PAR). Methods in which community members participate in the research process, advancing knowledge production and transformative action together, constitute the practical foundation of Design Justice.
Background and Context
The Intersection of Technology and Design
A defining feature of Costanza-Chock's analysis is its connection to technology criticism. Airport security scanners are designed with the cisgender male body as the "default," subjecting transgender people to excessive physical screening. The accuracy of facial recognition systems is highest for white male faces and declines for people of color, women, and children.
These "technical problems" are, in fact, problems of designer demographics and power relations within the design process. Design Justice turns its questions toward "from whose perspective was this designed?"
In the Japanese context, analogous problems are becoming visible in the design of public systems such as administrative digitalization, the My Number card system (マイナンバー), and AI-assisted welfare-eligibility determination. The question of for whom an "optimized" system is optimized depends on the assumptions built into the design.
The Critique of the "Empathy Trap"
Among its critiques of Design Thinking, Design Justice identifies what it calls the "empathy trap."
Standard Design Thinking methodology places "empathy with the user" at the entry point of the process. Through persona creation, user interviews, and ethnography, designers arrive at a state of "understanding the user's perspective."
Costanza-Chock calls this the "empathy trap." The subject of empathy is the designer, and even after the designer feels that they have "understood," the power relation remains unchanged. The structure of "I, who have understood you, will now design for you" is a refined variant of paternalism.
What should be interrogated is not empathy but the power question of "who is the subject of the design process."
Reading the Structure
Comparison with Participatory Design
Design Justice and participatory design (the Scandinavian school) occupy adjacent positions. Yet they differ in emphasis.
| Dimension | Participatory Design (Scandinavian School) | Design Justice |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Labor movement, workplace democracy (1960s–70s, Nordic countries) | Social justice movements, feminism (2010s, United States) |
| Central values | Worker participation in design, democratic workplaces | Intersectional equity, transformation of power structures |
| Primary domain | Workplaces, industrial systems | Everyday life, technology, public services |
| Power analysis | Labor-capital relations | Intersection of race, gender, class, and disability |
| Evaluation criteria | Quality of participatory process | Protection of minority rights and improvement of their situations |
Connections to Social Vision Design
Design Justice raises three questions for social vision design.
The first concerns the "positionality" of the designer. A designer's race, gender, social position, and experience all shape the assumptions and outcomes of design. When designers are unaware of their own positionality, their designs do not embody a neutral standpoint but a particular perspective. When social vision design engages with the challenges of Japanese society, the question of designer positionality is unavoidable.
The second concerns the valuation of "community knowledge." How does one build a design culture that treats the lived knowledge, experiential knowledge, and practical knowledge held by those directly affected as equal to — or greater than — professional expertise? The principles of Design Justice address this not as a matter of "values" but as a structural feature of the design process.
The third concerns the distribution of benefits and harms. Who receives the benefits of the change produced by social vision design, and who bears the harms? This question becomes a criterion for the prior evaluation of design. Design Justice holds that "good design" should be evaluated not by the goodness of its intentions but by the fairness of its distributions.
In Japan, the phrase "solving social problems" (社会課題解決) is frequently used to legitimate design. But who defined that "problem"? Who evaluates the "solution"? The questions raised by Design Justice have not yet been sufficiently absorbed on this point.
→ Related: Genealogy of Participatory Design / The Boundary Between Speculative Design and Social Vision Design / What Social Design Is Not / Six-Field Integration Hypothesis
