Book Review: Design Justice - Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock

This is an interesting - although frustrating at times - book. It asks a pretty big question - how do we embed justice in to the ways we designs apps and services?

I couldn't find much to disagree with (although I have the odd quibble) but some of the language it uses is very exclusionary unless you're terminally online in very specific communities. "Undocuqueer", "heteropatriarchy", "LGBTQIATS" - I scuttled off to the glossary more than once to try and understand what was being talked about.

If you can get through the language, there's a brilliant clarion call. We get to imagine the future - we're not tied to the old ways of doing things.

Designers imagine images, objects, buildings, and systems that do not yet exist. We propose, predict, and advocate for (or, in certain kinds of design, warn against) visions of the future.

We can build worlds where everyone gets to say what the future looks like. We need to end the practice of designing for the majority and screw everyone else.

One of the paradoxes with Design Justice is that it doesn't cope with competing needs well. For example:

we prioritize design work that shifts advantages to those who are currently systematically disadvantaged within the matrix of domination.

But, to take an example, what about audible alerts on street crossings? A lifeline for the blind but a nightmare for those with sensory issues. I don't think there's a real solution here - other than consideration. As it goes on to say:

The point is not that it’s wrong to privilege some users over others; the point is that these decisions need to be made explicit.

Each choice we make needs to be justified. Unfortunately, we are forced into many of the choices by the nature of society. Quoting Laurie Penny:

The wants and needs of young, healthy, middle-class people with connections and a reasonable amount of spare cash are over-represented among Start-up City’s priorities. For one thing, those are the problems with solutions that sell. For another, given a few million dollars and a team of semi-geniuses, those problems are easy to solve. Structural social injustice and systemic racism are harder to tackle.

And that's something the book can't easily tackle. It acknowledges that using tools like Facebook to protest is a devil's bargain; the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

What I found empowering was that there was lots of practical advice for practitioners; something that's often lacking in these sorts of books. Similarly, while it was very US focussed, it did at least acknowledge the presence of the Rest Of World.

There's an interesting diversion to look at the US Civil Service - specifically 18F's tackling of unemployment:

The problem statement offered by 18F immediately skips over any discussion of structural inequality. For example: How is the unemployment rate distributed among different groups of people in the United States? How is college education distributed? What groups of people are getting access to those jobs that are growing, and what groups are being left out? In a design justice approach, the answers to these kinds of questions inform both the “people” and “problem” statements. Exploring these questions also modifies the assumptions undergirding the problem statement.

But this leads to an activist Civil Service. Should unelected bureaucrats be changing the way elected officials conduct policy? Maybe - but that's a tricky proposition to sell.

I also think the book misses the mark when it comes to civic participation:

Just as users provide free labor for the dominant platforms in the cultural economy, neoliberal citizens provide free labor for city managers on the dominant urban incident reporting platforms. Citizens are encouraged to report potholes, petty crime, and graffiti and are rewarded with promises of more rapid service delivery. Journalism professor Michael Schudson describes these practices as monitorial citizenship. Monitorial citizenship can be read as a key part of the privatization of public services, the conflation of the citizen with the user [...]

I disagree. I don't see a difference between organising a community litter-pick and reporting potholes. Nor between watching my neighbours' house when they're out and reporting on damage and defacement. Making it easier for a community to work together and report their concerns doesn't seem like a neoliberal privatisation nightmare. Such platforms should be designed with the community, of course, but those of us who want to live in a pleasant environment see no difference between public rubbish bins and QR codes asking us to report broken street lights.

Perhaps the weakest section is the chapter on hackathons. It is boringly American and seems to have a lot of misplaced ire. I'm aware of how events like Homeless Hackday can be misconstrued - but a hackday is a start of an experiment, not an end unto itself.

As I said, I mostly agree with the book. But the thing I take issue with most is this:

We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process. [...] The principle that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience is a crucial element of design justice,

I just don't think that's universally true. Lots of people have absolutely no objective understanding of their own predicament, nor the tools available to overcome their obstacles. Having participated in many co-design events, I know that many people are, at best, naïve at best ("can't you just make a phone that doesn't need recharging") to outright malicious ("if I had that feature I could really annoy my neighbours!"). As depressing as it is, sometimes designers need to be a little bit like strict parents.

Anyway, I was left enourmously uplifted and encouraged by this book. Too often design is done to people, let alone for them, and rarely with them. The book ends with this:

For any design project, we can ask three questions: Who participated in the design process? Who benefited from the design? And who was harmed by the design?

If you can make it through the academic language, this is a handy book.