Conference Agenda

Integrating justice in the field of design is critically important to ensure the systems and technologies designers create and implement fairly serve all people. There is a need to better understand how justice is incorporated in scholarly design work. Our previous work has looked at how design academics write about justice in their research, with a particular focus on engineering design.1 The motivation for this special section is to engage with design academics and understand how they talk about justice in design research. Engaging with the Design Society community at DESIGN 2024 is an excellent opportunity to leverage the community’s expertise, to collectively foster discussion on justice in design, and to identify key opportunities to advance work in justice and design.

The meeting objectives are:

1. to learn how design academics understand justice in research through an interactive activity focused around analyzing a design justice framework, and 
2. to collect data on design academics’ perspectives of justice in their design work to analyze and later disseminate back to the community to catalyze future work in this area.

The expected outcome of the special section is a scholarly article (intended journal: Design Science) in which we analyze qualitative data collected during the session discussion activities and present preliminary findings about how design academics describe justice in research. This article will also highlight areas of future justice-oriented research for the broader design community to pursue.