Designing Equitable Futures

What is professional design practice’s role and responsibility in creating more equitable futures?

Midway through my current research project, I sought to summarize my research (which included interviews with designers, design artifact analysis, and literature review) about the possibilities and strategies for design businesses who are seeking to design more equitable solutions.

What is professional design practice’s role and responsibility in creating more equitable futures? In response to social injustice over the past five decades, designers have increasingly sought to engage in socially-minded practices. Seminal books like Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World highlighted the worldmaking capacity of design that has contributed to negative outcomes like climate change and resource depletion. More recently, the widespread adoption of human-centered design introduced empathy into the design lexicon and practice, but there are concerns that it has now been co-opted by commerce to cultivate increased consumption. Meanwhile, participatory design and other inclusive methodologies seek to equalize power and generate democratic design solutions, yet there is a lack of expertise, time, or resources to employ these methods in commercial practice.

Download PDF: Jacobs, Jessica. “Designing Equitable Futures.” dmi: Review 31, no. 3 (2020): 30-36.