Design and Justice: A Scoping Review in Engineering Design

Abstract

Our society faces complex social justice challenges, often exacerbated by existing engineered products and technologies. To avoid unintentionally contributing to social injustice, engineering designers play a critical role in creating and studying products and technologies that can aim to address the challenges of social injustice. There is a growing priority in the engineering design research community to incorporate justice into design and to do so meaningfully and intentionally. Therefore, there is a need to more deeply understand how scholars have integrated concepts of justice into design and to bring to light areas of future research. In this article, we conduct a scoping review of design and justice in twelve scholarly venues relevant to the engineering design community. A scoping review allowed for a broad range of topics to be covered to identify major research themes and gaps and to explore the boundaries of the nascent study of design and justice. After searching the relevant venues, we conducted a thematic analysis to capture the major themes in the dataset of papers relating to justice and design. Along with relevant terminology used, we found that scholars connected justice to design in ways that we categorized into three main areas of design: designers, design outcomes, and design processes. Our analysis highlighted areas of future research in studying justice as relevant to designers, outcomes, and processes, as well as identifying an overall call to redefine the field of design in the pursuit of justice.