2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

One of the primary tasks that engineers have to undertake is design. Engineers design and develop solutions that are supposed to satisfy human needs. Engineers also, through their work, intend to change the life of everyone for the better. While all around us we see numerous examples of cases/design solutions that have improved our lives, there is also another side of this story. For example, development of nuclear weapons during the second world war led to its use to destroy cities and innocent lives, and a perpetual threat of the possibility of nuclear holocaust. Or, for example, how early in the US history the growth of the country from its coastal colonies into the heartland was achieved through the development of the railroad. These same railroad projects ended up destroying the lives and livelihood of the indigenous people.

Even today when we are designing solutions, we quite often do not consider the possibilities of the harms that it may cause and we often exclude the voices of the very people who are affected by our design. The Design Justice movement is a network of design practitioners, design instructors and others from a variety of different backgrounds who want to change the design landscape into a more inclusive ecosystem [1,2]

Research shows [3], while typical engineering programs have plenty of design content, the concepts of design justice are rarely taught. This paper talks about the experiences of introducing some of the concepts of design justice into a number of undergraduate courses. It was done through a case study of a section of an interstate that was built in the 1950s cutting across a thriving neighborhood that was eventually decimated. This case has been in recent news, since federal government money is being used to revive parts of the neighborhood. In the assignment students were asked to review this case through the lens of deign justice using the principles of design justice[2]. Also, they are then assigned to pick a design situation that they are familiar with and use the same set of guiding principles to analyze their chosen example. The results learned from this assignment will be reported in this paper.

References

1. https://designjustice.org
2. https://designjustice.org/read-the-principles
3. Madhurima Das, Anastasia K. Ostrowski, et.al., “Auditing design justice: The impact of social movements on design pedagogy at a technology institution,” 13th Design Thinking Research Symposium, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, March 22-24, 2022