Reading List: Design Justice

Building on the research-focused articles from philanthropy unfiltered, these reading lists offer an excellent way to explore topics more thoroughly and move beyond a single essay. Each list compiles influential texts that relate to the essay’s ideas and includes additional readings to deepen your understanding of social justice efforts within the nonprofit industrial complex.

This list complements my Substack article, “A New Blueprint: Design Justice as a Catalyst for Structural Change in Philanthropy,” in which I discuss how philanthropy has adopted design thinking as a programmatic toolkit while preserving existing power structures. Design justice challenges us to consider who creates our systems and who bears their burdens. The readings here expand on the article’s references, tracing the framework to Black feminist thought and community-led design, and further critiquing philanthropy. I hope these readings prompt you to consider what you are ready to (re)design within your organization.

• Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.

  • An analysis of how discrimination is built into seemingly neutral but actually biased technologies.

• Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press. https://design-justice.pubpub.org

  • The defining text of the design justice framework, available in full open access via the provided link.

• Crenshaw, K. (2019). On intersectionality: Essential writings. The New Press.

  • A compilation of legal scholarship that introduced the term “intersectionality” and its analytical power.

• Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.

  • An argument advocating for design as a form of world-making that allows many worlds to thrive, rather than a single world imposed on everyone.

• Liedtka, J., Salzman, R., & Azer, D. (2017). Design thinking for the greater good: Innovation in the social sector. Columbia Business School Publishing.

  • Ten case studies demonstrating the potential of design thinking in the social sector, serving as a baseline for this list’s further exploration.

• Ackermann, R. (2023, February 9). Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong/

  • A thoroughly researched reflection on the rise of design thinking as an industry and how it diverged from its original purpose.

• Aye, G. (2017, June 2). Design education’s big gap: Understanding the role of power. Greater Good Studio. https://medium.com/greater-good-studio/design-educations-big-gap-understanding-the-role-of-power-1ee1756b7f08

  • A practicing designer’s critique of design education, arguing that it focuses on techniques while overlooking issues of power, aimed at practitioners.

• Buzon, D. (2020). Design thinking is a rebrand for white supremacy. Medium. https://dabuzon.medium.com/design-thinking-is-a-rebrand-for-white-supremacy-b3d31aa55831

  • A critique examining how design thinking rebrands mainstream cultural assumptions as a universal method.

• Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design justice, A.I., and escape from the matrix of domination. Journal of Design and Science. https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/costanza-chock

  • A brief open-access introduction to the design justice framework for those who don’t want to read the entire book.

• Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/

  • The original article that first discussed single-axis thinking and highlighted what it overlooks, available for free through Chicago Unbound.

• Francis, M. M. (2019). The price of civil rights: Black lives, white funding, and movement capture. Law & Society Review, 53(1), 275–309. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12384

  • An archival study examining how philanthropic funding shifted the NAACP’s agenda, highlighting that funder influence is a longstanding design feature.

• Irani, L. (2018). “Design thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the apex of global labor hierarchies. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29638

  • An open-access academic critique examining design thinking as a status project that privileges certain types of workers and knowledge over others.

• Iskander, N. (2018, September 5). Design thinking is fundamentally conservative and preserves the status quo. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-conservative-and-preserves-the-status-quo

  • A clear argument that design thinking places interpretive authority primarily with the designer instead of the community.

• Creative Reaction Lab. (2018). Equity-centered community design field guide. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e3b20447d777f2b32c1bc1c/t/5e667103feb2830f1b1b68d4/1583771908636/ECCD+FIELD+GUIDE+-+DOWNLOAD.pdf

  • A free digital facilitation guide that applies equity-centered design principles in practice.

• Holmes, K. (2018). Mismatch: How inclusion shapes design. The MIT Press.

  • A clear explanation of how exclusion naturally arises in designed systems and what is needed to change that.

• McKercher, K. A. (2020). Beyond sticky notes: Doing co-design for real: Mindsets, methods, and movements. Beyond Sticky Notes.

  • An accessible guide on truly empowering participants in co-design, moving beyond mere consultation.

• Papanek, V. (1971). Design for the real world: Human ecology and social change. Pantheon Books.

  • A timeless critique of prioritizing market needs over people in design.

• Tunstall, E. (2023). Decolonizing design: A cultural justice guidebook. The MIT Press.

  • A guidebook for challenging colonial norms within design institutions, based on lived leadership experience.

• Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.

  • The framework of the matrix of domination that design justice is based on directly.

• Taylor, K.-Y. (Ed.). (2017). How we get free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books.

  • The Combahee River Collective statement along with interviews of the women who authored it.

Data, technology, and encoded inequality

• D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. The MIT Press. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/

  • A comprehensive framework for questioning authority in data practices, available via open access at the provided link.

• Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.

  • Supports the idea that design perpetuates domination within daily information systems.

• brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.

  • A relational, iterative method of change that provides practitioners with a practical alternative to control-based models.

• Giridharadas, A. (2018). Winners take all: The elite charade of changing the world. Alfred A. Knopf.

  • The argument that elite-led social change aims to defend the very systems that create the problems.

• INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Ed.). (2017). The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex. Duke University Press.

  • The foundational critique of the nonprofit industrial complex and the clearest bridge between this list and the rest of the newsletter.

• Villanueva, E. (2021). Decolonizing wealth: Indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore balance (2nd ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

  • The most straightforward philosophy partner to the design justice argument, questioning whom wealth systems were created to serve.