Auditing Design Justice: The Impact of Social Movements on Design Pedagogy at a Technology Institution

The purpose of engineering is to solve consequential, real-world problems in service of society. To be effective problem-solvers in societal contexts, engineers and designers ought to be trained to conceptualize and operationalize ethics, equity, and justice in their practice. Our work develops a methodology for an ethics, equity, and justice audit of design pedagogy that can also be extended to design practice. We develop this methodology by drawing on and extending the Design Justice framework, which we then use to assess design pedagogy at a technology institution – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition, we explore how design and critique courses engage with ethics, equity, and justice content in course syllabi and examine the impact of social and racial justice movements on design pedagogy. Our audit of design pedagogy, the largest such audit of its kind, serves as a proof of concept of how this methodology can be applied more broadly to design education and practice.