Design Justice Network Hub Zines

Design  — whether it’s the creation of graphics, the layout of a website, or drafting the blueprints of buildings — is often the specialized work of experts, who make creative and structural choices on behalf of “users.” 

What happens when design becomes an opportunity for communities who have been systematically excluded from decision-making to engage and change their surroundings and conditions?

This zine compiles first-person reflections from designers whose projects and politics refuse the confines of their formal discipline, and instead chart different horizons of “design justice.” 

Artwork for a report becomes a platform for First Nations youth to explain how the colonial Canadian justice system produces discrimination against Indigenous people. Toronto youth develop their own ideas for how a sports center in their neighborhood might look. A housing corporation works with an indigenous pueblo in New Mexico to design affordable housing that combines modern compressed earth block with traditional adobe, in order to maintain the integrity of the community’s architectural identity.

The examples in this zine show that design justice is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather an approach that takes time. As one architect notes, “it’s a social art and political act built from profound relationships and hard work.”