Design Justice Practices within Mechanical Engineering
Objective: To study how engineering design researchers practice design justice in their work
Key findings:
Through analysis of data from three key workshops at engineering design conferences, we found themes in the following categories:
Defining design justice
Integrating design justice into research
Challenges with justice in engineering design
Future work to incorporate justice in engineering design
Design researchers brought up many key areas of justice in design work including participation in design, historical contexts that shape design research, education of justice in design curriculum, and research methods appropriate for design justice work.
Relevant Paper: Maher, T., Syal, S. M., and Kramer, J., 2025, “Bringing Justice to Design: How Researchers and Practitioners View and Incorporate Justice Into Design,” Proceedings of the ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE2025, Anaheim, CA. [link]
Lead EMBERlab researcher: Tera Maher
Collaborator: Julia Kramer