A warm welcome to the blog topic of Design for Justice!
We are excited to share with you blog posts written by the students of the OSZW PhD course “Design for Justice,” organized by Ibo van de Poel and me.
Throughout this course, our students explored how justice is intertwined with technology design and explored the relationship between value and technology. Supported by guest lecturers, we tackled important questions of justice: Who gets to design? Who are we designing for? And perhaps most importantly, what values are we embedding in technologies? In the course, we focused on justice issues in various technologies, including urban design, water management, and artificial intelligence.
In the blog posts you are about to read; students address many important issues relating to designing for justice. For instance, in the blog posts, you find critical evaluations and suggestions on how to improve approaches like value-sensitive design so that they promote an ongoing ethical evaluation by all stakeholders, including those with less formal influence. Similarly, one blog post argues for a bottom-up perspective to ensure that the target group's plurality of values is reflected and epistemic injustice is prevented. Another blog post explores the tension between using location data for distributive justice in humanitarian aid and the risks to individual and group privacy. One piece critically examines female-shaped sex robots and advocates for a design approach that includes diverse stakeholders, particularly women, to ensure that the technology respects women's dignity and promotes consent and mutuality in human-robot interactions.
I hope you have as much fun reading these pieces as I enjoyed teaching the course.
Happy reading, and may you find fresh inspiration on every page!
About the author
Steffen Steinert is an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology. Steffen is working on value change and ethics of technology.