Design Justice Network Principles

Design can invite people to speak while leaving every consequential decision elsewhere. The Design Justice Network Principles offers a way to examine that gap between participation and power. This collective document should be distinguished from Sasha Costanza-Chock’s later book, Design Justice. The network’s historical account traces the initial workshop to Detroit in 2015 and the revised principles to 2018; its English text identifies summer 2018 as the latest update. Collective authorship matters here: a movement’s working commitments are not the recommendations of a single benevolent professional.

Whose account changes the decision?

The document connects the authority of directly affected people to a distinction between a designer’s intentions and a project’s effects. These are related but different questions. A team may sincerely want to help while controlling the definition of the problem, the criteria of success and the final budget. Hearing testimony does not by itself redistribute power over a project’s problem definition, success criteria or budget. A feminist reading asks whether knowledge supplied by women, trans people or disabled participants can actually redirect the work, including challenging the proposed product itself.

Consider a hypothetical consultation about an online public service. Attending a workshop may require unpaid time, childcare and a device with a reliable connection. If organizers recruit only those who can meet those conditions, their picture of the community will already be selective. The principles do not supply this particular case or a ready-made staffing formula. They make it possible to question a process that records attendees’ satisfaction while ignoring the people excluded before consultation begins. Reimbursement, accessible participation and an explanation of how decisions change are practical tests of whether lived experience has institutional force.

A product ends; responsibility continues

The text also relates shared tools to sustainable outcomes controlled by communities. This changes the time horizon of evaluation. A launch can appear successful while leaving an organization dependent on a departing contractor, an unaffordable licence or expertise it cannot replace. Asking who can repair, adapt or discontinue a system reveals a distribution of power that a polished demonstration can conceal.

Maintenance is especially useful for feminist analysis because the less visible work of answering questions, translating requests and repairing relationships can fall to people whose contributions never appear in a project’s public credits. This is an interpretive application of the principles, not a workforce finding established by the declaration. It suggests examining the support budget, documentation and decision rights together. Giving away a tool without the capacity to govern it can transfer obligations while retaining control elsewhere.

Community leadership needs procedures for disagreement

The document’s attention to existing local and Indigenous practices challenges the assumption that innovation must arrive from outside. Before commissioning a replacement, a team can ask what people already use and what would be lost if that arrangement disappeared. Existing knowledge deserves authority without being treated as a freely extractable collection of ideas.

Yet a community is not a single speaker. An organization’s most visible representative may not share the priorities of its precariously employed members or people with less freedom to disclose their circumstances. Community control therefore still needs ways to contest representation, distribute resources and protect dissent. The short declaration establishes an orientation; it does not settle those institutional disputes or prove that a signatory has changed its conduct.

Read the principles beside Feminist Data Manifest-No: the latter sharpens the question of refusal when participation itself becomes extractive. The principles provide a different practical entry—examining who sets the problem and retains control afterward. Together they help distinguish consultation from a redistribution of authority, without turning a declaration into a certificate of justice.

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance clarify the distinction between participation procedures and collective rights. Organizing a consultation is not the same as possessing authority over later uses of data concerning peoples, territories and knowledge. This comparison preserves Indigenous self-determination rather than reducing it to generic community participation.