Design Justice in Action:
Designing With, Not For
Another one for class y’all… enjoy?
Introduction
I think a lot about who gets to design the worlds we move through. Because every learning experience is a design choice. The fonts we pick, the metaphors we use, the voices we center, the pathways we build or leave out… all of these decisions carry weight. They signal who belongs, who was imagined as the learner, and who was left as an afterthought. Design justice asks us to confront that weight directly, rather than pretend that good intentions are enough.
This post explores two frameworks that sit at the heart of transformative design practice: disability justice and community-driven design. Both demand more than accessibility checklists or well-meaning audits. They ask learning designers to fundamentally reorient our practice toward the people most harmed by design that excludes, flattens, or erases. The purpose here is to move past the theoretical framing and into what these principles actually require of us, and what becomes possible when we take them seriously.
Key Principles of Design Justice
Disability justice emerged from activist communities led by disabled people of color, and it carries a fundamentally different logic than traditional accessibility frameworks. Where accessibility frameworks often ask, “Does this meet the standard?“ disability justice asks, “Who shaped the standard, and whose body, mind, or experience was treated as the baseline?”
Mia Mingus and the Sins Invalid collective articulated disability justice as rooted in intersectionality because disability does not exist separately from race, gender, class, sexuality, or immigration status. A framework that ignores these overlapping systems of oppression will, at best, serve the most privileged disabled people and leave everyone else behind. For learning designers, this means that accessible design cannot be a one-size-fits-all technical fix. It requires asking whose lived experience is being centered, and whose is being accommodated as a secondary concern.
Constanza-Chock (2020) offers a parallel challenge through the lens of design justice more broadly. In examining what he calls the “design site,” he asks us to notice that most design processes default to centering the designer’s assumptions about the user, rather than building accountability to actual communities. This produces tools and experiences that may technically function but still reproduce harm (Constanza-Chock, 2020, Chapter 2).
Community-driven design is the corrective practice. At its core, it insists on co-design: not designing for a community, but designing with and through one. This looks like bringing stakeholders into the process from the earliest stages, not just as feedback-givers at the end. It looks like accountability mechanisms that keep designers answerable to community members over time.
And critically, it means resisting the pressure to let the tool or the technology drive the design process. As Constanza-Chock (2020) writes in his discussion of design practices, the principle “nothing about us without us” is not a request for inclusion in a process that remains fundamentally unchanged. It is a demand to transform the process itself.
Challenges and Opportunities
Of course, it is one thing to nod along with principles and another to live them inside real institutions. The barriers to implementing these principles are real. In many institutional contexts, including nonprofit organizations, schools, and training departments, design work happens under conditions of scarcity.
Community-driven processes take time. Meaningful co-design requires relationship-building that cannot be collapsed into a single focus group or survey.
The Moore article (2021) makes a pointed observation that the design models we have were built to serve particular assumptions about efficiency and scalability, and those assumptions often run counter to justice-oriented practice. The invitation, and the opportunity, is to ask what a design model built from justice principles might look like from the ground up.
That reimagining creates real openings. When designers commit to co-creation, they gain something: better design. Communities hold knowledge about their own needs, contexts, and barriers that no designer can fully access from the outside. Centering that knowledge produces learning experiences that are more resonant, more durable, and more likely to actually work.
Actionable Strategies for Inclusive Design
Build accountability structures. Form advisory groups of people directly affected by design decisions. Provide compensation for their time and integrate feedback loops to revisit outcomes regularly.
Audit your assumptions, not just your outputs. Most accessibility audits check whether a finished product meets standards. Justice-oriented practice asks designers to audit the assumptions embedded in the design process itself. Who was imagined as the default learner? What prior knowledge, technology access, or language proficiency was assumed? This kind of reflexive audit can happen at the beginning of a project through tools like empathy mapping or community asset inventories, rather than as a corrective afterthought.
Normalize flexible design cycles. Allocate time for reflection and revision, recognizing that accessibility insights often emerge mid-process. Document these adaptations and treat them as learning, not failures.
Invest in cultural accessibility. Beyond physical or digital accommodations, consider emotional and social access: is the language inclusive? Are power dynamics addressed? Are community norms acknowledged in design contexts?
Model sustainability through care. Avoid “innovation dumping.” For example, rolling out new programs without support systems to sustain them. Inclusive design grows from stewardship, not speed.
Resist the pull toward scalability at the expense of specificity. One of the tensions in institutional design is pressure to create “one product that works for everyone.” Disability justice and community-driven design both push back on this. Specificity serves more people than universality when universality is built on a narrow imagining of the user. Designing for the margins, as Mia Mingus argues, makes the design more useful for everyone.
Conclusion
Design justice asks something difficult of us, something that goes beyond producing better products and reaches toward becoming different kinds of designers. It invites us to move beyond the aesthetics of inclusion toward the ethics of liberation by asking who benefits, who is harmed, and who is missing from the design table (Costanza-Chock, 2020Moore & Dousay, 2023; Sins Invalid, 2016).
Disability justice and community-driven design remind us that design power must be redistributed, centering those most impacted and honoring their leadership, wholeness, and interdependence. When we begin with collective access and co-creation, design becomes a practice of relationship and movement-building rather than mere problem-solving.
As learning designers, we will not get this perfect. Accessibility will stay imperfect. We will miss things and need to try again (Moore & Dousay, 2023). But if we keep coming back to listening, shared power, and the belief that every learner carries wholeness with them into our spaces, then design becomes something more than a deliverable.
It becomes one of the ways we practice the kind of world we want to live in, together.
The question worth sitting with is what does it cost us, relationally and institutionally, to keep designing without them. That is the reflection this work demands. Start there. Then start building differently.
The invitation is to reimagine everyday design tasks from lesson planning to product development as opportunities to build the worlds we need, together.
Pa’lante, Siempre, Pa’lante. Always moving, always becoming, toward freedom, toward liberation. Always toward a world where we sway, sing, and leap, resistance our rhythm. Always toward a world where we take root and reach for the sun. Lex Rodriguez, 2026
Constanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
Mingus, M. (2017, April 12). Access intimacy, interdependence and disability justice. Leaving Evidence.
Moore, S. L. (2021). The design models we have and not the design models we need. The Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 10(4). https://doi.org/10.59668/329.5266
Sins Invalid. (2016). Skin, tooth, and bone: The basis of movement is our people – A disability justice primer (2nd ed.).