However, as Sita M. Syal and Julia Kramer, assistant professors in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, write in “Design and Justice: A Scoping Review in Engineering Design,” there is “a growing priority in the engineering design research community to incorporate justice into design and to do so meaningfully and intentionally.”
Syal and Kramer share insights into the interconnections between engineering and social justice, some of the lingering issues, and their hopes for the discourse moving forward.
We hear the term social justice a lot these days, but to kind of kick things off, could you give us a high-level overview of what social justice is in the context of our discussion and why it’s so important when it comes to engineering?
I’ll just start this off by saying it's a really interesting time and landscape to be asking this question.
We work in the area of this intersection of justice and engineering, and we get into this a little bit in the paper, but there are many, many disciplines outside of engineering that have been thinking about the concept of justice and studying the concept of justice for a long, long time. Social justice is really understanding how our society and structures and norms that are set, how all of those things are serving people. And I think there is a large body of literature to suggest that the structures and norms and systems that we have today—that can include decision making—are not just because all people are not served in ways that are that would that are equal, equitable, and fair.
So, how does that relate to engineering, and engineering particularly for us as mechanical engineers. We build things and systems and structures that real people use and we as engineers have a responsibility to ensure that what we’re putting out into the world to be used is for the good of all of humanity and not just for a select few.
I think one thing that we were thinking about is that justice doesn’t necessarily imply anything other than people having their needs met and people can reasonably disagree on how society should be organized on the way to do that. And I think that is probably outside the scope of what engineering does, but as much as it influences our work, how can we create solutions that mitigate burdens on groups of people, or amplify benefits to groups of people that aren’t being served by current society. We were very lucky to be able to draw upon such rich scholarship in doing so and I think we’re also relating to the fact that, as Sita mentioned, the work of engineers doing this, the National Society of Professional Engineers says that engineers serve public health, safety, and welfare. So, we know that there’s a goal here. What can we draw from other fields to help us understand the lever arms that our engineered artifacts and solutions can have toward fairly distributing benefits and burdens across a society.
Let’s talk about your research. What was the impetus behind getting this study started, what were you hoping to uncover, and did you uncover it?
We were very inspired by this idea of design justice, which had been a term that had come more into use starting with this 2018 paper that Sasha Costanza-Chock had written, which was a summary of work that had been going on in this network of practitioners called the Design Justice Network for many years before then. We had both been familiar with that work, were really excited to see how it had grown, culminating in a book that was published in 2020 called Design Justice. Upon publication of that book, I think there sparked this sort of ground swelling movement of people who were talking about this term in a bunch of different fields and us, both being engineers, became really interested in the idea of how our colleagues within engineering—which isn’t just mechanical but broadly engineering design was how we framed it—how are folks in engineering design talking about and writing about justice in their research.
Since we didn’t know the answer to that, we figured we should start with a lit review. So that was what initially framed our conversations around. We have a lot of thoughts around how we would like to shift our work and shift that toward justice. We have perspectives that we think are worth adding to the field of knowledge being generated. But we also don’t know everything that everyone else is doing. I don’t claim that our lit review told us everything that everyone’s doing, but we’re inherently limited by the keywords we chose to use and the journals that we searched over.
We really wanted to make sure that we were grounded in a solid foundation of, here are what our peers and our colleagues have been writing about, not just since 2020, though there has been a notable uptick. So, that was real impetus for the work—if we’re going to be working in here, let’s see what we’ve been doing so far, and use that as a way to map our course forward in our own individual research, in our collaborative research, and in the research that our communities are doing that’s more justice-oriented design as well.
And maybe something I’ll add to that—I think this field of design is so rich, it’s not just engineers, like Julia was saying. There is a set of principles that came out of some amazing work that this group did, it’s not engineering focused, but there is an enormous part of the engineering community that focuses on design. So, there’s this huge overlap. And I think the last part of the question, did we accomplish what we wanted, I think one of the things that really came out of this study is that it has been a springboard for us. There is this huge opportunity that had not been articulated beforehand of how design justice and engineering in particular, how those fields might intersect. As you can imagine, we came out of this study with many, many more questions than answers, which has been great for future work that we’re currently working on now and have plans to work on in the future. So, I would say from that angle, we certainly accomplished what we wanted.
That’s always amazing when your first project leads to multiple others. You mentioned in the paper that justice frequently comes up as a principle or an overarching goal rather than a specific set of metrics. How do you equate successful integration of justice into engineering design and how do you quantify it?
You’re hitting on some work that we’re doing right now because the reality is, the overarching highlight is that we don’t really know right now. And I think that’s kind of a consensus that we saw from this study is that there are examples of folks at a sort of micro level talking about things that they did in their particular context in their particular study that led to what they are saying, or claiming or proving or studying, as perhaps more just outcomes or processes. There’s also on the other side of the scale, kind of the more conceptual broad strokes.
What you’re asking is really, how do you get from the broad to the more specific contexts that we as design engineers might be thinking about. That is actually one of the big gaps that we found. There were a lot of calls to action for how to even quantify, to your question, how would you even quantify this concept of justice? I think that the pathway between those extremes of that spectrum is really undefined. And so actually, it’s really ripe for some exciting research, some of which we’re doing. We can’t do all of it, so hopefully others are going to get excited and want to work in this area because we really need all the people we can get to start really operationalizing. What does it actually mean to be integrating justice on a quantitative level, even qualitative, but implemented and not just a specific context.
One thing that we did surface in our paper is that justice is important not just for the outcomes of what engineered solutions we end up creating, but also for the processes that we use to get there. And so, when we think about measuring justice, I think the justice that is either enhanced or perhaps not, by the solutions that we create. Maybe principles for generating metrics like that need to be more application specific. For example, if you’re working on a technology for energy resilience, your metrics of success are going to look quite different than they would if you were working on a medical device.
I think we’re also interested in exploring what are the metrics for justice in the processes that you’re using, who are the various people that you’re engaging with that are informing their perspectives to the design decisions that you’re making, and how are you putting into action some of your goals for what the solution should achieve into the methods that you’re using to create it in the first place. I just want to highlight that the metrics piece is very important and it’s not just in our outcomes, but what we do in our process informs those outcomes as well. And so, we can measure both aspects.
And I think researchers really tried to get at that, sometimes camouflaged in other areas like metrics for social justice and how that is integrated into engineering and design, or in sustainability and using that as an overarching theme. But we saw these different kinds of overarching things that maybe weren’t as obvious. But when we synthesized them with our data set, we saw people are actually trying to measure justice or to come up with metrics in some way. But there’s no sort of concerted effort thus far.
In the report, you call for a redefinition of design and pursuit of justice. What would you change in traditional engineering design education or methodology to reflect that sort of redefinition, if it’s possible.
I think that goes back to our original point of you know, we’re kind of summarizing what other folks have said. And so, part of our call to action was intended mostly to be a synthesis of what other researchers also note as their call to action. I think one of the big things that we’ve seen in this literature that we reviewed and in some of the more background foundational literature we are drawing upon is that justice is sociotechnical, and the training that we offer to engineers primarily leans technical, often at the expense of social considerations.
There’s been some great research that has shown the impacts of that on students who are coming into an engineering program with the desire to contribute to public health, safety, and welfare. That desire actually goes down as they are in their collegiate education. That’s some really excellent work that Erin Cech has done to show that. So, I think that’s one aspect of redefinition, is highlighting the importance of sociotechnical education.
The other part of that is to emphasize that social and technical aren’t separate things, but they’re mutually reinforcing. And so if we’re working toward creating engineered artifacts that contribute to justice that is fundamentally interlinking social considerations with technical considerations. So, redefining engineering as a sociotechnical pursuit and not just a technical pursuit I think is going to be a requirement to give our students, our practitioners, the tools to be able to work toward that. To know the limits of their own expertise, to know when to collaborate with others who have different forms of expertise, including other forms of academic expertise, other forms of lived experience, and other forms of practical implementation experience as well. And so that would be, I think, a summary of one aspect of the redefinition that we saw.
Maybe another thing to add in there too, which is very tied to what Julia just said—practitioners that are doing this stuff on the ground, it’s not like we academics just found out about it and it must be something new. Practitioners are doing this. They’re doing design justice, whatever that means to them. And there’s this huge space and opportunity for learning how we in the academic space can tailor and redefine the way we do our research and what we do in our research on in terms of justice and design engineering and learn from what practitioners are doing to help, redefine that space. How are we actually training our engineers in a way that’s truly sociotechnical, meaning truly integrated and truly putting priority on all of those sides, not just technical with a little sprinkled in and connecting that to what’s happening in the practitioner world could really strengthen the whole sort of a circular economy of how we’re educating and then putting engineers out into the world and then bringing it back into academia.
What role do you believe students will play in shaping the future of of engineering design culture and this whole concept of bringing social justice so that it’s like second nature?
I think that’s a perfect segue from the last point. Both of us are in this profession because we really believe that it’s our duty to educate the next generation of engineers to go out and really rock the world in such positive ways and make change. And I think that students are going to have a huge role, particularly in this time that we live in. I mean, we live in a time where problems are complex and wicked and hairy and very, very nonlinear. We can’t prepare students for every Rolodex of things they’re going to see when they leave whatever institution and go out and make an impact in the real world. We may not even be able to guess that. But what we can do, and I think this applies really to this field of design justice and how we educate our engineers, is we can prepare them for the types of problems and the types of problem solving, which is something we engineers have always loved to say that we’re good at is problem solving.
This is a sort of, dare I say radical shift in the way we teach our engineers to solve problems. That it is not just about the technology that we are designing and developing and putting out in the world and implementing, but it’s actually this deep responsibility to consider systems as sociotechnical from the very, very beginning and move through our work as engineers with that from the very beginning. To know our limits, to work with other people with different expertise to be able to solve these very sort of ‘wicked’ problems.
If we’re relating it specifically to design justice, I think that really permeates all of engineering and students are going to have a huge role in the ever complicated world that we live in.
Where do you see this discourse around social justice moving as we head toward the end of the decade and beyond? What gives you confidence about this research and what worries you?
Something that Julia said way at the beginning of our conversation is that justice is not about helping some people and not helping other people, right? Justice is about everyone having their needs met. And the discourse to get there may include conflict or disagreement, or not.
This is about people getting their needs met and this is about creating a better, more fair society. So, from that perspective, I feel very confident in this work. I feel very hopeful in this work. I also feel very hopeful because students really get it and we can have a war on words all day long, that’s fine, at the core, I believe we’re all humans—who doesn’t want to work toward a better society where everyone’s needs are met and a more fair society where people are really able to thrive? And that’s what this work is all about.
Are there any other key findings or highlights that you might like to add before we wrap it up?
It’s just very telling that this work has been going on for a very long time. We were able to find so many different papers going back all the way to the 1980s, that was the first paper that we saw that was included in here. So, this is not a new thought.
I think the idea that engineering has something to do with promoting the betterment of society has always been true of the engineering profession. Being able to put some specific wording around it related to justice has utility in being able to identify those who are thinking about similar things. Also, the utility of being able to identify what are the frameworks outside of engineering that we might draw upon to be able to think about what justice actually means and how do our solutions work toward that.
There are a lot of problems to be working on and any time that I can add in a pop culture reference, I try to. So, the one that’s coming to me right now is Leslie Knope in Parks and Rec and the series finale, saying, ‘find your team and get to work.’ I think that’s a nice spirit of all of this work, of, we can’t do it alone. Find your team. Find your interdisciplinary people. Get to work. We’ve got many problems we could be working on.
Hear, hear.
Louise Poirier is managing editor of Mechanical Engineering magazine.
