Session: DTM-04-01 - Inclusive Design

Paper Number: 87373

87373 - What Do We Mean When We Write About Ethics, Equity, and Justice in Engineering Design? 

Engineering design often requires engaging with users, clients, and stakeholders of products and systems. It is therefore important for designers to reflect on the societal and environmental implications of their design work so that they can design equitably, ethically, and justly. We conduct a review of three leading scholarly engineering design venues to investigate how, when, and why these terms – “ethics”, “equity” and “justice” — appear in the engineering design literature and what scholars mean when they use them. We conducted a search for these three terms and their variations within the title, keywords, and abstracts of three leading engineering design journals and conferences from the earliest records available through the year 2020. We find that these terms are minimally present within the field’s scholarship and posit that design researchers may be using other terms to refer to their work that is aligned with principles of ethics, equity, and justice. Nevertheless, we find that the prevalence of terms has increased over time and that the terms come up throughout various stages of the design process. There appear to be a variety of motivations for including these terms, but sustainability and education of the next generation of designers appear to be particularly motivating. Finally, we propose an expanded design justice framework that is specific to engineering design. We encourage designers in our field to adopt this framework to assist them in thinking through how their engineering design work can be used to advance justice.

Presenting Author: Madhurima Das Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presenting Author Biography: Madhurima Das is a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT and earned her SB in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. She is a former K-12 engineering and design educator and her interests include design theory and methodology, makerspaces, and using design and engineering to advance equity and justice.

Authors:

Madhurima Das Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Gillian Roeder Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Anastasia Ostrowski Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Maria Yang Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Aditi Verma University of Michigan