What does design justice look like in a medium-size auto insurance company?

On September 13th, our emerging Principles at Work working group hosted a scenario-based workshop with 64 participants on how to apply design justice principles in professionalized workplaces. In hour-long breakout groups, we reflected on scenarios about struggling with power and equity to generate ideas, strategies, and tools for the job based on past experience. We found a majority of ideas at the systems-level interventions (e.g., stakeholders mapping, identifying gatekeepers) and only a minority of individual-level (e.g., workflow checklists), almost all of which in the context of influencing peers. And last week with 16 design students at University of San Francisco, we facilitated another workshop with similar results: a realization that interns or employees need "power in numbers" to make management do the right thing. We closed by making commitments for future efforts.

Since starting in April, our working group has grown from two people in April to over 70 in several circles. Our work ahead involves tackling "ethics" distractions, packaging our workshop with a zine to help our peers facilitate a similar workshop. We’re doing this to build our community of practice in industry, a tricky matter of ensuring principles and applications don't get co-opted or worse, like we’ve seen in many cases with participatory co-design.

Also, check out Principles at Work: Applying “Design Justice” in Professionalized Workplaces. Eight of us also co-authored that short paper in October for the CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) conference to document our efforts so far, our work ahead, and why we need to focus on daily economic needs like auto insurance.

In November, we're planning an orientation to include – and regroup with – new members, so reach out to get involved! Join us in #PrinciplesatWork in Slack (for DJN members) or email designjustice.atwork@gmail.com.