On the Need for Mapping - Specialized Research AI at MIT

On the Need for Mapping
Design Inequalities
Mona Sloane

Introduction

“We might agree to reclaim the keyword design in order to refashion it,
but we need to do that deliberately, with an eye to the tensions inherent in
articulating projects in transformational change as “small d” design, with-
out reproducing the supremacy of Design with that initial capital letter.”
Lucy Suchman on “Design,” 2018 1

This special issue explores the relationship between design(ing)
and inequalities. It prompts a decidedly cross-disciplinary ex-
change between design scholars and social scientists on design
inequalities to incite a new dialogue that extends beyond notions
of participatory design or diverse design cultures. It connects with
research into complex and intersecting inequalities that are histor-
ical, structural, and practiced.

The project originates in the individual research that Nell
Beecham and I have been conducting in recent years on different
aspects of design and inequality. In early 2017, we aligned our
interests and organized a seminar called “Design and ‘the Social’:
Mapping New Approaches to Inequality in Design,” held at the
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).2 The event
was premised on an active engagement with the current and
politically pressing inequality debate, set against the backdrop of
the specificities of design as a creative and commercial profession.
The response to the call for papers for this seminar was interdisci-
plinary and enthusiastic. Some of the papers given at the seminar
are featured as articles in this collection. In May 2017, we held a
second seminar on design inequality at the Center for Science,
Technology, Medicine & Society (CSTMS) at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley. Both these events reached a multi-disciplinary
audience, with participants from design practice as well as scholars
from anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies
(STS), creative industries, cultural studies, architecture, urban
planning, technology studies, and more. The discussions at both
events were very productive and played a central role in develop-
ing both this special issue of Design Issues and a workable framing
of different kinds of design inequality.

Lucy Suchman, “Design,” Theorizing the
Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology
website, March 29, 2018, https://culanth.
org/fieldsights/1355-design (accessed
May 5, 2018).
This seminar was funded by the British
Sociological Association and supported
by the International Inequalities Institute
(III) at the London School of Economics,
as well as Theatrum Mundi. A report
on the seminar is available here:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/International-
Inequalities/events/BSA-Seminar-
Design-and-the-Social-Mapping-new-
Approaches-to-Inequality-in-Design.

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00559

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Bridging notions of inequality and design, as well as social
science and design scholarship, this special issue is broadly guided
by the following questions: In what ways do designers and/or pro-
cesses of design operate on and engage with sociality? What kinds
of processes, concepts, and complications emerge in relation to
(social) inequalities when we look at different forms and aspects
of design? How can engaging with design practices broaden the
discussion of inequality, and how can engaging with inequality
broaden the discussion of design practices?

The contributions discuss a wide range of design domains.
They include social design, technology design, hacking and mak-
ing, sexuality, performativity and web design, as well as post-colo-
nialism and urban design, spatial design and material politics,
housing and social reform, and food market curation. This diver-
sity only begins to reflect the diversity of the field of design and
points to design’s significance for contemporary social life. What
holds the papers together is a strong commitment to theorizing
(design) inequality from the empirical case of design, rather than the
other way around. Across this commitment, three overlapping
themes emerge, all connected to a broader understanding of
inequality: The first is a view for the classification cultures and
norming narratives (e.g., of people, bodies, things, situations, and
so on) that permeate and structure design practice, and how these
evolve over time. The second is the presence or absence of politics
within and beyond the reach of design and designers. The third is
the unfolding of power and (human) agency, including activism
and the evolvement of alternative ontologies of design and sociality
and new forms of practice.

To provide an overview of the emerging field of design
inequalities, this introduction does two things: First, it describes
the parallel rise of design and inequality and introduces relevant
scholarly concepts and debates. This introduction is intended to be
a useful tool for scholars and practitioners who want to engage
with design inequalities and is hence heavily referenced. Second,
this introduction describes the works in this collection and
sketches out the links between them.

The Rise of Design and Inequality
Today, global economic divisions have escalated to a level that
increasingly transforms both social life and the public discourse
on social inequality.3 These new dimensions of inequality affect
the very basic structures of society and its participants, ranging
from democracy to peoples’ health.4 Paralleling this develop-
ment is a new significance of design in society: From our tooth-
brush to our mobile phone and the apps on it, from our spatial
environment to the policies that govern social life and interna-
tional relations, everything “has a designer, whether amateur or
self-consciously professional.”5 Anthropologist Lucy Suchman

3 Mike Savage, “End Class Wars,” Nature
News, September 21, 2016, https://
www.nature.com/news/end-class-
wars-1.20619, (accessed March 27,
2017); and Facundo Alvaredo et al.,
“World Inequality Report,” 2018, http://
wir2018.wid.world (accessed June 23,
2018).

4 Martin Wolf, “Inequality Threatens

Democracy,” Financial Times, December
20, 2017, https://www.ft.com/
content/47e3e014-e3ea-11e7-97e2-
916d4fbac0da (accessed January 7,
2018); and Richard Wilkinson and Kate
Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is
Better for Everyone (London, New York:
Bloomsbury, 2014).

5 Harvey Molotch, Where Stuff Comes

From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Com-
puters, and Many Other Things Come to
Be As They Are (London: Routledge,
2003), 22.

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DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 4 Autumn 2019

Lucy Suchman, “Design,” Theorizing the
Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology
website, March 29, 2018, https://culanth.
org/fieldsights/1355-design (accessed
May 5, 2018).
For the former, see, e.g., Lara Penin, An
Introduction to Service Design: Designing
the Invisible (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
For the latter, see Lucy Kimbell, “Rethink-
ing Design Thinking: Part 1,” in Design
and Culture 3, no. 3 (2011): 285–306;
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/1754708
11X13071166525216 (accessed Novem-
ber 21, 2016); and Lucy Kimbell and
Mona Sloane, “Mapping Design Thinking
Resources Outside of Higher Education –
An Exploratory Study,” in Design Thinking
in Higher Education, ed. Gavin Melles
(New York: Springer, forthcoming).
8 Wendy Gunn et al., eds., Design Anthro-
pology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); and
Cassandra Hartblay et al., “Keywords
for Ethnography and Design,” Theorizing
the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology
website, March 29, 2018, https://
culanth.org/fieldsights/1363-keywords-
for-ethnography-and-design (accessed
June 23, 2018).

9 Guy Julier and Liz Moor, Design and
Creativity: Policy, Management and
Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2009);
and Angela McRobbie, Be Creative:
Making a Living in the New Culture
Industries (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016).
10 Glenn Parsons, The Philosophy of Design

(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015).

11 Charlotte Bates et al., eds., Care and

Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities (Chich-
ester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell,
2016); Elizabeth Guffey, Designing Dis-
ability: Symbols, Space, and Society (Lon-
don: Bloomsbury, 2017); Aimi Hamraie,
Building Access: Universal Design and
the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2017);
Liz Jackson, “NYTimes Opinion: We Are
the Original Lifehackers,” The New York
Times, May 30, 2018, https://www.
nytimes.com/2018/05/30/opinion/dis-
ability-design-lifehacks.html; and Bess
Williamson, Accessible America. A
History of Disability and Design (New
York: New York University Press, 2019).
Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkie, eds.,
Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies,
Displacements (London: Routledge,
2016).

recently commented on this new situation by asking, “Has design
now displaced development as the dominant term for deliberative,
transformational change?”6

Design has gained authority, it seems, as a powerful modus
operandi for how society is organized, routinely surpassing the
domains of beautification and style. The new centrality of frame-
works like “service design” and “design thinking” across innu-
merable organizations—both private and public—is just one of
many testimonies to the rise of design.7 In response, new works are
being produced and published across a wide range of interdisci-
plinary perspectives. They explore design and the anthropological
method8; focus on design and cultural production and consump-
tion (e.g., in branding or fashion)9; raise new philosophical ques-
tions conjured up by design10; examine the role of design in the
context of accessibility11; and investigate the design studio as a cen-
tral site for cultural production.12 In addition, increasingly political
conversations are materializing around design and its complex
relation to power and sociality. In this context, design has been
critically examined in a number of ways: as a strategic driver of
consumption in aesthetic capitalism13; as an active agent in the
neoliberal marketization strategies14; and as entrenched with exer-
cising power and forms of oppression and violence, including
through algorithm design.15 Prompted by these conversations, the
popular discourse has brought design into the inequality context.
For example, critical comments on “neglect by design” have sur-
faced in the context of privatizing the National Health Service
(NHS) of the United Kingdom16; on “global inequality by design” as
part of the prevailing canon of colonial ontologies in higher edu-
cation17; on social media as “truth-less public sphere by design”18;
and on technology consumers’ being “deceived by design” to com-
promise on exercising their privacy rights.19

These observations resonate with a new political moment
that is gaining traction within, around, and beyond design.20 Here,
manifold design activisms have emerged to address participation,
democracy, and inequality issues and to propose alternative mod-
els of practice.21 For example, the focus has been on “decolonizing
design,” and on the ontological implications of design(ing) in the
global South versus the global North.22 Ramia Mazé’s work makes
the important point that design is never neutral and that “critical-
ity” in design necessitates reflexivity.23 Meanwhile, Arturo Escobar
underlines the significance of agency in design as a powerful cul-
tural practice that is deeply embedded in capitalism; he proposes
that design is both cause and the potential cure of the current eco-
logical and social crisis.24 These important voices and perspectives
build on a long tradition of addressing social change (albeit not
necessarily, or explicitly, in the context of inequality and its struc-
tural rootedness).25 This tradition has brought about scholarships

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DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 4 Autumn 2019

and strategies for responsible26 and empathetic design,27 new modes
of participatory or co-design (including in the context of “making
publics”),28 inclusive design,29 sustainable design,30 thinking about
design justice for both humans and non-humans,31 works on critical
theory and human-computer interaction (HCI),32 or phenomena
such as the hacker-maker movement.33

Against this backdrop, it appears ever more curious that the
ontological and empirical relevance of design has evaded focused
sociological investigation.34 This lack of attention is particularly
true for the kind of inequality research that focuses on economic
inequality.35 Here, the emphasis is largely on income and wealth
distribution, new class formations, and elite culture36; design gen-
erally is absent from this discourse. However, more recent research
on social inequality is promising because it opens up, for example,
the study of design as elite occupation37; it also provides links to the
notion of design-specific cultural capital as emerging, rather than
as fixed.38 The point here is that this development provides an
opportunity to shift focus toward (design) inequality as social
practice as well as a superstructure. Such a move facilitates the
much-needed sociological engagement with design, particularly
via feminist and intersectional scholarship. Sasha Costanza-Chock
has recently made a significant and important step in this direction
by proposing an “intersectional feminist framework for design
theory and practice.”39 They build on the important observation
that “intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the
design process” to formulate a notion of “design justice.”40 This
angle profoundly resonates with this collection in that it charts
design as encompassing both the reproduction of and resistance to the
unequal distribution of “design’s benefits and burdens.”41

Mapping Design Inequalities
Cued in by these conversations, this collection looks at design as
a way of “making society” and explores how design is entangled
with social inequalities across a wide spectrum of domains. The
point of departure is to view “design” and “inequalities” as both
superstructures and micro-practices of creativity, power, and
expertise that can simultaneously sustain and challenge privilege
and exclusion, regardless of what is being designed.

The open-ended nature of this endeavor feeds into the
overall concern of this special issue, which is to map—rather than
exhaustively list—research into various forms of design and their
entanglement with the diversity and complexity of inequality.
Based on this approach, we provide no singular definition of social
inequality to bookend this collection; rather, we emphasize the
contextual and complex nature of different inequalities that have
a bearing on design practice or that design practices seek to

13 See, e.g., Alan Warde, “Consumption
and Theories of Practice,” Journal of
Consumer Culture 5, no. 2 (2005):
131–53. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.1177/1469540505053090
(accessed June 23, 2018); and Gernot
Böhme, Ästhetischer Kapitalismus
[Aesthetic Capitalism] (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2016).

14 Guy Julier, Economies of Design

(London: Sage, 2017).

15 See, e.g., Paola Antonelli and Jamer

Hunt, Design and Violence (New York,
NY: The Museum of Modern Art and
ARTBOOK/D.A.P., 2015). For design of
algorithms, see, in particular, Virginia
Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How
High-tech Tools Profile, Police, and
Punish the Poor (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 2018); Cathy O’Neil, Weapons
of Math Destruction (London: Penguin
Books, 2017); and Safiya Umoja Noble,
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search
Engines Reinforce Racism (New York:
New York University Press, 2018).
16 Bev Skeggs, “A Crisis in Humanity:

What Everyone with Parents is Likely
to Face in the Future,” The Sociological
Review blog post, January 18, 2017,
https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/
blog/a-crisis-in-humanity-what-everyone-
with-parents-is-likely-to-face-in-the-
future.html (accessed May 27, 2017).
17 Kehinde Andrews, “The West Was Built
on Racism. It’s Time We Faced That,”
The Guardian video, January 18, 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/comment-
isfree/video/2017/jan/18/the-west-was-
built-on-racism-its-time-we-faced-that-
video (accessed March 27, 2017).
18 Noortje Marres, “Why We Can’t Have
Our Facts Back,” in Engaging Science,
Technology, and Society 4 (2018):
423–43. DOI:10.17351/ests2018.188
(accessed July 31, 2018).

19 The Norwegian Consumer Council,

“Deceived By Design: How Tech Com-
panies Use Dark Patterns to Discourage
Us from Exercising Our Rights to Privacy,”
June 27, 2018, https://fil.forbrukerradet.
no/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2018-
06-27-deceived-by-design-final.pdf
(accessed July 31, 2018).

20 See, e.g., Albena Yaneva, Five Ways to

Make Architecture Political: An Intro-
duction to the Politics of Design Practice
(London: Bloomsbury, 2017); or Adam

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DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 4 Autumn 2019

Kaasa et al., eds., Designing Politics:
The Limits of Design (London: The
London School of Economics and Political
Science, 2016). For a more radical view,
see also Tony Fry, Design as Politics
(Oxford: Berg, 2010); Fry asserts that
design must take the place of politics
to advance global sustainability.
21 Guy Julier, “From Design Culture to

Design Activism,” in Design and Culture
5, no. 2 (2013): 215–36. DOI: http://dx.
doi.org/10.2752/175470813X13638640
370814 (accessed June 9, 2017).
22 For the former, see http://www.decolo-
nisingdesign.com; see also the special
issue, “Decolonising Design, Design
and Culture 10, no. 1, (2018). Editors of
the issue were Tristan Schultz, Danah
Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canlı,
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem,
Luiza Prado de O. Martins, and Pedro
J. S. Vieira de Oliveira. For the latter,
see Tony Fry, “Design for/by ‘The
Global South,’” in Design Philosophy
Papers 15, no. 1 (2017): 3–37. DOI:
10.1080/14487136.2017.1303242
(accessed June 23, 2018).

23 Ramia Mazé, “Design Practices Are

Not Neutral,” http://speculative.hr/en/
ramia-maze/ (accessed July 27, 2018).
See also Lilly Irani and M. Six Silberman,
“Stories We Tell About Labor: Turkopti-
con and the Trouble with ‘Design,’”
Proceedings of CHI’ 16, May 7–12, 2016,
San Jose, CA; https://escholarship.org/
uc/item/8nm273g3 (accessed February
19, 2019).

24 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the

Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence,
Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

25 See, e.g., Victor Papanek, Design

for the Real World: Human Ecology
and Social Change (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1971).

26 See, e.g., Victor Margolin, “Design, the

Future and the Human Spirit,” Design
Issues 23, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 4–15.
DOI: doi.org/10.1162/desi.2007.23.3.4
(accessed on July 29, 2017).

27 See, e.g., Carolien Postma et al., “Social
Theory as a Thinking Tool for Empathetic
Design,” Design Issues 28, no. 1 (Winter
2012): 30–49, http://www.mitpressjour-
nals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/DESI_a_
00122 (accessed on July 29, 2017).

address—or anything in between. The point is that the relation-
ship between design and inequalities is fluid. It can move between
demonstrations of power and elitism that sustain unequal power
relations and decided efforts to challenge them. As part of “map-
ping design inequalities,” the papers in this collection reflect the
multiplicity and richness of this relationship. They all work with
different cases and theoretical foci, but what ties them together is a
concern for how “the social” is rationalized, narrated, and acted
upon in design practices and processes, under which circum-
stances, and to what ends.

The first piece, “Keeping the System Going: Social Design
and the Reproduction of Inequalities in Neoliberal Times,” by Guy
Julier and Lucy Kimbell, sets this scene clearly by critically assess-
ing the claims made by “social design” for tackling inequalities. It
links sociological and design concerns by working through the
socio-economic conditions created for (social) design in a neolib-
eral economy. Here, Kimbell and Julier review the institutional
structures within which social design operates to examine how its
precarious status mitigates against the consolidation of a legitimate
professional practice. Based on that, they argue that neoliberal con-
ditions necessitate inequalities, and that the current configuration
of social design practices is not set up for tackling these inequali-
ties and bringing about fundamental change. However, to conclude
their essay, Julier and Kimbell suggest three ways in which social
design might develop the capacity to do so in the future: develop-
ing critical and reflexive social design practices that acknowledge
the entanglement of design practice with neoliberal economies and
that create infrastructures for public accountability; conceiving of
social design beyond the client–designer template and locating
social designers according to the multiplicity of roles they may take
up—for example, as public servants, politicians, or citizens; and
establishing new and interventionist methodologies for bringing
the structures of inequalities into focus in design practice.

The claims made about “the social” within design and by
design actors are also a focus of Elizabeth Petrick’s piece, “Curb
Cuts and Computers: Advocating for Design Equality in the 1980s.”
She examines the overlap of social and design concerns by inves-
tigating the work, narratives, and associations that were required
in the early days of the personal computer to make it a universal
technology fit to be used by people with different bodies and abili-
ties. Her central unit of inquiry is the “curb cut metaphor” and its
role in facilitating accessible computer design through disability
activism, technology design, and public policy. With detailed atten-
tion to historical vignettes, Petrick sharply outlines the multiple
layers of the curb cut metaphor and its role in the computer design
process. She analyzes how the metaphor helped advocates to con-
ceptualize the computer as a sidewalk in need of a curb cut; how

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DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 4 Autumn 2019

the computer itself became a curb cut, fostering a more equal
participation in the new and computerized social world; and how it
was deployed by a computer company in the design process, as
well as in advertising to new users.

The exploration of technology design is continued in Ellen
K. Foster’s article, “Claims of Equity and Expertise: Feminist Inter-
ventions in the Design of DIY Communities and Cultures.” In this
piece, Foster brings feminist and design scholarships into conversa-
tion and examines feminist hacker responses to claims made about
democratization in the Do It Yourself (DIY) technology movement.
Deconstructing how these activists work to establish new kinds of
technology knowledges and value systems as part of grappling
with equity, she considers the power relations embedded in tech-
nology design and use. Drawing on ethnographic research in com-
munally organized DIY spaces, she works through both the design
of these spaces and the practices and groups that make up their
associated organization. Attending to the politics of how identities
are established vis-à-vis the DIY space itself, Foster builds on femi-
nist technoscience theorizations on care to suggest a framework for
investigating the ways in which feminist hacker practices can be
seen as facilitating “epistemic activism” and challenging the notion
that design is politically neutral. She describes how feminist hacker
groups decided to break away from male-dominated spaces and
the discomfort they caused for them, but also how these groups
position the practice of confronting discomfort as a basis for resis-
tance and alternative models of “making” and equitability in
design. She concludes that these explorations of discomfort and the
politics of care form the medium through which feminist hacker
collectives push for the recognition of heterogenous narratives in
DIY technology cultures.

“Designing the Female Orgasm: Situating the Sexual Entre-
preneur in the Online Sex-Education Platform OMGYes,” by Nell
Beecham and Clio Unger, takes up the issue of gendered dimen-
sions of product design. Beecham and Unger cut across design and
the sociological concerns of interface design, feminism, and neo-
liberalism. They critically analyze the design of the female-focused
sex education platform, OMGYes, against the backdrops of neo-
liberal subjectivities and sexual commodification. Beecham and
Unger build on interaction criticism and use visual analysis to
draw out key questions around OMGYes’s claims of neutrality and
feminist emancipation. Working through OMGYes as an example
of feminist design practices providing an alternative to often male-
dominated sex products, they show how OMGYes deploys affective
design to promote notions of sexual confidence, self-optimization
and personal responsibility. They argue that the clean website
design of OMGYes decontextualizes the female orgasm from its

28 See, e.g., Ezio Manzini, Design, When
Everybody Designs: An Introduction to
Design for Social Innvation (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2015); and Jesper
Simonsen and Toni Robertson, Routledge
International Handbook of Participatory
Design (London: Routledge, 2013).
29 See, e.g., Rob Imrie and Peter Hall, Inclu-

sive Design: Designing and Developing
Accessible Environments (London; Rout-
ledge, 2001).

30 See, e.g., Jonathan Chapman, Routledge
Handbook of Sustainable Product Design
(London: Routledge, 2017); and Alastair
Fuad-Luke, Design Activism: Beautiful
Strangeness for a Sustainable World
(London: Routledge, 2009).

31 See, e.g., Laura Forlano, “Posthumanism
and Design,” She Ji: The Journal of
Design, Economics, and Innovation,
special issue on Transforming Design
Matters 3, no. 1 (Spring 2017), DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.
08.001

32 See, e.g., Jeffrey Bardzell, et al., eds.,
Critical Theory and Interaction Design
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
33 See, e.g., Sarah R. Davies, Hackerspaces:
Making the Maker Movement (Cam-
bridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017); and Pelle
Ehn et al., Making Futures: Marginal
Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democ-
racy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
34 Note that some streams of sociological
research have long focused on issues
of design including parts of Science
and Technology Studies (STS) research.
Notable in this context is Lucy Suchman’s
work on technology design and HCI, as
well as the research of Elizabeth Shove
and her colleagues into the alteration of
designed products in everyday social
practice and a growing body of work
on the creative industries, including
architecture. A growing methodological
exchange also is happening between
design scholars and practitioners
and the social sciences—for example,
in the work of Nortje Marres, Michael
Guggenheim, and Alex Wilkie, which
looks at inventive approaches in quali-
tative social research. However, we
still lack a comprehensive social theory
of design in the way in which social
theories of “the economy” or “culture”
have been developed. See Lucy
Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions:

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The Problem of Human–Machine
Communication (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Matthew Watson et al., The Design
of Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury,
2007); and Noortje Marres et al., eds.,
Inventive Social Research (London:
Mattering Press, 2018).

35 Exceptions include the large literatures in

social policy research into the design of
state policies and welfare structures.
See, e.g., Tony Atkinson, “Social Policy:
Looking Backward and Looking Forward,”
in Proceedings of the Department of
Social Policy’s 100th Anniversary Collo-
quium: Social Policy Futures: Wreckage,
Resilience or Renewal (London: London
School of Economics and Political Sci-
ence 2015), 83–86; John Hills, “The Dis-
tribution of Welfare,” in Pete Alcock et
al., eds., The Student’s Companion to
Social Policy (Chichester, UK: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2012), 212–17; and Deborah
Lupton, “Digitized Health Promotion: Risk
and Personal Responsibility for Health in
the Web 2.0 Era,” in Joseph E. Davis and
Ana Marta Gonzalez, eds., To Fix or To
Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the
Limits of Biomedicine (New York: New
York University Press, 2016), 152–76.
36 See, respectively, Thomas Piketty, Capital
in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014);
Mike Savage, Social Class in the 21st
Century (London: Penguin Books, 2015).
For elite culture research, see, e.g., Sha-
mus Khan, “Elite Identities,” Identities
19, no. 4 (2012): 477–84. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.718713
(accessed June 23, 2018); Rachel Sher-
man, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of
Affluence (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2017); and Katharina Hecht, “A
Relational Analysis of Top Incomes and
Wealth: Economic Evaluation, Relative
(Dis)advantage and the Service to Capi-
tal,” LSE Working Paper (London: London
School of Economics, May 2017), http://
www.lse.ac.uk/International-Inequali-
ties/Assets/Documents/Working-Papers/
Katharina-Hecht-A-Relational-Analysis-
of-Top-Incomes-and-Wealth.pdf
(accessed July 27, 2018).

37 For example, Daniel Laurison and Sam

Friedman show that architects are part of
the elite class within the UK. See Daniel
Laurison and Sam Friedman, “The Class

corporeal reality and bodily fluids, thus mobilizing female orgasm
as an arena and tool for self-improvement. Beecham and Unger
locate this practice of self-improvement in the emergent neoliberal
subjectivity of the “sexual entrepreneur,” applying a postfeminist
critique of retail activism that emphasizes personal responsibility.
Based on this analysis, they conclude that OMGYes is a design case
that prioritizes an individualized strategy for empowerment,
rather than a collective one that would acknowledge and address
wider structures of gender injustice.

How design practices and concerns tend to shift the labor
and responsibility for change onto those at the receiving end of
designed structures and processes is also a central theme of Adam
Kaasa’s auto-ethnographic article, “Unequal Ideas: Reflections on
Designing Politics, an Urban Ideas Competition in Rio de Janeiro.”
Creating links between sociological and design concerns around
decolonization, labor, power and institutions, this piece examines
the changes made in order to diversify the nature of entries
received for “Designing Politics/Designing Respect” (DPDR), an
urban ideas competition run by Theatrum Mundi (TM) in Rio de
Janeiro in 2016. Kaasa initiates a discussion about the geography of
unequal labor to challenge institutions and processes of public
scholarship in design. Building on Sara Ahmed’s notion of the
“willful subject,” he suggests that the burden and labor of decolo-
nizing rests on those against whom systems embedded in the con-
tinuous presence of coloniality are staked. He works through
detailed vignettes and analyzes the structures of the competitions,
the institutional networks enabling the competitions, the entry
requirements, the make-up of the juries, and the exhibitions to
argue that the structures and conditions of knowledge production
must be interrogated, not just their actors and contents be diversi-
fied. The centerpiece of Kaasa’s reflection is making visible that the
collaborators in Rio de Janeiro were those who were burdened with
laboring to make visible the systems of inequality that the struc-
ture of a design competition is imbued with.

Picking up on the political dimension of design prac-
tice, Mona Sloane’s paper “The Shelves that Won’t Hold: Material
Politics and Social Inequality in Spatial Design Practice” examines
how the material politics in spatial design practice are central for
legitimizing unequal treatment in the material planning of space.
Engaging with design and sociology’s shared concern with mate-
riality and material culture, this piece presents a detailed vignette
of a community theater project in London. Sloane analyzes how
materiality can become the locus of a public dispute and power
struggle, as well as a key reference point for valuation frameworks
and calculation practices. She works through the ways in which
a “fit for purpose” framework pits private/commercial against

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public interests, positions materiality as arena for de-valuing user
needs and “cost-engineering” them down, and prescribes super-
ficial stakeholder engagements. In light of this analysis, Sloane
suggests that such design systems contribute to a material divide
that leaves vulnerable communities with homes of poor (or even
unsafe) material quality and therefore perpetuate and heighten
social inequality. She concludes by suggesting that discussions on
design inequalities must include material politics so that design
inequality and materiality are theorized in the context of access to
and participation in processes of design.

The concern for design practice’s entanglement in the poli-
tics of social inclusion and exclusion is carried on in Paz Concha’s
article, “Curators of Markets, Designers of Place: The Case of the
Street Food Scene in London.” Linking design concerns with socio-
logical concepts of cultural intermediaries, cultural calculation,
and social distinction, Concha’s essay draws on ethnographic
research about the curation of the street food scene in London. She
discusses how market designers assemble space, objects, people,
aesthetics, and atmospheres into a marketplace that has distinctive
aesthetic and affective qualities. She analyzes how these qualities
are deployed in the processes of design to appeal exclusively to
an upper middle-class audience with disposable income. Drawing
on her ethnographic work at a night market in Dalston, London,
Concha describes how the market is set up and how only certain
food traders are included in the market. Her analysis reveals the
kinds of socio-economic framings that are deployed by the market
designers in this process. She shows how these considerations are
steeped in the need for commercial viability and social distinction
and that the respective design practices run contrary to the de-
signers’ claim that their markets are space “for everyone.” Thus,
Concha suggests, the designers of these specific food markets con-
tribute to the unequal configuration of urban space.

“Mass Factory Housing: Design and Social Reform,” by
Fani Kostourou, provides another analysis of the unequal configu-
ration of urban space. She looks at design inequality in the context
of social inclusion and social form in housing design and policy.
Kostourou discusses the case of Cité Ouvrière in Mulhouse, France,
to analyze the socio-political agenda on which the design of com-
pany towns were founded in the nineteenth-century. She describes
the entanglement of spatial design practice both with social ideals
and social control, and she reviews the role of architecture and
urban design in shaping the social life of working-class inhabit-
ants. Her analysis is situated in the history of factory settlements,
and it ranges from the introduction of mass factory housing in the
second half of the nineteenth century and the founding of the Cité
Ouvrière in Mulhouse in 1853–97, to the current day. Kostourou

Pay Gap in Higher Professional and Man-
agerial Occupations,” in American Socio-
logical Review 81, no. 4 (2016): 668–95.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/000312241
6653602 (accessed June 23, 2018); and
Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The
Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privi-
leged (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2019).

38 The notion of cultural capital was

proposed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
in 1986. Cultural capital refers to educa-
tion, know-how, and socialization as
expressed in taste and distinction in the
context of class formation. The notion of
emerging cultural capital, proposed by
Annick Prieur and Mike Savage in 2012,
argues for updating this notion of cultural
capital by acknowledging that the
building up of cultural capital is always
relational to its field; that it is floating
and continually updated, rather than
firmly tied to certain activities. Relatedly,
Mona Sloane argued in 2014 that design
practitioners need to acquire and contin-
ually update a distinct version of cultural
capital. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Forms
of Capital, (1986), https://www.marxists.
org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/
fr/bourdieu-forms-capital.htm (accessed
April 4, 2014); Annick Prieur and Mike
Savage, “Emerging Forms of Cultural
Capital,” European Societies 15, no. 2
(2012): 246–67. DOI: https://doi.org/
10.1080/14616696.2012.748930
(accessed June 23, 2018); and Mona
Sloane, “Tuning the Space: Investigating
the Making of Atmospheres Through
Interior Design Practices,” Interiors 5,
no. 3 (2014): 297–314. DOI: 10.2752/
204191114X14126916211184 (accessed
June 23, 2018).

39 Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Design Justice:
Towards an Intersectional Feminist
Framework for Design Theory and
Practice,” Proceedings of the Design
Research Society, June 3, 2018; https://
ssrn.com/abstract=3189696 (accessed
June 23, 2018).

40 Although there is a crucial conceptual

overlap between the notions of “design
justice” and “design inequality,” I would
argue that the two terms have slightly
different intellectual roots, trajectories,
agendas, and scopes. Costanza-Chock’s
notion of design justice provides the very
important and much needed link between
theorizations of intersectional inequality

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argues that the bourgeois industrialists who sought to address an
acute housing problem did so primarily for personal gain and
increased control of workers. She asserts that the public sector,
then, was more successful in securing public infrastructure and
social integration, but it lacked long-term reform strategies. Today,
the workers who could secure home ownership are able to invest in
their homes and participate actively in the ongoing spatial design
of their community. Kostourou concludes that these observations
are valuable cues for the potential of mass housing and homeown-
ership and for tackling the contemporary housing crisis that belea-
guers many cities around the globe.

Nell Beecham brings this collection to a close with reflec-
tions on what was and is at stake in the process of assembling a
special issue on design inequalities. She takes readers through the
genealogy of this project, providing a view of its changing political
landscape. By narrating the questions and conditions that formed
the backdrop for putting together this collection and putting per-
sonal ethnographic vignettes to work, she explores what it means
to reflexively and (self-)critically work on scoping out the new field
of design inequalities as an early career researcher. In doing so, she
maps out the networks of power and prestige with which this proj-
ect is entangled to carefully consider who and what has been
silenced in this project, and what kinds of questions we need to ask
ourselves to change these conditions moving forward.

This collection offers Design Issues readers insight into the
multi-layered connections between design and inequalities. All the
articles address issues that are both deeply sociological and acutely
concerned with design. They move across themes like the economy,
labor, gender, disability, politics, colonization, material culture,
class, and (social) policy. The essays clearly position themselves in
the context of design inequality by pushing for greater criticality
and reflexivity in design scholarship and practice. They address
neoliberal conditions of design and its implications with capital-
ism, critically consider design users and their labors and decon-
struct the claims design/ers make about challenging inequalities.
At the same time, they also re-orient the notion of design inequal-
ity through the three central themes mapped out at the beginning
of this introduction: the claims and narratives that design gener-
ates about inequalities and the classification cultures that get
deployed within it; the question of (non-)politics within design;
and issues around power and agency. This collection of articles
represents a practical exercise in bringing sociological and design
scholarships and practices together. We hope the essays prompt
new and interesting sets of questions and facilitate a renewed and
much-needed dialogue on the structural rootedness of inequalities
and their practical re-enactment in design.

within design practice and activism.
(This link is signaled by the significance
of the terms “justice” and “equitability.”)
The notion of design inequality (or
rather, inequalities) sets out to make
the relevance of design inequality clear
to the social sciences (particularly the
economic and sociological inequality
scholarships). Thus, “design inequality”
looks at the other side of the “design
justice” coin. It works to make design a
significant case for social theorists so
that we can embark on assembling a
social theory of design. On this basis,
the term “design inequality” sets out to
connect existing and emerging design
and inequalities scholarships to provide
new approaches for researching design
and inequality as both social superstruc-
ture and micro-practice. As such, it
focuses on the critical investigation of
design inequality that spans all sorts
of design domains, including design
activism. (In this special issue, Julier and
Kimbell, as well as Foster, make this link
explicit.) This perspective is premised on
the view that we need a thorough analy-
sis and theorization of design inequality,
from which activism is not exempt (this is
not to say that an analytical engagement
with design activism precludes engaging
in activism, but that we need to investi-
gate both). This stance is also reflected
in the three themes that emerge from
this collection—classification cultures,
(non-)politics and power/agency—which
may lead to new research that is compli-
mentary to the important works and
agendas emerging from “design justice.”
41 Costanza-Chock, “Design Justice,” 2018.

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