Design Justice practices within Mechanical Engineering

Current
Written By Aishani Chatterjee

Objective: To understand the current and past practices that strive towards more just designs within mechanical engineering and how to improve on these methods.

Main Impact: As design in mechanical engineering is the front process to impacting the world through technology, it is important to put thought and practice towards making sure that the impact of designs will not be inequitable, and to account for the past injustices created from previous designs.

Key findings:

  • Scholars organized themes of justice and design in ways that we categorized into three main areas of design: Designers, Design Outcomes, and DesignProcess

  • We observed a sentiment across many papers to redefine the field of design in pursuit of justice

Relevant Paper: Syal, S. M., and Kramer, J. 2024, “Design and Justice: A Scoping Review in Engineering Design,” Journal of Mechanical Design, Accepted for publication. [link]

Lead EMBERlab Researcher: Tera Maher, with co-advisor Prof. Julia Kramer
Acknowledgements: Deepansha Singh, Lauren Wojciechowski, Uthman Olagoke, McKenna Owens, Aarohi Doshi, Saumya Sharma
Funding: University of Michigan Integrated Systems and Design department

Aishani Chatterjee