Design and Justice: A Scoping Review in Engineering Design

From climate change to global health inequity, society is faced with a slate of social injustices. Engineered products have often exacerbated injustice in our society [1] and existing engineered products and technologies are not neutral [2]. It is the presence of these nonneutral systems in areas such as energy, water, and health that disproportionately burden groups on the basis of race, class, gender, geography, and other socially-constructed identities [3–8]. There is a growing recognition in the broader engineering community [1] that the solutions we create do not operate in isolation and that the engineering design community must define and better integrate justice into our work [9].

To meet the rising urgency to integrate justice in engineering design, there is a need to better understand how scholars in the engineering design community are already incorporating justice into design and to identify current research gaps. In this article, we conduct a scoping literature review to explore how engineering design researchers are using concepts of justice in their work and to report major themes on design and justice from the reviewed papers. We also include suggestions for future work, based on our analysis of the scoping review.

As we the authors explore and analyze topics of justice, we align with a constructivist perspective, believing that “knowledge exists within the self and is constructed by individuals as they interact with themselves and with their environment” [10]. Therefore, we share our identities and positions of privilege here to acknowledge the lenses through which we approached the scoping review searching, thematic analysis, and interpretation of results. Dr. Kramer is a White, cisgender woman living in a high-income country (the United States) and raised in an upper-middle-class family. Dr. Syal is a multiracial (White and Asian Indian), cisgender woman, also living in a high-income country (the United States), and raised in an upper-middle-class family. We both have formal training in mechanical engineering as well as other disciplines including energy systems and public health. We are both employed by a large, public university that has a history of injustices, both documented [11] and undocumented. We revisit how these identities and positions informed the work in this article in Sec. 4.1.

The concept of justice has been explored, studied, and discussed among a diverse range of scholars outside of engineering and design. As the design engineering field seeks to define and incorporate justice and to bring justice-related concepts into greater prominence, we can contextualize our work as designers by learning from previously-defined frameworks of justice. While many theories of justice exist across multiple fields, we provide a brief background on frameworks that were developed outside the field of design and have already been brought up in previous contexts of design and design justice, as we demonstrate in Sec. 3. Understanding the background of these frameworks helps to understand the results of the scoping review. As presented in Sec. 3, a few papers in our dataset make reference to one or more of these frameworks.

Rawls' Justice as Fairness framework describes a just society as one that distributes available resources among people in the society in a fair way [12]. The distribution of resources may be unequal, as the unequal nature of the distribution may be what is most fair for different levels of needs experienced by people at different levels in society. Designed products, systems, and services provide benefits and burdens that are often distributed unequally among people [13] and that distribution matters deeply for how we assess the fairness of the outcomes of our designs.

While the Justice as Fairness framework focuses on the distribution of resources, Sen and Nussbaum's Capability Approach focuses on the reality that different people may be able to use these resources in different ways [14,15]. Capabilities are “real or substantive freedoms” that a person has, and having the capability to use the resources given differs from person to person, based on their lived experiences [16]. The Capability Approach has relevance in design when considering that the outcomes of design affect people in different ways, even if the outcomes look the same on the surface. Additionally, the Capability Approach offers nuance in understanding design processes. For example, participatory methods are often used to address complex social challenges in design [17]; however, the Capability Approach suggests that participation may or may not be available to different people, even if equal opportunities and resources to participate are offered.

Beyond the perspectives of justice as relating to the distribution of resources (Justice as Fairness) and to how people can act upon their access to resources (Capability Approach), Hill Collins' Matrix of Domination theory suggests that justice is also related to social identity and to the power structures that hold injustices in place [18]. The Matrix of Domination aims to lay out these structures in four domains of power: structural (which organizes oppression), disciplinary (which manages oppression), hegemonic (which justifies oppression), and interpersonal (which comes up in everyday interactions). Those who have intersectional identities are placed in lower standing in this matrix and experience power being held over them, continuing an unjust world. Who is designed for, who is included, and how design processes are conducted can reinforce the Matrix of Domination or can seek to disrupt these hierarchies of power [19].

In addition to the above frameworks of justice, we sought to understand how scholars define “social justice.” Jost and Kay [20] write about social justice as

In this definition, elements of Justice as Fairness, the Capability Approach, and the Matrix of Domination are evident. Framing the concept of justice as social justice implies the focus on justice as a concept relevant across aspects of society beyond just the individual: “social justice is a property of social systems… a just social system is to be contrasted with those systems that foster arbitrary or unnecessary suffering, exploitation, abuse, tyranny, oppression, prejudice, and discrimination” [20].

The engineering design community does not have a single definition of justice in design. Aimed at the broader engineering community, Leydens and Lucena [21] offer a definition of social justice as “engineering practices that strive to enhance human capabilities (goal) through an equitable distribution of opportunities and resources while reducing imposed risks and harms (means) among agentic citizens of a specific community,” synthesizing this definition across sources including [16,22–24]. They further provide six criteria of social justice in engineering:

1. Listening contextually

2. Identifying structural conditions

3. Acknowledging political agency and mobilizing power

4. Increasing opportunities and resources

5. Reducing imposed risks and harms

6. Enhancing human capabilities

This definition explicitly draws upon Rawls' Theory of Justice and Sen and Nussbaum's capability approach. The criteria incorporate aspects of Hill Collins' Matrix of Domination theory, noting the importance of structural conditions and political power in defining social justice.

More specific to the design community, Costanza-Chock [19] puts forth the most widely accepted definition of design justice in the field at present in their book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. They provide “a tentative definition of design justice” as a framework and a community focused on an equitable distribution of benefits and burdens from design, examining who is participating in design, who is making decisions, and what practices are honored and valued in design. Costanza-Chock references the Matrix of Domination and explicitly discusses how design might break down hierarchies of power instead of upholding them. Their work and the work of the Design Justice Network have led to a set of 10 principles that guide design as a field to be more just [25]:

1. We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.

2. We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.

3. We prioritize design's impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.

4. We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.

5. We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.

6. We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to the design process.

7. We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.

8. We work toward sustainable, community-led and-controlled outcomes.

9. We work toward nonexploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other.

10. Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.

Also, in the design community, Bianchin and Heylighen [26] define justice in accordance with Rawls' Justice as Fairness and suggest that just design should prioritize those who are “worst off in terms of capability demands placed on users.” Considering dimensions beyond social justice in design, Cotsaftis et al. [27] discuss the goal of achieving “ecological justice in design” by considering living systems and its inhabitants more holistically. This idea examines the relationship between nature and society and asks how design studies work to integrate these two when working toward a more just world, instead of separating them.

The engineering design community, particularly in the Design Theory and Methodology group, has articulated a need to strengthen research in design justice, including the development of new approaches and tools to integrate justice from the beginning of the design process [9]. While the term “justice” has not been used as often as terms such as “ethics” or “equity” in engineering design literature [28], overall, the use of the term justice has increased over time (as we show in Table 1), suggesting a rising interest in the concept. The analysis presented in this article is not meant to suggest that we align on a single, “right” definition of justice in design, but rather to encourage the engineering design research community to clarify what theories of justice and definitions of justice are being used in each study context.

This article presents an exploratory scoping review of justice in a wide set of engineering design literature. We conduct a scoping review given that the study of justice in design is nascent; a scoping review versus a systematic literature review covers a broader range of topics to identify major research themes and gaps and explore boundaries of a topic that has yet to be explored [29].

We started our review with justice-related keyword searches in relevant venues in the engineering design community, followed by the application of a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria. Once the final paper dataset was determined, we conducted a thematic analysis to uncover major themes and insights into how scholars are studying, defining, and incorporating justice in connection to design. We then contextualized our findings from the thematic analysis and salient research gaps and future opportunities.

We build on prior research done to examine justice in design literature in three main ways: (1) our scoping review includes searches in a broad set of journals and conferences in the engineering design field, (2) we focus specifically on the concept of justice in design and related terms, and (3) we seek to understand how engineering design authors connect the term justice to design, even if the connections may be small or sparse throughout any given paper. We see the results from this scoping study as a springboard for a more directed systematic literature review in the future, as well as an invitation to study these topics and form this nascent field for a more just design future.

The scoping review in this article focused on the three justice-related keywords: “justice,” “injustice,” and “unjust.” These keywords were chosen to span the different word forms related to justice, ensuring that we cast a wider net when searching for relevant articles. To determine the venues to search in, we chose the journals and conferences most relevant to the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM) group in ASME and to the Design Society. This list was informed by the list of journals and conferences affiliated with the Design Society at the time of conducting this analysis [30], the relevant conferences and journals associated with the DTM community, as well as by our own experiences participating in these academic communities.

Journals included in the scoping review:

• Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing (AI EDAM)

• CoDesign—International Journal of Co-Creation in Design and the Arts (CoDesign)

• Design Science

• Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation

• Journal of Design Research

• Journal of Engineering Design

• Journal of Mechanical Design

• Research in Engineering Design

• Design Studies

Conference proceedings included in the scoping review:

• ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conferences (IDETC-CIE)

• Design Society DESIGN Conference

• Design Society International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED)

The following keyword searches were conducted separately on each journal/conference website to identify relevant papers: design AND justice; design AND injustice; design AND unjust.³

Papers included were all in English and were published before February 1, 2023. Only full research papers were included; workshops and editorials were excluded. Figure 1 shows a visual depiction of the inclusion/exclusion criteria and the screening flow used for the scoping review.

After conducting the keyword searches for each journal and conference proceeding, we first screened the titles and abstracts of each paper in the initial set of 308. If the title or abstract explicitly engaged with social/contextual topics, we included the paper in the next round, and if it did not, we excluded the paper. We defined social/contextual topics as making specific mention of an application or implication of the research on a particular social challenge that had a relationship to people. For example, we included papers that addressed topics such as sustainability, climate change, health, the developing world/base of the pyramid, education, environment, social impact, empathy/emotion, ethics, and power/influence. We also included papers that made reference to a particular social identity, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and (dis)ability. In the title and abstract screening stage, we also looked for duplicates of journal and conference papers. If the title, abstract, and authors were the same between a journal and conference paper, we included the journal paper version and excluded the conference paper version.

Next, we conducted two full-text screening steps. In full-text screening step A, we searched each paper for the desired keywords (justice, injustice, and unjust) and included the paper if any of the keywords were included in the title, abstract, or main body of the paper. The paper was excluded if the keywords were only included in the references. In this step, we also checked to make sure the keywords were used in a way that was relevant to our study. For example, we excluded the paper if the only use of a keyword was the last name of a researcher (i.e., Jane Justice), or was used in a sentence such as “to do justice to this research method….”

In full-text screening step B, we assessed the meaningfulness of the connection between the desired keywords to design. Papers were included if: (1) justice was discussed as an outcome of design, (2) justice was connected to some part of the design process, or (3) the concept of justice was connected to an application area of design (i.e., the outcome of their study of design could be used to further investigate an area of justice or could be used to probe an area of justice). We did not base the inclusion on the number of times the keywords were used or if the concept of justice was discussed in the paper's novel contributions. We included the paper if there was any connection we could identify being made between justice and design, even if the connection was small, and we excluded the paper if we could not identify a connection between justice and design. We chose not to assess the depth of the connection in this scoping review during the inclusion/exclusion steps to keep the screening consistent between the two authors.

The keyword searches and title and abstract screening were completed by two student research assistants and checked by the authors of this article. The full-text screening steps A and B were conducted by the authors. For full-text screening step B, each author assessed the meaningfulness criteria for every paper, independent of the other author, and then compared the results together. Author agreement was 83%, thus in line with the generally accepted threshold of 80% [31]. For the papers that the authors disagreed on, the protocol to resolve disagreements was to have a live discussion about the conflicting judgments in relation to the inclusion criteria and agree on the resolution together. After this screening step, the resulting papers constituted the final dataset for the scoping review of 66 papers. The final dataset of papers can be found below.⁴

Both authors jointly conducted a thematic analysis to uncover insights on how papers in the engineering design literature connect justice to design. The thematic analysis was conducted on the collaborative platform Miro [32] in two steps. First, for each paper, we noted (1) the connection between design and justice (including relevant supporting quotes), (2) where justice showed up in the design process, and (3) other interesting insights that emerged while reading the papers. Second, we performed a clustering analysis, placing the insights and quotes from each paper into thematic categories. Each author conducted the clustering analysis separately, then we came together for a series of discussions to combine our results and clusters to uncover major themes from the papers and identify research gaps. For example, both authors independently identified a cluster of insights around scholars describing justice as a value held by individual designers. Upon discussion, the authors placed this theme within an overarching view of justice having unique relevance to the designer, giving rise to the research gap around how an individually held value of justice relates to a societal goal of justice.

We chose to take a bottom-up approach to analysis so that we could allow the papers in the dataset to guide the development of themes around justice in engineering design. Scholars in engineering design are grappling with how to integrate justice, and as noted in Sec. 1.2, we have not seen a commonly accepted definition or set of norms around incorporating justice in engineering design. Justice in design is a complex topic, and thus we aimed to identify nuanced perspectives by analyzing each paper in the scoping review individually and allowing the dataset of papers to collectively build themes of justice in engineering design for future inquiry.

The resulting number of papers at each stage is shown in the flowchart in Fig. 1. Table 2 shows the breakdown of papers at each stage for every venue we searched. After completing all steps of screening, the final scoping review dataset contained 66 papers.⁵ Table 1 shows the number of papers found in each journal or conference proceeding searched, as well as the year range of the papers. For more granularity of the results, we have also included the number of papers found in each journal or conference proceeding after each step of inclusion/exclusion. This table can be found in the  Appendix (Table 2).

While we set up our search strategy to only identify papers that included concepts of justice interrelated with aspects of design, we found that authors additionally used a range of other terms adjacent to the phrases “justice,” “injustice,” and “unjust.”

We saw a frequent discussion of “ethics” alongside justice. Ethics is an important topic in the profession of engineering as a whole, particularly in how ethical decision-making is operationalized in engineering practice [33]. As an illustrative example, consider Eekels' [34] exploration titled “The Engineer as Designer and as a Morally Responsible Individual.” In this paper, published in the Journal of Engineering Design, Eekels discussed frameworks of ethics to be applied to study the moral behavior of engineers. He noted that the ethical frameworks of “axiology (the science of values) and deontology (the science of duties)” are both relevant to assessing engineers' moral responsibilities. In axiology, Eekels applied Dutch philosopher Van Riessen's [35] work to identify “justice” as a judicial value relevant to engineers' actions (alongside other technical values like “safety” and other vital values like “health”). In deontology, he noted that “an action is good if this action is virtuous” and justice is a “philosophical virtue” alongside wisdom, valor, and self-control. Therefore, Eekels proposed that ethical frameworks can help guide engineers' moral actions, and he made a link between ethics and justice by highlighting justice as both a value and a virtue, relevant to both the intentions of engineering actions and the outcomes of engineering actions.

The idea of justice being part of ethics was echoed in several other papers. For example, Kronqvist and Rousi [36] noted Jobin et al.'s [37] findings of “five pillars of AI ethics: transparency, justice and fairness, non-maleficence, responsibility, and privacy.” Sefyrin and Mörtberg [38] described “knowledge and justice” as ethical consequences of IT design. Kelly [39] noted the World Health Organization's set of ethical principles “relate[d] to individual autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice” [40]. Bianchin and Heylighen [26] suggested that a focus on justice in design is important to addressing “ethical and social issues arising with design.” d'Anjou [41] wrote about ethical decision-making in design practice, noting that justice can be an issue that is incorporated into decision-making models. These examples, which discussed justice as a value, virtue, or issue in ethics [34,41], a pillar of ethics [36], a type of ethical consequence [38], an ethical principle [39], and a foundational focus for addressing ethics [26], share a common perspective that justice is part of ethics. Counter to this trend, Das et al. [42] posited that ethics is a part of design justice: the authors recommended that “[c]ontextualizing problems with ethics is a good start, but it is not an end in itself. Engineers and researchers must take the step from ethics to equity and justice by prioritizing stakeholders who are disproportionately impacted by designs and actively taking a stance on what is just when engaging in design in multiple and varied contexts” (emphasis added). We saw this as a stance that ethics is a step toward justice, rather than justice being part of ethics—a different lens on the justice-ethics relationship we saw in other papers analyzed.

In the dataset, we saw a trend where the phrase “social impact” was often used to imply “social justice.” “Social impact” focuses on the impacts of designed solutions, but it does not explicitly address elements of justice as described by the Justice as Fairness framework, the Capability Approach, or the Matrix of Domination (explored in Sec. 1.1). A focus on social impact does not necessarily imply a focus on fair distribution of resources, the capabilities people have to act upon their access to resources, or the role that power structures and social identities play in upholding injustices; yet, several papers in our dataset did not make a distinction between impact and justice.

This was particularly true in papers that dealt with or discussed sustainability challenges [43–45]. This finding aligns with previous work that found sustainability to be used interchangeably with other related terms (i.e., “sustainability” and “ethics” in Ref. [42]).

A common thread in these papers was that the “triple bottom line” includes a focus on the economic, environmental, and social impact of manufactured products, yet much of the extant sustainability research focuses on economic and environmental impacts but not social impacts.

Outside of sustainability, Pease et al. [46] also used “social impact” in relation to social justice: they proposed a new method of design for the developing world (“Lean Design for Developing World”) which expands the lean startup method to include an “impact hypothesis”: testing the societal impact of a product by seeking to measure “the net impact [of a product] upon individual consumers, their communities, and their regions.”

A limited number of papers in the dataset provided a definition or a framework of justice that they used in their work. Hulse et al. [47] drew upon “philosophical theories of justice,” including Rawls' [12] “veil of ignorance” principle. A few other papers referred to the Justice as Fairness framework, including Li and Dong [48] and Gall et al. [49]. Other papers in the dataset also drew upon the Capability Approach from Sen [50] and Nussbaum [51] in exploring justice [26,49,52]. For example, Gall et al. [49] stated: “Any comparative consideration between different positive and negative impacts on different groups raises a question of justice. Hence, to assess and compare impacts between groups of humans, the fulfillment of one human's needs should not negative [sic] impact the capability of a non-user human (Rawls 1971, 2001; Sen, 1979; Nussbaum, 2003).”

Several papers in the dataset used the general term “justice” (or “injustice,” “just,” or “unjust”) without referring to a more specific term (e.g., “social justice” or “design justice”). However, most of these papers described “justice” in the context of society, (e.g., Armstrong et al. [53] use the Sustainable Development Goal 16 definition of “Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions” as the goal to “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”).

Several papers added an additional descriptor to justice (e.g., “urban justice” [54], “technological justice” [55], “spatial justice” [52], and “environmental justice” [56]), highlighting that justice as a general term may beg a more specific definition or framing in a particular application area. While there is a benefit to exploring these specific framings of justice, for our purposes of seeking themes across how people use “justice,” we note that each of these specific descriptors of justice still relates to some element of society, be it urban planning, the use and accessibility of technology by people, the concern with how justice is distributed geographically, or the impacts of the environment on people and communities. Therefore, while we summarize the authors' uses of “social justice” in Sec. 3.2.4, we do not see a marked difference between how authors used a more general term of “justice” (or “justice” with any other descriptors) versus a more specific “social justice.”

Very few papers in the dataset offer a definition of “social justice.” Bianchin and Heylighen [26] suggested that social justice “determines how the burdens and benefits of cooperation are distributed” and cited Rawls' Theory of Justice as Fairness. Das et al. [42] quoted Leydens and Lucena's [21] definition of social justice in engineering to define justice in their own work (though Das et al. use Leydens and Lucena's definition to define “justice” and not “social justice”). Van Bossuyt and Dean [57] provided a framework for what they consider “social justice” by leveraging Leydens and Lucena's six criteria of social justice in engineering. Mazzurco et al. [58] also noted Leydens' and Lucena's criteria for social justice in their discussion of design methods available to support a commitment to social justice in engineering design projects, and they specifically noted that “a key aspect of engineering for social justice is to address the structural and sociohistorical conditions that led to specific community needs.” From this, we see a relation between social justice and the Matrix of Domination, and we see a focus on understanding historical context as part of defining social justice.

While other papers did not specifically define or provide a framework for what they meant by “social justice,” we do see a few themes in how authors used the term. First, several authors described social justice as a political issue, including [59–63]. For example, in Agid's case study of a design engagement with a social justice organization, the author talked about the “social justice struggles” an organization seeks to address is connected to “the socio-political-material infrastructures they [social justice organizations] seek to engage, transform, or abolish” [61]. Luck [62] talked about the “social justice movements” sparked by the free speech movement of 1963 as “draw[ing] attention to a political motivation for people to participate in decision-making that would affect their lives.” Here, we see Luck pointing out that social justice movements tied to calls for social and political change gave rise to “first-generation design researchers” beginning to include people in participatory decision-making and design. Second, several authors presented “social justice” as one component of “sustainable development” [43,44,46,64], alongside economic and environment considerations (the “triple bottom line” as we also discussed in Sec. 3.2.2). These authors did not further define social justice but instead framed their presentation of social justice around sustainability and sustainable development. Third, a few authors presented “social justice” as related to social inclusion [65,66]. For example, Lopes and Gill [65] say that “open and inclusive approaches” to design are “social justice concerns.” While many papers talked about inclusive or universal design, these two papers uniquely described social justice as related generally to inclusion.

Noting the influential role that Costanza-Chock's foundational work, published in 2018 [13] and 2020 [19], has played in formalizing “design justice” as a field of theory and practice, we found six papers in our dataset either used the term “design justice” or provided a definition or framework of what they consider to be “design justice,” with the oldest paper being from 2018 [9,26,42,48,67,68]. Most (but not all) drew upon Costanza-Chock's work. For example, O'Sullivan [68] used the phrase “design justice” to describe the aims of a design project “to create an all-terrain, locally manufactured and low-cost wheelchair for low-resource settings, with intentions to help alleviate poverty, improve accessibility and reduce inequality.” However, the oldest paper in our dataset that used the term “design justice” (written by Bianchin and Heylighen in 2018 [26]) did not draw upon Costanza-Chock's work and instead proposed their own framework.

Udoewa [67] went further to provide his own definition of design justice, leveraging prior work from Costanza-Chock: “Design justice insists on ‘community participation, leadership, and accountability throughout a collaborative, transparent design process,’ centred on the community who owns the design artefacts and the benefits, stewardship, and narratives about the artefacts (Costanza-Chock 2018, 2020).”

Das et al. [42] also built on Costanza-Chock's [13] work and provided an expanded framework of design justice. Das et al. presented the following new topics and questions of design justice to complement Costanza-Chock's original framework:

• Sustainability: How do we consider the long-term impact of our designs on the health of the planet?

• Systems optimization: How do we consider justice as a parameter when optimizing a design problem?

• Education: How do we teach new generations of engineers to prioritize advancing justice using their design practices?

Bianchin and Heylighen [26] offered their own discussion of “Just Design” through a Rawlsian lens. They suggested that justice in design is about ensuring the usability of designed outcomes in a system is fairly distributed, with the resources prioritized to the “…advantage of the less able or most disadvantaged.” The authors pointed out that the capabilities of end users to take advantage of the usability being offered to them are foundational to assessing justice. In other words, they suggested integrating the Capability Approach framework with the Justice as Fairness framework for a full picture of understanding just design. Bianchin and Heylighen's definition informed other authors as well: for example, Li and Dong [48] referred to Bianchin and Heylighen's work in their use of the phrase “design justice.”

An overarching theme we noted in analyzing the dataset was the different ways that justice showed up in design. Particularly, we noted the distinction between the authors' discussion of justice in the designer versus in the design process versus in design outcomes. The details and takeaways reported in the following sections were gathered from the dataset and presented in each of these three categories (designer, design outcomes, and design process).

Exploring the relevance of justice to the designer as a person (or a team of persons), we found themes of values and virtues, power, education, and design teams.

Toh et al. [9] called for the need for further research to “[reexamine] the set of virtues required of professional engineers and operationalization of the virtues in practice.” Margolin [69] suggested that justice is part of human happiness, and van Onselen et al. [70,71] offered an expansion on this idea, noting that “designers embed a wide range of values in their work” including “beauty, novelty, purity, and justice.” These values guide collaborative design efforts and can sometimes present value-based conflicts, when—for example—senior designers or managers with a dominant communication style prioritize prestige over collaboration, standing in direct conflict with junior designers' values of “helpfulness, social justice, and honesty” [70]. Trusting that one's superiors value justice can help promote trust and openness within an organization [72], which can lead to better designs and better implementation of new technology.

As noted in Sec. 3.2.1, Eekels [34] viewed justice as both a value engineering designers apply to evaluate reality, and a philosophical virtue guiding engineering designers' actions. The importance of holding justice as a core value extends beyond solely the designer, but also to other members of the design process, such as “intermediaries” who function as liaisons between designers and communities [66]. Holistically, individually held values of justice influence how designers do their work [61], can encourage designers to continue evolving in their work to make more responsible products [73], and can affect the outcomes they design. Kumar et al. [74] suggested values of justice lead to better design outcomes: “Values like broadminded [sic], wisdom, social justice, a world at peace, a world of beauty, and protecting the environment …will always help the personnel in getting a universally acceptable product.”

Toh et al. [9] noted that design researchers hold “power as one of the most influential forces in decisions that shape our world.” Ortega Alvarado [75] noted that “expert” designers currently have the most agency and power to create solutions as they are “professionally trained to create conditions for an outcome.” Eekels [34] echoed this sentiment in engineering, noting that engineers change “material reality” through their actions. With power comes responsibility: Toh et al. [9] reflected that the engineering design community “bear[s] a responsibility to proactively consider the ethics of the artifacts, processes, and systems that we design.” Designers have the power and choice to decide when and where to integrate justice into their work, through education, policies, or need-finding [76]. Designers also have the power to decide what perspectives are included; Bianchin and Heylighen discussed the need to prioritize the “worst off” and that designers must ensure these perspectives are included in a just design process [26]. Sosa and Connor [77], citing Freire's [78] book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, posed “creativity as instrumental to nourish a critical spirit to prevent alienation and to actively resist situations of social injustice and oppression,” and thus, creativity is a source of power. Design creativity has been discussed as an “important element of engineering innovation” [79] as well as a means of confidence and empowerment for the designer [80]. Ortega Alvarado cited Escobar's [81] argument that the activity of design offers people an opportunity to regain “their ability to see and make otherwise, so as to make plural futures again possible (Escobar, 2021, p. 25).” If design shapes the future, and the act of designing allows a person to imagine an “optimistic alternative future,” then the question of who gets to do design? becomes increasingly relevant.

Given the power inherent in both the process of design and in the people who carry out design, there is thus a relevance of justice in design teams. “Participatory design” was often cited in papers in our dataset as a just approach that leads to just outcomes. Udoewa [67] explored three dimensions of participation in design:

He then noted that full accountability, full participation, and full coleadership shared between “designers” and “community members” are characteristics of design justice.

A challenge, however, to “full” initiation, participation, and coleadership in design is that designers are traditionally trained to provide “technical” and “normative” solutions (e.g., new products and services), and there is a need for designers to reframe their practices to allow for more “diffuse design” (“an attitude towards change that anybody with an agency can develop by taking ownership and shaping means—material and communicational”) [75]. This also requires a recognition of “community members” (i.e., not traditionally trained designers) to have the capacity to be creative and to carry out design and “intermediaries,” who may be allies facilitating between designers and community members or the designers themselves who embody attributes of intermediation [66]. Grisales-Bohórquez et al. [82] highlighted that “inviting participants to build their individuality [is] the primary condition of participation” in design, and thus view participation as “a practice to re-imagine and transform the self” and “a path to uplifting dignity by actively inviting diverse voices, including those that are silenced or unseen.”

Given the themes around participation in design and its relation to justice, we noted two dimensions of justice in design education that appeared in the papers in our dataset: (1) training design and engineering students to incorporate justice into design and (2) training design and engineering students to recognize the capacity of others to conduct design.

In the first dimension, we noted themes around the need to provide educational opportunities for engineering design students to engage in social justice projects [42,83] and the need to teach engineering design students to incorporate awareness and practices of justice in their design processes [57,58]. Acknowledging and eliminating the injustices in the educational setting in which design is taught is important as well. Ward wrote about the “hidden curriculum,” or a set of norms that are not explicitly shared, that often exists in design education and perpetuates the power structures [84].

The second dimension was much less common among the papers in our dataset. Sosa and Connor [77] noted the need to train designers to be “[humble] in acknowledging the creative agency of others.” While Ortega Alvarado [75] and Grisales-Bohórquez et al. [82] both described factors influencing the capacity of others to conduct design, neither delved into the implications on design education.

Interestingly, we did not note themes around broadening the training available to those who are not already trained (or in training for) engineering design (i.e., no papers in our dataset explored opportunities to build the creative or design capacity of those not traditionally trained in design).

We explored the relevance of justice to the design outcomes and found themes that related to justice in a diverse set of areas, measuring justice in design outcomes, and linking justice-related impacts on a society level to the individual level.

Several papers applied or explored design to address justice-related issues, including sustainability [43–45,64,85,86], environmental justice [56], inclusive, accessible, and universal design [26,48,63,65,87,88], health [89], and economic resilience [90]. Authors [61,91] described design as a tool to address social justice problems, and that outcomes of a design process affect social justice [73,81,92,93]. Many of these papers described these issues as relating to social justice but did not define what social justice is (e.g., “universal design specifically suggests the concepts of equity and social justice” from Ref. [88]). In this way, we can view justice as an ideal or an aspiration to work toward, but not a specific or measurable outcome.

Some papers did attempt to measure “social justice” and provided metrics. Two papers [85,86] identified and discussed metrics of justice within the scope of social sustainability (in line with the theme mentioned in Sec. 3.2.2 around sustainability research, often referring to the “triple bottom line,” and “justice” often being described as an aspect of social sustainability). Neither of these papers defined what justice specifically means in sustainability, and both considered justice to be a consideration with impacts at the community level. Relatedly, two papers focused on “multiobjective optimization” of sustainability and discussed examples of identifying parameters to measure sustainability issues [43,64]. For example, Mattson et al. [43] measured the social sustainability of a hypodermic needle in multiple ways, ranging from “percentage of vaccine that can be delivered with the needle” to “potential for illegal drug use with the needle.” This approach demonstrates that measuring social sustainability—and by extension, justice—may include positive and negative social effects.

The most in-depth exploration of social justice metrics was provided by Van Bossuyt and Dean [57]. Van Bossuyt and Dean identified six criteria of social justice (as described in Sec. 3.2.3) and then developed a scorecard that asks engineers and students to rate their designs on a scale of −3 to +3 (−3: “active and immediate harm; 0: “neutral effort”; +3: “active and immediate benefit”), thus aiming to support engineers and students to integrate social justice into their design projects.

While most papers focused on justice at a societal level (i.e., the papers mentioned earlier in this section that apply design to address justice-related issues), a few papers made a link between justice at a societal level and justice at an individual level.

Some papers grappled with the distribution of design outcomes across many individuals. For example, Li and Dong [48] explored inclusive design from an economic perspective and emphasized that “the goal of inclusive design lies not only in the partial and temporary elimination of exclusion, but also in how to distribute the freedom of choice.” This is in line with Bianchin and Heylighen's [26] concepts of design fairness and justice which “transform[s] the contradiction of inclusivity issues from the usability of a single item to the distribution of usability in society.” They stated that a designed solution can only be considered just if it generally offers more advantage to the “less able or most disadvantaged.” Thus, design outcomes experienced at an individual level (e.g., more freedom or usability) are linked to societal justice when we consider who experiences these individual-level outcomes and how those outcomes are distributed across individuals in a society.

Other papers focused on the relationship between individuals' experiences engaging in design and justice in society. For example, when describing participatory design efforts Grisales-Bohórquez et al. [82] noted that “[o]ne of the fundamental aspects at the core of these efforts is the reinstating of a position of dignity for individuals and collectives involved in design processes.” Sosa and Connor [77], who explored individuals' beliefs in their own creativity, shared the spirit of Grisales-Bohórquez's sentiment, noting: “A world where everyone can develop their creativity even incrementally is, in principle, more resilient and conducive of innovation in a rapidly changing environment than a world where a small minority concentrates maximal creativity” (emphasis added) and arguably, a more resilient world that is conducive to continual innovation is more just. Udoewa [67] echoed this notion in his presentation of “radical participatory design” as an approach to design justice: “Radical participatory design … equalises the value of experiential and lived knowledge of the community, the cultural knowledge of the community, and the institutional knowledge of organisations.”

Focusing on the distribution of benefits and burdens resulting from design outcomes, prioritizing the development of creativity for everyone, and promoting the dignity of all designers by equalizing knowledge across both lived and technical expertise are principles emblematic of the ways in which actions at the individual level can lead to justice at the societal level.

In addition to the designer and the design outcomes, papers in our dataset also referred to the relevance of justice in the design process. Bianchin and Heylighen [26] explicitly called for a shift in focus on justice in the outcomes of design to the process of design. Ward [93] echoed this, noting that designers (and all humans) are continually creating the realities we live in and that design processes lie at the heart of social change. We saw a particular focus on the relation of justice to participatory design processes but otherwise found that references to justice spanned across the different stages of the design process and the different ways methods could be used to drive these processes.

Among the papers in our dataset that discussed justice in the design process, we did not find a singular focus on any particular stage of the design process. Mentions of justice spanned across all stages of design. Most of the justice-focused discussion was in the front-end (research/empathizing, e.g., [73]) and in the back-end (implementation, e.g., [65]) stages. Middle stages such as analysis [58], ideation [45], prototyping [38], and testing [89] had less discussion, but still, at least one or two papers made references to justice in each of these stages. We also found many papers alluded to justice as a crucial overall mindset in the design process [58,67,75,77,82,94]: justice shows up throughout design processes and designers' mindsets toward justice are required to continually pay attention to justice considerations. Other papers described justice as a key factor in initiating a design process [26,41,44,61,87,91,95]: when faced with a justice-related challenge, design is an approach to apply. Related, the “politics of social justice” [63] and the societal movement toward justice [63] call for a shift toward more just design processes.

A few papers discussed their methods as a way to guide future design processes for justice-related challenges, for example, in Refs. [89,96,97]. In contrast to simply applying a design method, some papers explicitly mentioned justice in the framing and selection of their design methods, and how those decisions helped to guide a more just design process. Pease et al. [46] incorporated justice in their design method called “Lean Design in Developing World,” which elevated “impact” to the same level as “value” and “growth” in traditional lean methodologies. Van Bossuyt and Dean [57] presented a Social Justice Scorecard specifically to help incorporate justice into design processes. Udoewa [67] based his Radical Participatory Design method on tenets of justice. Grisales-Bohórquez et al.'s [82] “Saber y Vida” methodology asked participatory codesigners “to anchor themselves in territory and memory” as part of a design process to “[exert] justice in the face of oppressive social and socio-technical systems.” While each of these papers took a different lens to incorporate justice into different parts of the design process, they point to the overall shared notion that we as a field need to redefine our design processes to integrate justice.

Several papers discussed the importance of justice in the participatory aspects of the design process. One of the journals included in the searches for this scoping review was titled CoDesign and its focus helped bring a particular spotlight to the different textures of participation and codesign.

Many authors noted (at different levels of detail) that community participation must be integrated into the design process to result in just outcomes [26,52,56,58,59,61,66–68,74,91,98–100]. Toker's [56] work in community design notes that justice has long been a concern of community or participatory design efforts. True design participation must include communities from a “bottom-up” approach to orient to design justice [98] and intermediaries to communicate between designers and community members can help facilitate just outcomes [66]. O'Sullivan [68] suggested that “fram[ing] and validat[ing] the design problem through the lenses and voices of those with lived experience” can lead to design justice in the solutions, which aligns with the perspective-taking emphasis on participatory processes discussed in Bianchin and Heylighen's work [26].

As discussed in previous sections, Udoewa [67] provided an insightful discussion around the importance of who is empowered to participate throughout a just design process. Interestingly, we noted that while community participation came up often in our dataset, the definition of “community” varied based on the context of the project or, in some cases, was not defined at all. The definitions of “community” spanned from a group of direct users or beneficiaries of the project (i.e., Hart et al. [99] involved children with “complex needs” in the process of designing a game for children with complex needs) all the way to a group of people indirectly impacted by, but still involved or invested in the overall design problem (i.e., Baibarac et al. [55] wrote to involve the broader community for design and governance of an urban commons).

Contrary to the assumption made in many papers, other papers [39,52] noted that incorporating participation into a design process does not guarantee a just process or just outcomes. Who is represented and who is empowered to make decisions in the design process deeply matters in the pursuit of design justice [67] and the actual implementation of participation in the design process is difficult to do well [91]. Evaluating justice in design processes is an even more challenging endeavor [52]. Just participation involves “actively inviting diverse voices” and identities of those who design [82] and recognizing inherent creativity in everyone [77], and ensuring decision-making lies with communities who will be affected [26,67]. Several authors highlighted that inadequate participation can, in fact, lead to more harm instead of intended good [60,67]. Palmås and von Busch [101] cautioned that using participatory design methods can run the risk of sustaining “broader level inequalities and injustice” behind the “shimmer of ‘collaboration.’” Several authors noted that as a field, we need tools and metrics to effectively analyze and evaluate participatory design processes to ensure justice is adequately incorporated into design processes [57,59,99].

Several papers in the dataset posited that in order for design to contribute to a more just world, design itself as a field and a practice needs to be redefined. As with our findings above, we can organize these calls into the designer, the design outcomes, and the design process. Related to the designer, authors raised a need to create new narratives for who can be a designer. Design plays a key role in “opening futures to others” and there is a need to recognize that “anybody with an agency can develop [change] by taking ownership and shaping means” [75]. This call for a redefinition of who is considered a designer extends to the design process: the authors highlighted a need to grapple with power dynamics inherent in current design processes. When we expand a view of who can be considered a designer, we must also recognize and address power dynamics related to how different participants in design contribute and make design decisions [38,52,67]. A “liberatory consciousness” that empowers people to be creative and contribute to design must be part of the shift in narrative and change in power dynamics [77] as well as “uplifting dignity” of those involved, particularly those who have been historically underheard or silenced [82], and encouraging design to create “new openings for…solidarity” in the journey toward a just society [90]. Measuring or assessing the implementation of participation in a design process can also help us measure or assess justice in design [52].

Beyond who is involved and the design processes to make decisions, authors noted a need to redefine design outcomes by acknowledging the complexity of design problems contributes to a complexity of design outcomes. A new field of design may include an “enhanced contextuality” of the problems that we work on to deeply understand the framing of our work and drive innovation [90]. Design problems by nature are full of multiple complexities that make it hard for designers to judge what is a good action for design [39] and acknowledge that complexity is an important component to defining just design outcomes. For justice to be fully realized, design must expand its boundaries to include all people in its consideration and the impacts people experience directly and indirectly as a result of our design outcomes [49].

The thematic analysis of the scoping review dataset revealed multiple insights into how scholars connect justice and design in engineering design literature. Overall, the analysis gave rise to a framework of aspects relating to justice and design: justice as relevant to the designer, the design outcomes, and the design process. Figure 2 shows this framework and the scoping review themes organized within the framework, and Table 3 shows the relevant references for each theme. We posit that justice in design sits at the intersection of considering the relevance of justice within the designer, the design outcomes, and the design process.

Authors often talked about justice being relevant to one or more of these aspects of design. Organizing their discussions in these three aspects allowed us to understand the specific modes in which justice relates to design. Questions like who gets to be a designer, who is empowered to make design decisions, and who is trained in design all relate to the designer. Questions like what happens when designed solutions are out in the world relate to Outcomes and questions like how does design happen relate to the Process. Of course, these aspects are all interconnected; while we did not find explicit mention of this in our analysis, many of the results demonstrated implicit acknowledgment that justice considerations overlap between aspects.

Our scoping review findings regarding the overall terminology used (e.g., “ethics,” “social impact,” and “design justice”) are relevant to the context in which designers, design outcomes, and design processes are studied and practiced. The call for redefining the design field toward justice also has implications for future study of the designer, the design outcomes, and the design process and can shape how we research and practice as a field going forward.

Most relevant to Process and Outcomes, the term “justice” more frequently came up as a principle or overarching goal for design instead of a set of specific metrics to evaluate within the design. Many papers pointed toward justice as an aspirational goal of design, an important tenet of a design process, or as a designer's value, but questions about the success of the implementation of justice remain. How might we know if justice is adequately incorporated into design? What does success in design justice mean? How will we know if success is reached? Without a deeper understanding of how to operationalize justice in design, we may find it hard as a field to move forward in concrete ways to define and incorporate justice into our work as design researchers.

A starting point to understanding how to operationalize justice in engineering design may be to look to the engineering ethics space. Papers in our dataset brought up the term “ethics” as related to justice but did not make reference to the field of engineering ethics as it stands today. Engineering ethics offers a set of standards that all engineers should abide by to do the “right” thing when practicing one's work [102]. The National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) has a Code of Ethics for Engineers that outlines the duties, rules, and obligations of the profession to guide the translation of ethical principles to work conducted by engineers [33]. While the term “justice” is not explicitly used in the NSPE code, many of the tenets discuss topics that are related to different aspects of justice we saw through the papers in our dataset, such as treating all people with fairness and respect, working toward sustainable development, and giving credit to appropriate parties. Many opportunities exist to study the link between ethics and justice in engineering design and how both concepts are reflected in practice and process.

Another way we may tackle the challenge of operationalizing justice is to expand our analysis to include the concept of equity. We hypothesize that justice as a concept may be more effectively linked to overarching goals and mindsets, and concepts of equity may be more effectively related to metrics. This scoping review did not include equity in the search, but doing so could be a natural next step in the study of justice in design. Equity is defined across many fields as the fair distribution of burdens/costs and benefits (for example, in health [103], energy [104], transportation [105], and local government [106]), and examining design through the lens of equity may offer insight into metrics and evaluation toward a broader goal of justice.

A related finding of interest in our analysis, most related to the designer and design outcomes, was the relative lack of discussion about justice on an individual level and how that affects design outcomes. A few papers discussed justice as an individual value a designer might hold, but the application of that value was toward a societal goal. One paper suggested that beneficiaries who believe that designers who value justice may be more accepting of potential solutions created by those designers [72]. In another paper, the authors discussed the importance of intermediaries between design researchers and communities, and their commitment to social justice is key to community empowerment in the design process [66]. But overall, we found in our dataset that the goals and implications of justice in design were primarily discussed at a societal level.

As a scoping review, we intend this study to be an exploration of the emerging field and practice of design and justice. To put reasonable bounds on this exploratory review, we chose a set of journals and conferences that we saw as most relevant to the engineering design community, though other potentially relevant venues may have been excluded from our study. Another limitation of our work was the sole focus on the term “justice” and the exclusion of other related keywords. Our analysis did not include papers that did not include the keywords of interest, even if these papers may have offered insights into justice and design. For example, Hahn et al. [107] discussed a design project with lead users in the context of natural hair care for women of African descent—a topic that sounds highly related to concepts of justice and design—however, this paper did not show up in our searches because the authors did not use the keywords “justice,” “injustice,” or “unjust” that we searched for.

A major challenge in our work was searchability on different journal and conference platforms. Different platforms offered different levels of searchability with keywords and search logic, thus we had to adapt our approach depending on the capabilities of that search database (see the footnote in Sec. 2). We see value in conducting scoping and systematic literature reviews as a way to identify themes relevant to emerging topics in engineering design research (like justice), and yet, we found the platforms providing access to engineering design publications did not easily enable these keyword searches.

It is important to note that the scoping review in this article was focused solely on academic literature in the engineering design field, and the framework in Fig. 2 was built from the resulting dataset of papers. However, work in justice and design is not only happening in the engineering design field and in the academic world. Other fields, such as human–computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work and social computing, and architectural design, have done their own work in integrating justice into the design. Additionally, many practitioners outside of academia have studied this area and are practicing tenets of justice in design today. Creative Reaction Lab [108], Liberatory Design [109], and Reflex Design Collective [110] are examples of organizations that have explicitly integrated justice into their design approaches. Equity Meets Design [111] offers its own framework to connect Historical Context, Radical Inclusion, and Process as Product to design. The Design Justice Network [25], discussed in Sec. 1.2, is a growing community of designers that has put forth a set of Design Justice Principles. We predict future study and collaboration among these academic fields and practice-focused frameworks and organizations will provide insights for the engineering design field to grow in the area of justice.

More holistically, limitations relating to how the topic area of justice is presented in existing papers may have shown up in our results. Because justice in the engineering design field is a nascent topic, authors who incorporate this concept in their work may be cautious to write freely about all the dimensions of their research due to a multitude of factors. There may be underlying pressure to conform to field norms and expectations when conducting and writing about one's research, which may change the way the research is presented. This sentiment may also extend to grant writing, based on what reviewers might think and how grants might be evaluated. While this limitation is outside the scope of our review in this article, it is important for the community to note and grapple with as design justice grows within the engineering design discipline.

In addition to these limitations specific to conducting an academic-focused scoping review, we also revisit here our constructivist perspective to note how our identities and professional positions as authors impacted our study. One such impact was evident in the selection of journals and conference proceedings: we chose the venues to include in the scoping review based on our knowledge gained from working in engineering and design research spaces for the past decade. This experiential knowledge gave us a valuable starting point but also highlighted gaps in our understanding of the most relevant journals and proceedings to include, which evolved over time with reflection and contributions from the peer review process. We acknowledge that we still may have missed other important venues due to the limitations of our own professional perspectives. A second impact of our identities and positions on this scoping review was evident in the foundational frameworks of justice we selected to inform our analysis. We chose to focus on Justice as Fairness, the Capability Approach, and the Matrix of Domination largely based on our prior knowledge that engineering design scholars were already working with these frameworks. This initial assumption was confirmed in our analysis of the dataset, as we saw authors make direct or indirect mention of each of these justice frameworks. However, there are countless other frameworks of justice we could have leveraged to analyze the dataset, including procedural justice, distributive justice, transformative justice, and legal justice, and each of these would likely have led to slightly different interpretations of the dataset.

As part of the scoping review, our analysis revealed research gaps and opportunities for action to advance the field of justice in engineering design. Holistically, we see a mindset shift is needed to orient engineering design research in the pursuit of justice. As part of this mindset shift, we must grapple with what our community aims to achieve by centering justice in design. Is there one ideal goal of justice we aim to achieve? Or is the pursuit about marrying the ideals of justice with the practicalities of designing in the real world for positive progress? We posit the latter, adopting a comparative perspective on justice that focuses on choosing options or making design decisions, that are comparatively more just than their alternatives [112]. We agree with the sentiment shared by Dombrowski et al.: “We view social justice as a horizon to work towards. No developed solution will be perfect given the tradeoffs and conflicts among stakeholders that necessarily occur in design” [113].

Any evolution of mindsets will require a change in how we work and in what we research. How might we shift our priorities as a community to value inquiry in justice and design, even if those priorities may be different from the status quo? How might we shift our academic systems to encourage this mindset shift in the design community? We see a need to clarify definitions of key terms (such as “justice” and “design justice”) and theories of justice used across studies in our community as a first step to answering these questions.

Functionally, there are opportunities that could help support research at the intersection of justice and design. There is a need to create more open and searchable databases for the papers in our community so these concepts can be more easily found and studied. We see a significant opportunity for academic-practitioner collaborations to advance our understanding of justice in design at a fundamental level, given the extensive justice-related work happening in practice today.

Looking to the future, we offer the framework in Fig. 2 not only to discuss the findings from this scoping review but also to organize future work to dive deeper into each area. We foresee a need to better understand the ways justice relates to the people doing design (designer), the impacts of design (design outcomes), and the ways of doing design (design process), as well as how those areas come together to redefine the field of design in pursuit of justice. We also see an overall gap in understanding how justice may be interconnected across these aspects.

Specific to the designer, our analysis revealed that there is a gap in broadening training in engineering design in the pursuit of justice, studying how we might develop training and capacity building for people who are not typically regarded as designers. Only after dismantling currently exclusionary power structures in the accessibility to design education and to the hidden curriculum of design education can the field aim to effectively broaden inclusion in design. Another related area of future study relevant to the designer is how might we study justice as an individually held value that also ultimately contributes to justice as a societal goal. How does an individual designer's orientation to justice relate to more just outcomes resulting from the work of these designers?

Specific to design outcomes, we did not see significant discussion on the evaluation of justice-related measurements. To understand if our design outcomes are truly just, our community must better understand what kind of measurements and metrics can be used and how we define what is “good.” One metric is unlikely to encompass all dimensions of justice with one measurement, thus a suite of metrics is likely the direction of a plausible solution.

Specific to the design process, the most salient gap that came out of our analysis was the need for tools and metrics to effectively analyze participatory design processes to ensure justice is embedded and practiced. Additionally, there is an opportunity to develop justice-specific design methods for use throughout phases of the design process, and to study the impacts of these methods on designers and design outcomes.

This article presented a scoping review of justice in twelve scholarly venues relevant to the engineering design community. We focused on three keywords for the searches—justice, injustice, and unjust—and after applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria, finalized a dataset of 66 papers. We then conducted a thematic analysis of papers in the dataset to study how scholars wrote about and incorporated justice in design.

In the analysis, we found that authors rarely defined justice and often used a range of justice-adjacent and justice-related terms to describe their work, including “ethics,” “sustainability,” and “design justice.” There is a need to better define and agree upon these terms for consistent use across the engineering design community to support justice-oriented research. Major themes from the papers were broadly described as how justice relates to the designer, the design process, and design outcomes. We discussed how this framework (designer, process, and outcomes) can be used not only in understanding past scholarly work but also in guiding future inquiry into justice and design. Finally, we observed a sentiment across some papers to redefine design in pursuit of justice. Overall, we see an opportunity to use the results of this scoping review as a launching point for furthering the study of justice in design and we invite the engineering design community to continue grappling with what we aim to achieve when pursuing design justice, and what design justice looks like.

We thank Saumya Sharma and Aarohi Doshi for their work in searching through scholarly venues to identify relevant papers to include in this scoping review. We are grateful for the suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript. Their comments helped us strengthen the article.

• We acknowledge and thank the University of Michigan Integrated Systems and Design Seed Funding program for funding this work.

There are no conflicts of interest.

The data and information that support the findings of this article are freely available.⁶

Tables 2 and 3