A review by reneerianne
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

Very compelling and understandable book that is a great resource for designers engaged with justice in any way, whether it is by tackling oppression, surfacing marginalised voices or critically examining existing power structures. I will definitely use it a lot as a reference material for teaching and grounding my own practice. While some of the messages felt very obvious, it was very helpful to see them articulated on the page with clear examples. I was particularly inspired by the chapter on teaching and pedagogies, which I will use to evaluate and reshape my own teaching practices. Unfortunately, like many of the influential design books, it does draw mainly on US culture and examples from the US (e.g. covering the Trump administration), which means that it will need a layer of translation for my own context. Nevertheless, it did give me a clear vocabulary and inspiration to build on. I will warmly recommend this to my colleagues and students.

As a final note, and this is probably due to the publisher rather than the author, I did find the choice of handling the references interesting for a book that talks a lot about giving credit where it's due. Finding a number at the end of a sentence that leads to a note at the end of the book that gives the shorthand reference to then find the full reference in the References was quite burdensome and meant that many times I did not bother to find out the author names for most of the work mentioned throughout the book.