Justice Driven Product Design: A Comprehensive Guide to Resources
Resource list to learn about building Inclusive Products
As Product Managers and Designers, it's crucial to not just focus on our target audience but to also consider the needs and perspectives of all users. Inclusion goes beyond diversity in hiring and extends to creating products, designs, campaigns, algorithms, and systems that serve everyone. Failure to do so can result in products that are not accessible or user-friendly for certain groups, ultimately limiting the potential impact of our products.
This guide is a comprehensive collection of resources to help you think about inclusive product design, universal design, ethics in AI, design equity, Justice Driven Product Design. It's time to broaden your perspective. These are a lot of resources. Start with the recommendations and keep learning. Set aside 30 mins a week at the minimum to compound your learning in this space.
Where to start
📹 Rethink what Inclusive Design Means by Kat Holmes
📹 Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
📹 Designing for Justice - Talk by Antionette Caroll
🔗equityXdesign free course online
🔗Mismatch Design for all: Why inclusion matters in business by Kat Holmes
Books
🕮 Mismatch How Inclusion Shapes Design By Kat Holmes Mismatch
🕮 Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
🕮 Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock. An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities and dismantle structural inequality. Online version of the book here
🕮 Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin. A cut through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.
🕮 Building for Everyone by Annie-Jean Baptiste
🕮 Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher. A revealing look at how tech industry bias and blind spots get baked into digital products — and harm us all.
🕮 Cross Cultural Design by Senongo Akpem. A List Apart book exploring how to create culturally relevant and responsible experiences that reach a truly global audience.
🕮 Field Guide: Equity-Centered Community Design by Creative Reaction Lab. A problem solving process based on equity, humility-building, addressing power dynamics, and co-creating.
🕮 How to Be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi, this book discusses concepts of racism and Kendi's proposals for anti-racist individual actions and systemic changes. It received positive critical reception
Articles and Resources
📹 Joy Buolamwini, How I am fighting bias in algorithms - Ted video
📹Joy Buolamwini on The Open Mind: Algorithmic Justice - 2019 video
📹Cathy O'Neil: The Era of Blind Faith In Data Must End - a Ted Talk
🔗6 Principles for Inclusive Design: How designing for equity & accessibility benefits everyone
🎧Intersectionality Matters Podcast
🔗Equity-Centered Design Framework and K12 Lab’s deck
🔗When bias in product design means life or death - a TechCrunch article
🔗Adding Ethics to Design Sprints
🔗How to begin designing for diversity
🔗Anti-racist reading list for designers
🔗Measuring Discrimination on the Airbnb Platform here
🔗Racism Untaught resources
🔗Creative Reaction Lab for resources, masterclasses, jobs etc., Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide - Collection of equitable design-thinking frameworks
🔗Creative Reaction Lab’s library of training webinars for designers
🔗5by5: Access and Algorithms with Lisa Nash - an interview with resources
🔗5by5: The Interplay of Design and Ethics with Ruth Schmidt - A super powerful read.
🔗Biased Algorithms are Everywhere and No One Seems to Care - an article on AI
🔗Microsoft’s Responsible Innovation Toolkit: Harms Modeling and others
🔗Measuring Bias at Airbnb
🔗Design | A brief history of how racism manifests itself in design and how we can learn from it here
🔗The challenge of designing for everyone by Benjamin Evans, head of Product Inclusion at PayPal
🔗Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo by Natasha Iskander in Harvard Business Review
🔗Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way. by Charlton McIlwain in MIT Technology Review
🔗Typography as A Radical Act by Silas Munro in AIGA’s Eye on Design
🔗What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design? by Anoushka Khandwala in AIGA’s Eye on Design
🔗Speech recognition technology is racist by Thomas Macaulay in The Next Web
🔗Anti-Racist Reading List for Designers - Medium post by Lexi Namer
People to Follow
➡️Cathy O'Neil here or on Twitter
➡️Navrina Singh on LI
➡️Joy Buolamwini at Poet of Code
➡️Laura Kalbag on Twitter
➡️Kat Holmes on LI
➡️Sasha Costanza-Chock on Twitter
➡️Susannah Shattuck on LI
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