"Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face." - Design Justice Network
We have organized our project based on the principles of Design Justice. Below we have included the original principles from the Design Justice Network and detailed how we will incorporate each in our design.
We are examining our own profession as librarians and libraries as non-neutral places. We’re pushing back on the fictional library narrative of being information for all when exclusion was built into the field from the beginning. In order to heal and sustain and empower our communities, we need to be aware of how we have been exploitive and oppressive in the past--and in many cases today.
It is important that we are transparent with our students throughout the process of creating and implementing learning tools. By enabling them to actively participate in and observe the development of these tools, students not only participate in providing input through the design process, but they also practice agency in their own educational and personal growth and success.
We began our design process by seeking student collaboration when selecting the learning tools, learning outcomes, and assessments used in the project, and we will continue to regularly seek student collaboration at every stage of the development and design. Our intent is to use critical and open pedagogies to center student voices in the classroom.
For this project, the process of collaboration between librarians, students, and other community members has the potential to be just as valuable as the end product. Throughout the process, it is essential that we must listen before designing and creating in all our iterations. We must be accountable to the needs and interests of our students and making them as widely accessible as possible.
As librarians and educators, we often act as experts rather than facilitators. Through this design process we can continue to transform our role center student voices, expertise, and needs, rather than engaging in a banking model of education.
In an effort to build and maintain a healthy relationship with our communities, we respect and take into account the different voices and lived experiences that contribute to the success of the design process. Being inclusive in our practice to welcome diverse experiences will empower our communities and enable us to produce, share, and reuse effective learning tools and programs within and outside of our respective environments.
The key to this component is to involve the community we serve where ever possible in the process. For this project, we are honoring this component by including two important communities, students from all Ohio Five schools and other librarians who may use our process in the future. For librarians, we have created the guide you are reading right now, where we have shared all of our planning documents. To ensure that this guide reaches other librarians who may find it useful, we have also made sure to include a marketing plan in the very early stages of our planning process. Then we have made students integral to our process for creating our learning tools. The entire process started off with talking to various student groups through surveys and focus groups to give them the chance to tell us what roles these tools needed to fill and how to deliver the and the form they should take.
We are seeking to involve our communities, including students and faculty on our local campuses and in the wider community of librarians, in our process, providing multiple opportunities for collaboration. We are using an iterative design process that will allow us to check in regularly with our communities to ensure that the project grows with them.
Our work influences the environment, our communities, and our own well-being in both known and unforeseen ways. For this project, we strive to do no harm but acknowledge that the outcome may not match our intentions. To best capture our impact, we are including environmental impact, community impact, and self-reflection as primary components of our project evaluation and analysis to improve the next iteration of this work.
For this project, we wanted to take a deeper look at the work the education and library communities have done concerning critical, feminist, and open pedagogies in order to incorporate strategies of student-librarian collaboration that have helped students thrive previously. We also recognize and respect that each of our campuses and intra-campus communities have unique approaches to information interaction. We celebrate and center the critical thinking, learning, and problem-solving practices our students have gleaned from their communities and lived experiences. We will investigate and share the ways that indigenous communities of Ohio and non-western cultures gather and share information.