Diversifying your Design Syllabus: Recommended Readings by Women, Non-binary, and Culturally Diverse Authors

A snapshot of my bookshelf, design and racism books intersecting

My PhD dissertation is focused on anti-racism and design, so people sometimes ask for advice on more diverse or socially-oriented readings for course planning. As a student in the classroom myself, I have felt the frustration of a syllabus filled primarily with white men. It is especially painful as our courses are often made up predominantly of women, and if we’re lucky, include a diversity of cultural backgrounds.

Here I present a list of readings for you to consider adding to your design syllabi to demonstrate that women and People of Color do have a voice and place in design. This list is not perfect, and it’s not exhaustive. It reflects my bias as an American design researcher at Carnegie Mellon, who reads only English. I will appreciate feedback on my selections, I’ll edit to add additional readings, and if it’s helpful, I’d like to create a Google Doc version where others can contribute. Links to PDFs are included for most of the listings.

Design Practice and Theory

• Boehnert, Joanna, and Dimeji Onafuwa. “Design as Symbolic Violence: Reproducing the ‘isms’+ A Framework for Allies.” Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics and Power, School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University 15 (2016).

“Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, products and tools that result in structural and other types of violence (including ecocide).”

— Boehnert & Onafuwa, 2016. p. 1

• Costanza-Chock, Sasha. 2020. Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press.
• Holmes, Kat. 2018. Mismatch: How inclusion shapes design. MIT Press.
• Kimbell, Lucy. 2012. “Rethinking Design Thinking: Part II.” Design and Culture 4 (2): 129–48.
• Onafuwa, Dimeji. 2018. “Allies and Decoloniality: A Review of the Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics, and Power Symposium.” Design and Culture 10 (1): 7–15.
• Rankin, Yolanda A., and Jakita O. Thomas. “Straighten up and fly right: rethinking intersectionality in HCI research.” Interactions 26, no. 6 (2019): 64–68.
• Rosner, Daniela K. 2018. Critical Fabulations: reworking the methods and margins of design. MIT Press.
• Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain : The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press.
• Tlostanova, Madina. 2017. “On Decolonizing Design.” Design Philosophy Papers.
• Willis, Anne-Marie. 2006. “Ontological Designing.” Design Philosophy Papers. https://doi.org/10.2752/144871306X13966268131514.

Interaction Design & HCI

• Bardzell, Shaowen. 2018. “Utopias of Participation: Feminism, Design, and the Futures.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 25 (1): 1–24.
• Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley Sons.
• Crivellaro, Clara, Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Alan Dix, and Ann Light. 2019. “Not-Equal: Democratizing Research in Digital Innovation for Social Justice.” Interactions 26 (2): 70–73.
• Dirksen, Julie. 2015. Design for How People Learn. New Riders.
• Forlano, Laura. 2016. “Decentering the Human in the Design of of Collaborative Cities.” Design Issues 32 (3): 42–54.
• Hankerson, D., Marshall, A. R., Booker, J., El Mimouni, H., Walker, I., & Rode, J. A. 2016. “Does Technology have Race?” In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 473–486).
• Harrington, Christina N., Sheena Erete, and Anne Marie Piper. 2019. “Deconstructing Community-Based Collaborative Design: Towards More Equitable Participatory Design Engagements.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3 (CSCW).
• Merritt, Samantha, and Erik Stolterman. 2012. “Cultural Hybridity in Participatory Design.” ACM International Conference Proceeding Series 2 (August): 73–76.
• Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, I. F., Smith, A. D., To, A., & Toyama, K. 2020. “Critical Race Theory for HCI.” CHI ’20, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA.

“Theories that recommend strategies to address large populations often fail to incorporate or interpret inequalities, history, privilege, and power and their impacts on people.”

— Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al. 2020, p. 5

• Pallanez, Marysol Ortega. 2013. “Social Play and Bimanual Activities through Interactive Experiences for Children with Cerebral Palsy.”
• Schlesinger, Ari, W. Keith Edwards, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2017. “Intersectional HCI: Engaging identity through gender, race, and class.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Suchman, Lucy. 2002. “Located accountabilities in technology production.” Scandinavian journal of information systems 14.2 (2002): 7.
• To, Alexandra, Jarrek Holmes, Elaine Fath, Eda Zhang, Geoff Kaufman, and Jessica Hammer. 2017. “Modeling and Designing for Key Elements of Curiosity: Risking Failure, Valuing Questions.” Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference, DiGRA 2017, no. Gee 2003: 1–18.
• Warren, Anne Marie, Ainin Sulaiman, and Noor Ismawati Jaafar. 2015. “Understanding Civic Engagement Behaviour on Facebook from a Social Capital Theory Perspective.” Behaviour and Information Technology 34 (2): 163–75.

Service Design/ Design for Justice/ Socially Conscious Design

• Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press.
• Asad, Mariam. 2019. “Prefigurative Design as a Method for Research Justice.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3.CSCW (2019): 1–18.
• Bennett, Cynthia L., and Daniela K. Rosner. 2019. “The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the ‘Other.’” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — Proceedings, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300528.
• Boeun Bethany, Hong, and Prendeville, Sharon. 2019. “Understanding Development Discourse through Ontological Design: The Case of South Korea.” Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference Proceedings.
• Buğalı, Hilal, and Sue Fairburn. 2016. “The Discourse of Design for Social Innovation.” In Proceedings of the 8th international social innovation research conference: social innovation in the 21st century; beyond welfare capitalism, 5–7th September 2016, Glasgow, UK. Glasgow: Glasgow Caledonian University, ID 160.
• Chin, Elizabeth. 2017. “On Multimodal Anthropologies from the Space of Design: Toward Participant Making.” American Anthropologist 119.3 (2017): 541–543.
• EquityXDesign. 2018. “Equity is a Verb” Medium Publication. December 7, 2018.
• Fox, Sarah, Jill Dimond, Lilly Irani, Tad Hirsch, Michael Muller, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2017. “Social Justice and Design: Power and Oppression in Collaborative Systems.” CSCW 2017 — Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 117–22.
• Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2005. “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs 30 (2): 1557–87.

“Feminist dis-ability studies similarly questions our assumptions that disability is a flaw, lack, or excess. To do so, it defines disability broadly from a social rather than a medical perspective.”
— Garland-Thomson, 2005, p. 1557

• Grant, L., and Villalobos, G. 2008. Designing Educational Technologies for Social Justice: A Handbook from Futurelab. Futurelab. Retrieved from:
• Jones, Natasha N. 2016. “Narrative Inquiry in Human-Centered Design: Examining Silence and Voice to Promote Social Justice in Design Scenarios.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 46 (4): 471–92.
• Junginger, Sabine. 2017. “Design Research and Practice for the Public Good: A Reflection.” She Ji 3 (4): 290–302.
• Light, Ann, and Rosemary Luckin. 2008. “Designing for Social Justice: People, Technology, Learning.” FutureLab, 1–60.
• Parvin, Nassim. “Doing justice to stories: on ethics and politics of digital storytelling.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4 (2018): 515–534.
• Sih, Brady, Hillary Carey, and Michael C. Lin. “Getting from Vision to Reality: How Ethnography and Prototyping Can Solve Late‐Stage Design Challenges.” In Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, vol. 2018, no. 1, pp. 457–465. 2018.
• Søndergaard, Marie Louise Juul, and Lone Koefoed Hansen. 2017. “Designing with Bias and Privilege.” Nordes 2017 7.
• Torre, Maria Elena. 2009. “Participatory Action Research and Critical Race Theory: Fueling spaces for nos-otras to research.” The Urban Review, 41(1), 106–120.
• Tunstall, Elizabeth. 2007. “In Design We Trust: Design, Governmentality, and the Tangibility of Governance.” Iasdr07, no. 1: 1–16.
• Wylie, Alison. 2013. “Why Standpoint Matters.” Science and other cultures. Routledge, 34–56.

Eco Design & Transition Design

• Agid, Shana, and Elizabeth Chin. 2019. “Making and Negotiating Value: Design and Collaboration with Community Led Groups.” CoDesign 15 (1): 75–89.
• Boehnert, Joanna. 2018. Design, ecology, politics: Towards the ecocene. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Bosch Gomez, Sofia, and Hajira Qazi. 2019. “The Disconnect Between Design Practice and Political Interests: The Need for a Long-Term Political Engagement as Design Practice.” Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference Proceedings.
• Brown, Adrienne M. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.

“Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. i suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”
— Brown, 2017.

• du Plessis, Hannah. 2015. “The Mindset and Posture Required to Engender Life-Affirming Transitions.” Transition Design Symposium: Provocation and Position Papers, School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Forlano, Laura. 2017. “Posthumanism and Design.” She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3 (1): 16–29.
• Gebara, Ivone. 1999. Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
• Gram, Maggie. 2019. “On Design Thinking.” N + 1 Magazine, Issue 35: Savior Complex.
• Kendi, Ibram X. 2019. How to be an Antiracist. One World/Ballantine. [Specifically Chapter 2: Dueling Consciousness]
• Light, Ann. 2015. “Troubling Futures: Can Participatory Design Research Provide a Constitutive Anthropology for the 21 St Century?” Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal 26.
• Lykes, M. Brinton and Rachel M. Hirschberg. “Participatory Action Research and Feminisms: Social Inequalities and Transformative Praxis.” In Handbook of Feminist Research Theory and Praxis. Edited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2012.
• Mata-Marin, Silvia, Francis Carter, Dimeji Onafuwa, Ahmed Ansari, and Dan Lockton. 2017. “Changing Behavior of the Systems We‘re in: Designing for Transitions in Environment, Economy, and Democracy,” Relating Systems Thinking and Design 2017, 1–8.
• Mijs, J.J.B. The Unfulfillable Promise of Meritocracy: Three Lessons and Their Implications for Justice in Education. Soc Just Res 29, 14–34 (2016).
• Morales, Aurora. Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1988.
• Price, Rebecca Anne. 2019. “In Pursuit of Design-led Transitions.” Conference Proceedings of the Academy for Design Innovation Management. Vol. 2. №1. 2019.
• Sardar, Ziauddin. 2015. “Postnormal Times Revisited.” Futures 67: 26–39.
• Smith, Rachel Charlotte, and Ole Sejer Iversen. 2018. “Participatory Design for Sustainable Social Change.” Design Studies.
• Søndergaard, Marie Louise Juul, and Lone Koefoed Hansen. 2017. “Designing with Bias and Privilege.” Nordes 2017 7.
• Taysom, Eloise, and Nathan Crilly. 2017. “Resilience in Sociotechnical Systems: The Perspectives of Multiple Stakeholders.” She Ji 3 (3): 165–82.
• Trawalter, Sophie, D. J. Bart-Plange, and Kelly M. Hoffman. 2020. “A socioecological psychology of racism: making structures and history more visible.” Current opinion in psychology 32 (2020): 47–51.
• Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing.

Design Research

• Chin, Elizabeth. 2007. “The Consumer Diaries, or, Autoethnography in the Inverted World.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7 (3): 335–53.
• E.pluribus unum. 2019. Divided by Design: Findings from the American South. [This is a great example of a design research deliverable]
• Forlizzi, Jodi, J. Zimmerman, and E. Stolterman. 2009. “From design research to theory: Evidence of a maturing field.” Proceedings of IASDR 9 (2009): 2889–2898.
• Jones, Rachel. 2006. “Experience Models: Where Ethnography and Design Meet.” Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, 82–93.
• Lupton, Deborah. 2018. “Towards Design Sociology.” Sociology Compass 12 (1): 1–11.
• Milner IV, H. Richard. 2007. “Race, culture, and researcher positionality: Working through dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen.” Educational researcher 36, no. 7 (2007): 388–400.
• O’Leary, Jasper Tran, Sara Zewde, Jennifer Mankoff, and Daniela K. Rosner. 2019. “Who Gets to Future? Race, Representation, and Design Methods in Africatown.” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — Proceedings.

“Within both data collection and analysis, the authors sought to highlight their own place as participants in, rather than observers of, the politics of the Activation, following notions of reflexivity and participant ethnographies.”
— O’Leary et al., 2019, p. 5

• Tervalon, Melanie, and Jann Murray-Garcia. 1998. “Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education.” Journal of health care for the poor and underserved 9, no. 2 (1998): 117–125.
• Tunstall, Elizabeth (Dori). 2008. “The QAME of Trans-Disciplinary Ethnography: Making Visible Disciplinary Theories of Ethnographic Praxis as Boundary Object.” Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings. 2008: 218–33.
• Wylie, Alison. 2013. “Why Standpoint Matters.” Science and other cultures. Routledge, 34–56.

Communication Design

• Ahmed, Sara. 2014. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
• Cole, Teju. “Getting Others Right.” New York Times Magazine (2017).
• Martin, Emily. 1996. “Egg and Sperm: A scientific fairy tale.” Gender and Scientific Authority. Ed. Barbara Laslett. Chicago: University of Chicago P (1996): 324–339.

“Part of my goal in writing this article is to shine a bright light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology.”
— Martin, 1996, p. 1

• Sykes, Ruth. 2019. “Recognizing the Women Designers Lost to History Will Take Work — We Should Do It Collectively” *This piece is published by AIGA, which has recently failed to attribute ideas properly to contributors of color, so proceed with caution.