Education Justice

Designing for education is one of the most responsible things: Following the design justice principles in every step of design is essential for me as it is one of the ways I make sure that I am targeting the interests and learning of people in various social, cultural, and racial groups. Although we are preconditioned to think it is hard and an extra thing, I have learned that if you follow a systematic approach you will be able to succeed in it. I try to position the population I am designing for as co-designers who know their challenges and needs more than I do and view them as experts by their individual lived experiences. Another critical component for me is making sure that I consider and include in the design decisions that I make the marginalized groups who got excluded from specific experiences in the past.

Co-designing is when you treat the population you design for as your team members and experts in matters that concern them. I have been making sure that I put my interests and what I envision the final products to be second, thus making sure that the choices and what I hear from the population I work with come first. In my project, Hug Bug, I have included several people from the population that I design for and positioned them as experts in my interviews with them, making sure they know that they are valuable team members and I am accountable in front of them with the significant decisions that I make which will affect them. Here, you can see how I incorporated and shifted my initial decisions based on my population's feedback.

I enjoy working on first experiences, ensuring they have every essential component to motivate and invite the marginalized population of learners from those same spheres. In the same project, Hug Bug, I have been concentrating on making the experience of electronics appeal to girls who have been excluded from STEM areas as their interests and voices have not been taken into account when creating experiences in the field. I have used co-design principles and motivation theory to account for appropriate entryways in the design, which you can read about more here.

In my future work, be it working on first experiences or not, I will take the responsibility to make sure that I continue stressing those two components making sure the projects I work on target a variety of learners by valuing their input in the design.