Design Justice in Practice: Community-led Design of an Online Maker Space for Refugee and Migrant Women

ABSTRACT

While varying degrees of participatory methods are often explored by the HCI community to enable design with different user groups, this paper seeks to add weight to the burgeoning demand for community-led design when engaging with diverse groups at the intersections of marginalisation. This paper presents a 24-month-long qualitative study, where the authors observed a community-based organisation that empowers refugee and migrant women in Australia through making. We report how the organisation led its own process to pivot from face-to-face to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the design and delivery of an app and the intersectional challenges faced by the women as they learnt to navigate online making. This paper expands feminist intersectional praxis in HCI to new contexts and critiques the positionality of researchers in this work. It contributes to the literature on design justice, providing an exemplar of how community-led design more effectively dismantles the compounding constraints experienced by intersectional communities. This paper also argues that the ethos of care and safe spaces, which are central to black feminist thought, are vital to community-led design and underpin the 10 design justice principles when executed in practice. © 2023 ACM.