Sasha Costanza-Chock

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a sociologist, design scholar, and movement-rooted activist (they/them) whose 2020 book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need — published by MIT Press in March 2020 and a 2021 PROSE Award finalist in Engineering & Technology — installed design justice as a working framework across the make-AI-good movement, the participatory-design field, and the wider tech-and-society discourse (see Person entry). They are currently Director of Research & Sensemaking at One Project, Associate Professor at Northeastern University's College of Arts, Media, and Design with joint appointments in Communication Studies and Design, a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, a Steering Committee member of the Design Justice Network, and a board member of Allied Media Projects; their prior trajectory runs through an associate professorship in Civic Media at MIT, the founding of the MIT Codesign Studio, and the Director-of-Research-and-Design role at the Algorithmic Justice League under which the Community Reporting of Algorithmic System Harms (CRASH) project was developed. They are tracked here as a Voice because their public-facing output — the book itself, the Design Justice Network principles they co-drafted, the named-byline AJL research reports they have co-authored, and a sustained named-keynote and workshop record across digital-rights, design-research, and movement venues — has done as much as any single body of work to install into make-AI-good organising the working argument that the question of how AI systems are built is inseparable from the question of who is at the design table and whose worlds the systems are being designed to reproduce.

They are the corpus's first framework-author Voice — a register structurally distinct from the worker-plaintiff voice anchored by Daniel Motaung, the strategic-litigation convener voice anchored by Cori Crider, the lead-plaintiff artist voice anchored by Karla Ortiz, the algorithmic-bias public-scientist voice anchored by Joy Buolamwini, and the feminist-decolonial-tech voice anchored by Joana Varon. Where each of those voices anchors a specific case, sector, or campaign, Costanza-Chock's voice is the published-framework anchor — the named analytical vocabulary (the "matrix of domination" applied to design, the community-led "Nothing About Us Without Us" inheritance from disability-rights organising, the explicit contrast between design justice and "design for social impact") that the other voices' campaigns have drawn on as their working theoretical apparatus.

The Design Justice framework

The single load-bearing artefact of Costanza-Chock's public output is the 2020 MIT Press book Design Justice, which formalises design justice as both "a community of practice, and a framework for analysis" — the named self-description Costanza-Chock has carried across subsequent talks, interviews, and academic work. The book's central move is to apply Patricia Hill Collins's framework of the "matrix of domination" — structured by white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and settler colonialism — to the analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between groups of people. The book's working argument runs in three named registers:

• "Design reflects existing power structures." Biases are encoded in everyday objects — software, medical devices, social media, airport scanners — that systematically disadvantage people outside dominant norms. The opening chapter's named case is the airport millimeter-wave scanner's binary-gender classification of nonbinary bodies, the framing example Costanza-Chock has used in repeated talks and interviews as the load-bearing illustration of how seemingly neutral technical systems encode the assumptions of dominant social categories into the bodies they recognise.
• "Who designs matters, but isn't enough." The book is explicit that workforce-diversity alone — the dominant industry framing of "fairness in AI" or "diverse teams" — is a necessary but insufficient condition; even diverse teams routinely build products for affluent users with constant connectivity, excluding billions globally. The working corrective is community-led design, not representative design.
• "Innovation is collective, not solitary." Social movements and marginalised communities constantly innovate, but those contributions remain invisible in dominant narratives that celebrate individual "genius". The named methodological intervention the book argues for is to make visible — and to materially compensate — the design labour of the people the dominant industry framing erases.

The framework's working vocabulary — "Nothing About Us Without Us" (the disability-rights movement's inheritance the book carries forward as Principle 3 of the Design Justice Network's ten principles), "design for one, design for many", "we recognise that we are not always the right people to design" — has been adopted across the participatory-design field, the algorithmic-accountability research community, and the wider AI-and-society discourse. By Costanza-Chock's own published account, the book has been cited more than 3,000 times.

The Design Justice Network — the community of practice

The book's "community of practice" half is the Design Justice Network itself, of which Costanza-Chock is a co-founder and continuing Steering Committee member. The Network's named institutional arc runs through the Allied Media Conference in Detroit:

• 2014. The Future Design Lab practice space launches at the Allied Media Conference as an early collaborative space for participatory design.
• 21 June 2015. Thirty designers, artists, technologists, and community organisers convene at AMC Detroit for a session titled "Generating Shared Principles for Design Justice", at which the named distinction between design justice and "design for social impact" is first drafted — centring those "normally marginalized by [design]" as co-creators rather than passive beneficiaries.
• 2016. A Design Justice Network Gathering at AMC consolidates the principles through collaborative editing.
• 2018. The Design Justice Network officially shares finalised principles at the AMC's Design Justice Track, released under a Creative Commons licence.
• 2019-2020. The Network adopts a structured engagement framework (signatories, members, working groups, local nodes) and opens membership, reaching more than 300 paid members by early 2021.

The Network is institutionally a sponsored project of Allied Media Projects, on whose board Costanza-Chock sits — the named institutional vehicle through which the framework's "community of practice" half is operated.

Anchoring work inside the corpus

Costanza-Chock's public output sits at three named intersections with the existing corpus:

• The Algorithmic Justice League CRASH project. Costanza-Chock's Director-of-Research-and-Design role at the Algorithmic Justice League is the corpus's most legible operational application of the design-justice framework to a make-AI-good campaign. The Bug Bounties For Algorithmic Harms? report (January 2022), of which Costanza-Chock is a named author alongside Josh Kenway, Camille François, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, and Joy Buolamwini, is the foundational AJL CRASH-project publication and the working translation of the design-justice framework's "community of practice" half into a participatory-audit programme for algorithmic systems. The report's named recommendations — that bug-bounty programmes for algorithmic harms must nurture a community of practice that does not exclude non-computer-scientists; must intentionally develop a diverse, inclusive community of researchers and community advocates with fair compensation; and must foster and protect participatory adversarial research — are direct restatements of design-justice principles in the algorithmic-auditing register. The 2022 Who Audits the Auditors? paper Costanza-Chock co-authored with Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Joy Buolamwini extends the same line into the academic-policy register.
• The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, with Coding Rights. Costanza-Chock co-conceived the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies workshop methodology with Joana Varon of Coding Rights, in partnership with the Design Justice Network and with design and illustration by Clarote. The Oracle — a five-deck card-game workshop methodology whose stated purpose is to "collectively envision and share ideas for transfeminist technologies from the future" — originated at the Global Symposium on AI & Inclusion in Rio de Janeiro in November 2017 and was formally published on 13 September 2021. The Oracle is the corpus's clearest single Latin-American / Global-South-collaborative anchor of the design-justice framework's participatory-and-speculative-design methodology applied to the political question of who designs AI futures.
• CryptoRave 2017 São Paulo and the Latin-American digital-rights register. Costanza-Chock delivered an activist-design keynote pair with Mexican feminist-hacktivism researcher Lili_anaz at CryptoRave 2017 in São Paulo on strategies for communicating security and cryptography concepts to general audiences — an early-period anchor of their international keynote record in the Latin-American digital-rights field that ran in parallel to the development of the Design Justice book.

The wider published-output record

The published-output record beyond the Design Justice book includes the earlier Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement (MIT Press, 2014), an ethnographic study of the US immigrant-rights movement's media practices that anchors Costanza-Chock's social-movement-research register; the #MoreThanCode report (2018) on the public-interest technology field, co-authored with Maya Wagoner, Berhan Taye, and others; and an academic-publication record across The Journal of Higher Education, Information, Communication & Society, and the Journal of Design and Science. The open-access reading edition of Design Justice on MIT Press's PubPub platform is the working reference text the book is most often cited from in subsequent academic and movement use.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Costanza-Chock's published framework is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the named analytical vocabulary — design justice as a framework, the matrix-of-domination application to design, the "Nothing About Us Without Us" inheritance, the explicit contrast between design justice and design for social impact, the ten-principle Design Justice Network charter — is the working theoretical apparatus that other Voices' campaigns (Buolamwini's algorithmic-bias public output, Varon's transfeminist-decolonial register, Crider's public-law-against-platforms line, Motaung's worker-side litigation register, Ortiz's creative-industry consent-credit-compensation line) draw on as their analytical scaffolding. The corpus's framework-author Voice register — the published-framework anchor distinct from the case-anchored advocacy Voices — carried no anchor before this entry; this entry gives that register its first Voice. Affiliation and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.