Just Sustainability Design Lab
What We Do and Why
The Just Sustainability Design Lab (JSD Lab) at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information explores how technology can serve social justice, environmental sustainability, and community well-being. At the lab, researchers, students, and community partners come together to imagine and design technologies that sustain life rather than deplete it. We work across fields and disciplines to create systems and practices that foster life, equity, and care.
At the JSD Lab, we believe another tech future is possible. Through transdisciplinary research, collaborative design, and public engagement, we pursue:
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Technologies Otherwise: exploring degrowth and other pathways to postgrowth, and challenging the cultures of consumption and infinite capital accumulation.
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Just Sustainabilities: integrating environmental and social justice into computing and technology design.
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Convivial Technologies: cultivating systems that nurture cooperation, community, and joy beyond the confines of capitalism.
Current Projects
We are working with the University of Warwick to tackle global challenges like social inequity and climate change by emphasizing data justice, social justice, and sustainability in technology design within our research and education programs.
Save the AI is a satirical campaign that uses humour to juxtapose our personal needs for Earth’s resources with evidence of just how much of these resources are now being claimed by the data centres running generative AI.
In Undecided? A Board Game to study Intertemporal choices in software projects, our team did, well, what the title says. The game facilitates (1) educational exploration of intertemporal choice and (2) studies of intertemporal choice. We plan to release it on Kickstarter in 2026!
In this new project funded by the School of Cities, we explore the tensions between data analytics and lived experience through lenses such as design justice and data feminism.
As part of this project, we designed an evaluation framework that adopts principles and concepts from data curation to enable more responsible ML dataset development. We applied this framework to examine current curation practices in ML and suggest areas of improvement.
A map-based data exploration and visualization tool designed to translate urban sustainability data into actionable knowledge for shaping sustainable cities.
Completed Projects
Our lab is a founding member of the international Karlskrona Alliance, best known for its Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design.
In our recent article, we set a foundation for future studies of intertemporal choices by showing that they are ubiquitous in systems design practice and poorly understood and showing how we can study them in realistic ways.
Temporal discounting indicates that outcomes at a distance may seem less important to us than closer ones. How do we think about these intertemporal choices in practice? What effects does this have? We performed the first study of decision making in software projects that asked how software professionals discount future outcomes. Our findings have significant practical implications.
In this long-running study of Civic Tech Toronto, we show how this community designs civic technology in a way that allows community members and others to engage with democratic governance outside of the conventional transactions of representative democracy.
This award-winning paper used Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) to examine the design of Sidewalk Toronto, a previously planned smart city development.
Who We Are
Current Members
Introducing Just Sustainability Design
What is Just Sustainability Design
Just Sustainability Design, JSD for short, is a framework for systems design practice, research, and pedagogy that privileges sustainability and justice and therefore, the asymmetric and uneven effects of systems design choices at a distance. JSD aims to bring about improvement, not just avoid damage.
JSD was introduced in Professor Becker’s book, Insolvent: How to reorient computing for just sustainability. To learn more about Just Sustainability Design, see the resources below.
Research Funding
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