Introduction to Just Sustainability Design

Just Sustainability Design (JSD) is a framework for systems design practice, research, and pedagogy that privileges sustainability and justice and therefore attends explicitly to the asymmetric and uneven effects of systems design choices at a distance. JSD aims to bring about improvement, not merely avoid damage.

Because systems design is inherently discursive, JSD is attentive to the narratives, metaphors, and assumptions that shape how technological futures are imagined and justified. It responds to the danger of misleading narratives that keep design practice captive to false consciousness and instead centres sustainability and justice as first-order design concerns.

As a consequence, JSD must grapple seriously with five interconnected challenges:

• Dispersal of design effects, and their ripple effects across space and time
• Uncertainty and ambiguity about complex, dynamic effects across time scales
• Fragmentation of perspective and agency across the many stakeholders involved in or affected by design decisions
• Power dynamics across direct and indirect stakeholders with unevenly distributed influence over design choices
• Incommensurability across different worldviews, values, and understandings of the design space

Principles of Just Sustainability Design

Constructive and Critical

Critique is an essential element of change. To reorient systems design toward sustainability and justice, critique must examine not only artefacts but also the norms that govern how computational systems are designed today. JSD must therefore be critical without abandoning the generative orientation of engineering and design. The idea of critical friendship is central to this balance.

Systemic

Because the social, technical, and natural are entangled with political, cultural, and economic dimensions, JSD adopts a systemic perspective—one that prioritizes relationships and wholes over isolated components. Meaningful system boundaries rarely align with organizational or technical ones, making sociotechnical analysis unavoidable.

Dialectic

The climate crisis foregrounds epistemic and political challenges that sustainability and justice advocates have long confronted: conflicting worldviews, partial perspectives, and incommensurability. JSD therefore rejects purely nomological or deductive approaches to “solving” social problems, instead embracing a pluralist dialectic in which multiple perspectives can meaningfully engage.

Diachronic

Design decisions are path-dependent and unfold over time. JSD adopts a diachronic perspective that considers historical conditions, system life cycles, downstream effects, and long-term consequences—rather than focusing narrowly on the present moment of design.

Contingent

JSD acknowledges the partiality and situatedness of its own perspective. Rather than claiming completeness or optimality, it is conceived as a deliberately incomplete and evolving project, capable of learning from critique, failure, and changing contexts.

Legitimate

Because sustainability and justice foreground the asymmetry of distant effects, JSD must grapple with justification. When full participation of those affected is impossible, legitimacy—rather than technical optimization alone—must guide design decisions.

Reasonable, rather than rationalist

JSD resists universalist rationalist frameworks that obscure value judgments behind formal reasoning. Instead, it relies on reasonable arguments that remain open to critique, context, and pluralism, while still drawing on scientific methods where appropriate and legitimate.

Replicable, rather than repeatable

JSD does not promise a single method that can be mechanically repeated to produce optimal outcomes. Instead, it seeks replicability across diverse contexts, fostering shared understanding without imposing uniform solutions.

Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability

JSD is developed in depth in the book Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability, which offers a sustained critique of dominant computing paradigms and articulates how systems design can be reoriented toward sustainability and justice.

The book situates computing within the intertwined crises of environmental degradation, social injustice, and democratic erosion. It argues that contemporary computing practices have accumulated societal and ecological debts that cannot be repaid within existing conceptual frameworks—and that a reorientation of design perspectives is therefore necessary.

How can we enact meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and justice?

The deep entanglement of information technology with contemporary societies has raised hopes that computing might support transitions toward more sustainable and just futures—futures that phase out fossil fuels, distribute public goods fairly, and enable meaningful access to information. In principle, computing should be able to help.

In practice, however, opaque algorithms increasingly steer societies toward misinformation, unsustainable consumption, and extractive forms of value creation. Insolvent shows why dominant ways of thinking in computing are conceptually insufficient to address these challenges, and why computing continues to incur societal debts it cannot pay back.

The book positions computing within environmental sustainability, social justice, and the intersection of the two, and explains why designing for just sustainability is both technically and ethically demanding. It argues that computing must engage in critical dialogue with neighbouring disciplines—drawing on social theory, feminist thought, and systems thinking—to better understand its role in society. At the same time, it demonstrates that such critical perspectives can be productively integrated into computing research and practice.

Devil’s Dictionary

The Devil’s Dictionary offers short, critical reinterpretations of common terms in computing and technology discourse, exposing the assumptions and power relations embedded in everyday language.

Endorsements

Reading and Discussion Guide

A guided framework for reading and discussing Insolvent in classrooms, reading groups, and community settings is currently in development.

Coming soon.