Designing for Justice Across Systems

Abstract

Environmental justice has long suffered from a lack of collaboration between government, researchers, and community constituents, further burdening communities most affected by environmental hazards. To build capacity for change among environmental justice stakeholders, and provide opportunities for Asian, Black, and Latinx peoples to develop better environmental justice fluency, the authors leveraged community-based participatory research to focus on the lives, hopes, and dreams of those most impacted by environmental racism in Chicago, Illinois. The authors address how the racism evident across Chicago in terms of cumulative environmental burdens requires a context-specific approach to explore the structural components of environmental racism that plague this U.S. city. For this validation study, the authors sought to explore the importance of fostering agentic behaviour and area identification around environmental racism through collaborative sense-making. The article builds on work that shows, when used collaboratively, simulations can facilitate group sense-making that can also mitigate accessibility needs between participants’ graph interpretation capacities and scientific inferences. In contrast to the single-story nature of typical publicly accessible environmental data portals, the environmental racism tool encouraged participants to examine the many factors impacting vulnerable populations in Chicago to help them draw their own conclusions. Findings suggest that our tool not only supported 14 participants across four design iterations to conclude that poor Asian, Black, and Latinx Chicagoans are most impacted by unjust air quality exposure, and that not one graph is suitable enough to support everyone. Implications illuminate how racism in context can be made transparent through co-design and converging stakeholders for change.