A Sydney panellist made the case for design justice inside autistic businesses

One panellist’s answer to how autistic founders should build their businesses was to stop sorting people by neurotype inside them. Speaking at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney on 9 June 2024, on a panel about autistic cognition and business development, the panellist said they were “a heavy believer in design justice principles”, and summed those principles up as a question: “how do we design for everyone not for a specific norm”.

The panellist traced the idea to a movement. There is a whole Design Justice Network, the panellist told the room, and its beginnings were linked to a book written by a transgender person who had difficulty going through airports, because their body shape was not what the scanning system expected and they were constantly being picked up by it. The book and its author were not named in the session. The description matches Design Justice: Community Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, by the MIT associate professor Sasha Costanza-Chock, which MIT News reported on in March 2020 as a new book from MIT Press. According to MIT News, Costanza-Chock is transgender and nonbinary, and airport millimetre wave scanners, set by agents to a binary setting based on their assumptions about the traveller, nearly always flag Costanza-Chock for a hands on check. The same report puts the sequence the other way round from the panellist’s account. In its telling, the book grew out of the Design Justice Network, which was founded in 2016 to rethink design processes so that they centre people who are often marginalised by design.