Week 11: Design justice

A method for the capstone — designing dispatch systems with the people who bear their risk, instead of for them

Whoever bears the risk should have had a say#

Sasha Costanza-Chock’s 2020 book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press), gives this week’s method its name and its sharpest formulation: design processes routinely reproduce existing inequality precisely because the people most affected by a system’s failure modes are the least likely to have been in the room when it was specified. Applied to a dispatch system, the core commitment is simple to state and hard to practise: the people a system’s decisions fall on should have had input into how it was designed, not just standing to complain about it afterward. That means worker interviews, co-design sessions, and contestable defaults built in from the start — not a feedback form bolted on once the system already ships.

Rerunning the semester’s mechanisms through that lens#

Apply it to what you’ve already studied: an ETA model built with riders in the room might expose its uncertainty instead of presenting one confident number; a lateness penalty designed with the people it penalises might look completely different, or might not exist in its current form at all. The batching decision from week 2 is a good test case — a batching rule co-designed with riders would likely surface the “who absorbs the slippage” question explicitly, as a parameter riders could see and weigh in on, rather than leaving it implicit in the routing logic. The point isn’t to guess what riders would want — it’s to notice how much of a mechanism’s current shape follows directly from whose voice wasn’t in the room when it was specified.

The capstone brief#

Propose one mechanism — a piece of dispatch, rating, or pay design — and defend it against the strongest objection a regulator from any of the three regimes this course has studied could raise. Naming your own weakest point before someone else does is worth more than a design with no visible flaws and no argument for why they don’t matter.

Before the session#

Choose the single mechanism you’ll redesign for the capstone and bring a one-sentence statement of who currently bears the cost of how it works now.