Who we are, what we do and why we do it
Initiated by Irene Luque Martin and Johnathan Subendran, Justice by Design is an interdisciplinary collective and disruptive practice committed to radically re-imagining spatial design as an intentional act of justice, by critically centring the attitude and skills of designer. We explore how the spatial designer can resist and transform dominant systems by developing alternative pedagogies, methodologies, and epistemologies that challenge design’s complicity in injustice.
As both a forum and a school, we operate at the intersection of theory, practice, and education—convening students, educators, designers, and activists to interrogate how spatial design is taught, learned, and practiced. We reject the myths of design neutrality, heroism, and Western universalism that dominate spatial disciplines. Instead, we centre knowledge that is embodied, lived, relational, and historically marginalised.
Our work is organized around three key shifts:
- Epistemic — what knowledge we recognize, legitimize, and work with.
- Pedagogical — how we learn and teach design otherwise.
- Methodological — how we design with care, accountability, and reflexivity.
Through workshops, collaborations, studios, experiments, and provocations, we mobilize a growing community of uncertain, motivated, and justice-oriented spatial practitioners. We are building new literacies for justice, ones that equip designers to navigate complexity, confront power, and act with integrity in contested contexts.
So far we have collaborated with educational organisations such as the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, Centre for the Just City and Department of Urbanism of TU Delft, as well as an interdisciplinary group of artists and designers specialising in methods and skills unconventional to spatial design such as textile and tapestry, gaming, improvised singing, embodiment, theatre and dance.
Please get in touch with us if you are curious, want to connect or collaborate.
Justice by Design 