INM317 Design Justice Student Coursework Zine Collection (HCID; City St George's, University of London)
To access the items in this collection, please scroll down to the bottom of this page.
INM317 Design Justice is a postgraduate module taught at City St George's, University of London. This public collection presents a selection of the zines students produced as coursework for the module, starting with the 2023-2024 cohort, led by Dr Ernesto Priego. New additions were made as the module became core and had a larger cohort, in the 2024-2025 academic year.
As technology enters all aspects of our lives, designers are faced with an ever-increasing array of ethical and social challenges. Technology is increasingly amplifying existing inequalities and injustices such as racist and sexist discrimination, through new algorithms, social media, and machine learning, as well as contributing to environmental destruction through ever-increasing energy-consuming computational systems.
Human-Computer Interaction and design, as fields of study and practice, are investing in new ways to respond to technology on these challenges. In this module students are introduced to frameworks, approaches, perspectives, methods and tools from HCI and beyond that: a) critically examine the ways in which design harms people and planet, and b) reposition design towards justice, sustainability, fairness and equality.
As part of the final coursework, students are asked to create a zine that describes a Design Justice case study of technology of their choosing.
A zine (short for magazine or fanzine - pronounced “zeen”) is usually a low-cost, self-made publication that can showcase anything. They can be traced back to science fiction fans in the 1950’s, the British punk movement of the 1970’s and DIY and indie subcultures of the 1990s. They are now made and distributed by artists, illustrators, designers, and academics alike, including the Design Justice Network (see https://designjustice.org/zines). This coursework aimed to encourage students to contributing to this area of practice. The module also introduced students to Creative Commons licensing and different open access repositories.
Students were encuraged to use lo-fi and digital methods. Zines were printed out and deposited on figshare as PDF files for archiving and potential sharing, feedback and citation.
Please note this module was not specifically about zinemaking, and most students were new to it. Learning is a process that continues after the submission of the final piece of coursework. Most of these zines are first attempts, and there will be varying levels of proficiency in the items in the collection.
It is hoped new items and new versions will be added over time to this collection. We hope it becomes a useful resource for others at City St George's and elsewhere. Please refer to the citation and licensing information of each of the individual items.
To access the items in this collection, please scroll down to the bottom of this page.
