Designing for Equity: Extending the Equitable Design Toolkit (EDT) Beyond Digital Practice

Abstract

Design education is increasingly tasked with preparing students to address social equity, accessibility, and the impact of technology alongside usability and visual clarity. This paper builds upon the Equitable Design Toolkit (EDT), first introduced in earlier research (Lee, 2025), and extends the framework to broader pedagogical contexts to demonstrate how inclusive design principles can move beyond screens and interfaces into lived environments and human-centered systems. The EDT supports design instructors in helping students create more equitable products by incorporating an intersectional and power-mapping framework known as the Wheel of Power and Privilege, which visualizes how social hierarchies shape access, representation, and lived experiences. The toolkit consists of three core components: Intersectional Identity Cards that illustrate overlapping identity dimensions such as race, gender, ability, and age; the Wheel of Power and Privilege, which maps social hierarchies that influence access; and Biased Design Cards, which highlight examples of exclusionary design. This study examines the classroom integration of the EDT as a pedagogical model, in which students used the toolkit to create research-informed intersectional personas and applied inclusive design thinking to assess both digital interfaces and physical environments, addressing issues such as navigation, signage, and interface affordances for diverse user groups. By integrating inclusive critique practices with the EDT, this study frames inclusivity as a core measure of design effectiveness and offers educators adaptable strategies for equity-centered learning across digital and physical contexts.

Keywords: Inclusive Design, Intersectionality, Human-centered Design, UX Pedagogy, Equity-centered Frameworks, Design Education

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008028