In the book, Costanza-Chock notes that design justice is a framework whose core concepts have emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields working closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. It focuses explicitly on the ways that design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people, reproducing and/or challenging the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, settler colonialism, and other forms of structural inequality). 

Costanza-Chock documents and builds upon the theory and practice of this community, demonstrating how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—in particular, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under what Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins calls the matrix of domination. 

The book is not only critique, Costanza-Chock says; it's really an invitation to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.”