More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What we need to worry about isn’t unethical industries. It’s unethical decisions made over time because of ill-conceived motivations.
Working the right way requires constant vigilance. It’s why we’ve learned to ask “why” and to say “no.” That vigilance is required of everyone you work with, but you also can’t expect that someone else is taking care of it,
as they enjoy their lovingly prepared locally-sourced meat—ask them why they feel safe eating it. Ask them how they’re sure their meal is maggot-free or that it hasn’t been sitting in a stockyard under a blazing summer sun for a week. Turns out, we’re all in favor of regulations when it comes to what we shovel into our mouth. Not so much when we’re spewing ideas about disrupting the cities we live in.
The only question at this point is whether we are going to regulate ourselves, by adopting a higher standard of ethics, or whether we want to wait until the government steps in and does it for us.
And we don’t get to complain about it because we had an opportunity to regulate ourselves and we didn’t. Even in the absence of regulations, safeguarding the people we design for is the job.
Be willing to say the thing that might get you fired, because if you’re not, then you’re holding back. Otherwise, you’re giving the answer you think people want to hear, or the answer that you think saves your skin. That’s not the job. Your job is to design things the right way, the ethical way, even if it gets you fired. They should teach you that in design school.
She includes the people who need to be included in the design process, especially the ones who’ve been excluded in the past. She does this with authority. With agency. With good communication. And with conviction.
We break civil discourse.
Large ships turn slowly.
An inexperienced designer fresh out of school has neither the experience, nor the skill to do any of those things, as willing as they might be. Worst yet, when they go to work at those places, there’s no one there to train them on how to argue, how to ask questions, how to stand up for themselves, how to look out for the impact of their work.
And as easy as it is to make fun of people who want to “change things from the inside,”—I’m guilty of this myself and will continue to do it in the very next section!—I do believe these particular people mean it.
ensuring tweets
This was design as obfuscation.
People hire you to be the expert, so you might as well be the expert. Tell those people what it’s going to take to do your job and how you’re going to do it. And if you’re walking into a situation where you’re supposed to fit into a certain methodology of working, get clarity on what that methodology is and whether you’re okay with it before you accept the job.
WHO DO YOU WORK FOR, AGAIN?
If we continue to behave like it’s a white man’s world, we’re not only doing ourselves a disservice, we’re doing our society a disservice.
Tire kicking is a gift. If someone kicks the tires on your work and it falls apart, that person is your new best friend because they just saved your ass. They helped you keep bad work out of the world.
In some cases, we bear the responsibility of inventing the things you’re interacting with online or speaking to in your kitchen, but that doesn’t mean we understand how they affect people.
On Twitter, those problems become exactly the same size. They receive the same amount of outrage. They’re presented identically. They’re just as big as one another. Twitter works like a giant depressed brain.
We’re strip-mining humanity for engagement and fracking the decency out of society because we’re working within a system of rewards that doesn’t give a damn about long-term effects, only short-term gains.
Use clear language that communicates what’s going on. Be upfront about what things do and what effects they’ll have.
Designers should be able to write their own interface language.
We already have enough data that’s going to take us hundreds of years to process. That’s if we decided what we wanted to do with it today. We do not know what we want to do with it. We’ve just collected it. Tell Brad he can collect new data once he’s analyzed the data he already has.
(Seriously? Who the fuck is giving Panera Bread their data?), 92 million
Digital surveillance is easy and a lot of people are still so excited that they can do it, they haven’t begun worrying about whether they should do it.
If we continue to design interfaces that knowingly break the law we have to expect it’ll bite us in the ass.
what we were willing to be outraged by shifted drastically. There’s a concept called an Overton window, which describes what we’re willing to discuss or tolerate over time—or as the window opens or closes. What was once unthinkable (window closed)
My goal here isn’t so much to give you the specific method to destroy specific unethical behavior because like all viruses, they’ll mutate, and the tools we use today may not work tomorrow. The constant here can’t be the method. The constant needs to be the gatekeeper. That is you.
We still believe this to be our one true purpose.
To design is to influence.
The important work won’t get done at the pixel level. A pixel is just a point of proof in the stage of execution. It’s the period at the end of the sentence. That sentence though? That’s the important thing. To design is to influence people. To design is to build new connections in people’s minds. To design is to build relationships where there previously weren’t any.
If you want to have a say in what’s being designed you need to be in the room where design decisions are being made. By design decisions, I mean things like metrics, strategy, outcomes, definitions, timelines, and resources. All of those things will influence what is being designed a million times more than where pixels ultimately get placed.
Getting the job done and speaking up to people and building alliances are gonna require you to push past that level of discomfort, at least at work. You can still be an introvert at home.
No one has all the answers, and pretending you do doesn’t make you look confident; it makes you look like a fool.
I’ve convinced you that you aren’t just a pair of hands. You’re hired to give as much counsel as labor. The minute your counsel is no longer being heeded, your labor needs to stop as well. Otherwise, you’re doing half the job.
Not everything can be fixed. There is a time to burn things down.
Nothing is happening to the children. We are doing something to the children.
We can’t ask the people we’re protecting to be braver than we’re willing to be.
Finally, not doing the job correctly should have a cost.
(Watch Matewan,
When the reason for community changes from “keeping those inside safe” to “keeping those outside, out” we lose perspective.
It would serve us all well to understand how we are failing them.
They can emerge wherever people have common goals.
they’re taking all those good feelings that you have about community and transferring it to their own ends.
Our power derives from our collective power. We can’t design things for the common good if the sole community we’re representing is our boss.
When we organize, they have a problem. Even the biggest companies in the world are made up of people like us.
Their short-term decisions are digging their long-term resting place.
Our only way out of this mess is to work together. We need to see ourselves as a community, and not just a community of common interests, but a community of common agency. We’re a workforce. The way one of us works ends up affecting all of us. As long as one of us is willing to work as a pair of hands, there’s someone out there you can hire to be a pair of hands. If we agree that we work within an ethical framework, as most other professions of our caliber do, then we can elevate not just the type of work we do and how we do it, but also the society which that work ends up affecting.
as I was accumulating all of this printed matter that I started
asking myself, well, what does the AIGA actually do for me other than being inspirational?
