Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

by Mike Monteiro

We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our ideas.

Asking ourselves why we are making something is an infinitely better question than asking ourselves whether we can make it.

We need to measure more than profit. We need to slow down and measure what our work is doing out there in the world. We need to measure impact on the people whose lives we’re affecting. Then, we need to design things that improve the lives of the people who make them and the people who use them; design things which have a positive impact on society at large.

People don’t see the things they’re rewarded for as problems to fix.

As Upton Sinclair so eloquently put it: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

There’s nothing wrong with making money, but there is something inherently wrong with profiting from the labor of others without giving them a piece of the success they’ve earned.

There is no such thing as neutral software. We all bring our own biases to the things we design—our own ethical code, and our own garbage.

Who we work for and how we do that work are the only things that matter right now.

When I look out at today’s political landscape at the companies that destroyed democracy and increased income disparity, I see social networks, I see open-source blogging tools, I see the sharing economy. I see services that might very well have passed that first ethical test. I see companies that, for the most part, were created with the best of intentions falling into a system that rewards growth, regardless of how it comes.

We built the networks that brought this world to ruin. We built the digital megaphones that brought the alt-right to power, and when we realized what was happening, we refused to do anything about it because of the money it was bringing in. And while the decision on what course to take is made at the top of these organizations, like Jack Dorsey refusing to budge an inch on abuse or harassment, ultimately their decisions cannot be implemented without our labor. And there, right there—there is our power. Labor.

The truth is that design, when it comes to digital products, is a team sport. Designing a complex tool well takes people from a lot of different fields. Be they engineers, strategists, developers, or yes, designers.

Everything in that tweet is correct. Everyone who influences the final thing, be it a product or a service, is designing.

Today’s designers need to be systems thinkers, experts in regulation, collaborators, communicators, and fearless. We need to understand our job is to be advocates for the people who aren’t in the room.

Because the reality is that some of those voices are using their augmentation to silence others.

While Twitter bends over backward to protect the voices that silence others, I believe that our job as designers, and as human beings, is to use our skills to protect the voices that are most in need of protection.

To paraphrase Google Sydney’s Tea Uglow, why teach people to think outside the box when you can hire people outside the box.

There’s no quicker way to destroy someone’s confidence than teaching them that what they’re saying isn’t as important as what you’re saying.

If you’re a dude, you have a responsibility to tell your male co-workers to shut the fuck up when they interrupt someone. Be a role model. I don’t mean “I think what Rebecca was saying was—” I mean you should say “You interrupted Maria. I want to hear her finish.”

The people affected by our actions are always more important than our intent.

You put people from different backgrounds together, and they can see things from multiple points of view. They cover each others’ blind spots. It’s the smart move.

As the great James Baldwin puts it, “It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”

If you’re serious about making a social impact, your first question should be where are people getting screwed the most? Financial services. The medical industry. Education. Civil services. (Your city needs you!) The list is pretty long. Your second question should be whether you can keep people from getting screwed by working there.

Good work cannot be done in situations where the work is to hurt people, deceive them, or manipulate them.

Here’s the important part: nothing that I just described is hard or expensive. Find a place with good leadership. Find a place that wants to listen to what you have to say. Find a place filled with people you want to collaborate with you, and people you’re willing to collaborate with.

You were hired to solve problems. Your work should be evaluated on how well it solves those problems (without creating new ones.)

You work for the people who’ll ultimately come in contact with your work. You work for the people who aren’t in the room.

The first step of setting up for success is including as many different points of view in the room from as many different cultures as possible with as many experiences as possible. The fact that Chuck went to Berkeley while Todd and Stew went to Stanford is not diversity.

“This right here is broken” is good feedback. It tells you there is a problem. You can explore that further. Ask the person how it’s broken.

The work we do lives in the world. We make it. It affects the people who come in contact with it. It’s our solemn duty to make sure it’s well thought out, beneficial, and as free from error as possible once it’s in their hands. Even then, we owe them vigilance.

Ultimately, the success we crave isn’t our own. It’s the success of the people we work for. The ones on the ground. We want the work we do to be successful for them. That’s the job.

Twitter works like a giant depressed brain. It can’t tell right from wrong, and it can’t tell big from small. It needs help.

We need to challenge the idea that a CEO’s primary mission is to make money for shareholders.

Echoing Tepper and Hearn in The Myth of Capitalism:

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.

DARK PATTERNS Dark patterns are the low-hanging fruit of design ethics. They’re generally easy to spot. They keep people from doing what they intended to do. They rob users of their intent, because their intent runs counter to how a business makes their money. Your job is to make it easy for people to do what they want. Dark patterns are designed to do just the opposite.

So again, when someone tells you to design something to collect a specific piece of data, ask them what they intend to do with that data. You have a right to know, after all, the work they’re asking you to do is going out with your name on it.

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) such as putting children in cages or constant surveillance or a president breaking with standards of decorum, slowly becomes policy (window open) as we get used to new behavior. Now, this isn’t always a negative. Overton’s window can also be applied to things such as gay marriage, black presidents, and legal weed, all of which were once unthinkable, even in my lifetime, and have come to pass. (Though some vigilance is still required if we want to keep those windows open.) It does mean that when an idea is introduced into the public sphere, as outrageous as it may seem at the time, unless someone is willing to shut that window hard, it’s on its way to acceptance.

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.

It’s easy to look confident when you know what you’re talking about. (To be clear, you should know what you’re talking about most of the time.) But letting people know that you’re confident enough to admit that you’re at a loss is when you beat the level boss. No one has all the answers, and pretending you do doesn’t make you look confident; it makes you look like a fool.

So, while you should absolutely include the study of data in your approach, recognize that when you get to the point where you’re trying to persuade someone about good work, you need a story. Work like a scientist but present like a snake-charmer.

The best, most effective, way for you to effect change is to stay and fight. Persuade others. Present good solutions, and fight for them.

This shit that’s destroying the world is being made with our labor. They can’t make it without our labor. They need us! That gives us power. We have agency and we are a collective force. We are fucking legion!

When your labor is being used to unethical ends, you must put down your tools. When your labor is being used to spread inequality, you must put down your tools. When your tools are being used to take away people’s humanity, you must put down your tools.

I realize we can’t control every way that people use the tools we build, but that doesn’t make us any less responsible for them.

If designers and other tech workers want to have any chance at fixing the mess we’ve created, we need to reassess who we consider our community. The homeless people whose existence we condemn in our Medium thinkpieces because they dare to exist close to the homes we pay too much rent for? They are our community. It would serve us all well to understand how we are failing them. The multitudes that get harassed and abused online by the very tools we build? They are our community. They deserve our allegiance. The corner bodega that’s barely getting by because all their customers have been evicted? They deserve our business. The school system that’s suffering because teachers can no longer afford to live where they teach? They deserve our tax money.

The people who would sack you in a heartbeat to improve their quarterly earnings report are not your community, and they don’t deserve your allegiance.

One of the reasons humans band together in larger communities is to protect each other from something larger than ourselves. Our power derives from our collective power.

Your human resources department does not work for you. They work for your employer. Their job is to protect them, not you.

We need to care more about the safe-being of the people using what we design than we care about how much profit those things generate. The world needs us in place as gatekeepers.

There’s a reason I wrote these last three chapters in this order. Community breeds standards; standards breed accountability; accountability breeds trust; licensure validates that trust. It’s a journey. It may be a long journey, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking. Do positive things.