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

by Mike Monteiro

Either by action or inaction, through fault or ignorance, we have designed the world to behave exactly as it’s behaving right now.

design is a political act. What we choose to design and more importantly, what we choose not to design, and even more importantly, who we exclude from the design process—these are all political acts. Knowing this and ignoring it is also a political act, albeit a cowardly one.

Understanding the power in our labor and how we choose to use it defines the type of people we are. As the great Victor Papanek once said, “You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effects those things have upon the world.”

Never do work you’re ashamed of putting your name on.

morals and ethics. Understanding the difference between the two is like understanding the difference between a font and a typeface. It’s interesting to know, but it’s not gonna help you set good type.

if you mention ethical codes to designers they lose their shit.

It should freak you out that gangsters can agree on a code of behavior but designers can’t. Crime is more organized than design.

When we knowingly produce work that is intended to harm, we are abdicating our responsibility. When we ignorantly produce work that harms others because we didn’t consider the full ramifications of that work, we are doubly guilty.

A designer uses their expertise in the service of others without being a servant. Saying no is a design skill. Asking why is a design skill. Rolling your eyes and staying quiet is not. Asking ourselves why we are making something is an infinitely better question than asking ourselves whether we can make it.

If your work is so fragile that it can’t withstand criticism, it shouldn’t exist.

labor without counsel is not design. We have a skill-set that people need in order to get things made, and that skill-set includes an inquiring mind and a strong spine. We need to be more than a pair of hands. And we certainly can’t become the hands of unethical men.

As Victor said, “The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.”

Twitter’s profitable quarter came at the expense of democracy, decency, and the safety of the world.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

if a doctor is caught behaving unethically, there’s a fairly good chance they could lose their license. A designer who behaves unethically for a shady boss might get a raise. Your shady boss now knows they have someone they can rely on for shady work.

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.

The real question isn’t how you’re going to pay your rent or mortgage while working ethically, the real question is why you’d be willing to work unethically in the first place.

Willingness is not power. Powerless people don't have willing choices on many issues that impact their survival.

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.”

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.

What all of these people had in common was a well-rounded curiosity, the good sense to know when something wasn’t working, and good social skills. Not only could they design well, they could write, think analytically; and they were curious about every job in the shop. If a job in the shop needed to be done, they’d volunteer to do it, even if (or maybe especially if) it meant having to learn a new skill.

Creativity can’t be the cornerstone of a design foundation anymore. We need to teach students the responsibilities of their craft, and it needs to be done at the foundational level. We need to value the consequences of our actions more than the cleverness of our ideas.

Working ethically is a skill, and it’s a skill that needs to be taught and then developed.

Design schools aren’t training their students how to have those conversations. Designers aren’t going to win these conversation while they see themselves as special creative unicorns.

The biggest problem, by far, is they confuse solving design problems with personal expression.

Teaching a designer to be creative without teaching them ethics is akin to a medical school teaching a surgeon how to open up a torso without teaching them how internal organs work.

Anyone who wants a career as a designer is going to need to speak about someone’s business and organizational goals. They’re going to have to learn how to analyze data, and how to measure effectiveness. They’re going to have to learn how to build and extend brands and to do goal-driven work. Most of all, they need to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their own work. Not only for the company, but more importantly for society at large.

Design is not about expressing yourself. Design is not about following your dream. Design is not about becoming a creative. Design is about keeping people ...

ask yourself whether you’d want someone who took a one week intensive class in “Bones! How do they even work?” resetting the arm you broke snowboarding.

Having a successful design career has little to do with how creative you are.

no matter how good a designer’s work is, at some point they’re going to have to have to stand in front of someone who can fire them and keep them from doing something stupid. That’s the day you actually become a designer.

Getting fired is stressful, granted. The trick to not being stressed out about getting fired is to expect it every day. Work toward it. 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.

Ability to self-manage workload between multiple stakeholders. That, dear reader, is how you describe a toilet.

The history of UX design is, until very very very recently, the history of design as defined by other fields.

Engineers’ definition of design — the people in the bunny hats who make the colors — is still widely accepted by a large majority of designers working in the field today. Unfortunately, it’s a definition that’s been accepted by designers as well.

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.

What a professional designer brings to the act is intention. But in order to do that, the designer needs to behave intentionally. Designers are dead. Long live design.

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. We need to understand we have a greater responsibility to society than to the people who sign the checks. The age of creatives is over. It led us to a garbage fire. The age of gatekeepers is at hand.

It’s time to take off the expensive headphones, move to the desk in the center of the room, and start taking the lead on how things in our organizations are designed. Today’s designer needs to encourage collaboration between people with different skill sets and experiences.

She does this with authority. With agency. With good communication. And with conviction.

Twitter never built in a way to deal with harassment because none of the people designing it had ever been harassed, so it didn’t come up. Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with threats because none of the people designing it had ever gotten a death threat. It didn’t come up. Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with stalking because no one on the team had ever been stalked. It didn’t come up. That’s not to say those things don’t happen to white boys. They do, but very rarely.

We are white men building tools for white men.

Twitter is too hard to fix. Twitter was broken from conception. Twitter’s original sin occurred the day that four white boys sat around a room and designed the seed of what the platform would be.

Non-authoritarian societies are not made up of laws as much as they’re made up of an agreement to follow those laws. While laws are delivered to us in a top-down fashion, the agreement to follow those laws is upheld from the bottom-up. A code of ethics will not magically transform us into people who behave decently. Its imposition, coming from the top, will have no transformative power. Only an agreement to follow it, made at the rank and file level, can change how we work.

If you want to do good work, start doing it at your day job. Start asking questions about what you’re building. Start asking questions about who benefits from what you’re building. Start asking questions about who gets hurt by what you’re building.

We’ve got the people with the least amount of experience, sometimes fresh out of school, making decisions at the largest platforms in the world. Services that affect billions of people. Services that need to understand the effects of their decisions on multitudes of communities. Services where we share our most intimate thoughts and our most private information. Meanwhile, the workers with the most experience in dealing with this stuff are burning out and going off to do work at nonprofits and NGOs.

at this particular moment in time, we need our best people where the biggest problems live.

So if you want to do work with social impact, and I honestly cannot believe I’m saying this, but it’s absolutely true—we need you at places like Facebook. But we need you with swords drawn. We need you going there to fight.

You can change a company that’s afraid of change. You can change a company that finds change uncomfortable. You cannot change a company that doesn’t want to change, especially when leadership doesn’t want to change.

There’s no ethical way to design a gun because to design it well is to design it to kill better. We cannot do that.