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

by Mike Monteiro

You’ve said things, done things at your company that crushed your soul but paid your bills.

You don’t understand why or how design is political nor do you care to engage that conversation.

“Well, I know that Project WTF is unethical and problematic… but that’s not my team.”

We are so fucked. In fact, we are so fucked, it may already be too late for this book.

Silicon Valley may be lobbying Congress to just make women illegal.

We designed the combustion engine that led to global warming (climate change deniers can just stop reading right now). We designed the guns that kill school children. We designed shitty interfaces to protect our private information. We designed the religions that pitted us against one another. We designed social networks without any way of dealing with abuse or harassment. We designed a financial incentives system that would lead Mark Zuckerberg to assert what’s good for the world isn’t necessarily good for Facebook; and lead Jack Dorsey to believe engagement was a more important metric than safety.

Let’s get some stuff out of the way. The goal of this book isn’t to convince you to quit your corporate job and take a gig at a nonprofit. If you work at a nonprofit, great. I love you. Stay there. Help everyone get clean water and free goats. Those things are important, and this book will still be helpful to you.

The goal of this book is to help you do the right thing in environments designed to make it easier to do the wrong thing.

“You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effects those things have upon the world.”

There’s a reason everybody hates moral philosophy professors: they write incredibly boring books!

Let me explain. Because I love you, I need to tell you something: you’re not special. You have no unique properties. There is absolutely nothing about you that makes you different than anyone else. Even if you are the most creative person you know, I guarantee there are ten million other people. Just. Like. You.

We’re not special. We’re ordinary and we live by the same social contract.

The world isn’t usually changed by special people.

For years, the libertarian con artists of Silicon Valley have been telling us they want to change the world. But when the people at the top tell you they want to change the world, it’s generally because they’ve figured out how to profit even more from those below them. (To be fair, not even in my wildest dreams did I think even those dirtbags would be okay normalizing fascism to make that happen. Yet here we are.)

Our labor is what makes us special, and what gives us power. When we turn that labor into a force for making the world better for the largest number of people possible instead of using it to make a few people even richer than they already are? Then, and only then, we may be actually able to change the world. Then we get to go home and live ordinary lives. I am looking forward to it.

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

Before you are a designer, you are a human being. Like every other human being on the planet, you are part of the social contract.

We cannot be surprised when a gun we designed kills someone. We cannot be surprised when a database we designed to catalog immigrants gets those immigrants deported. 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.

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

Design does not exist in a vacuum. Society is the biggest system we can impact and everything you do, good and bad, is a part of that system.

Nothing a totalitarian regime designs is well-designed because it has been designed by a totalitarian regime.

We were making a decision that there were people in the world whose problems weren’t worth solving.

The world isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to work. And we’re the ones who designed it. Which means we fucked up.

The worst of what we create will outlive us.

The current generation of designers have spent their careers learning how to work faster and faster and faster. While there’s certainly something to be said for speed, excessive speed tends to blur one’s purpose.

Everything needs to be faster and also bigger. It’s no longer good enough to be the best in your category. You need to destroy all your competition, burn the sky, and view your competitor as an enemy.

We don’t build businesses for the long haul anymore, at least not the venture-backed ones. Those only need to last long enough to make it to their liquidity event so the investors can get their payday.

Silicon Valley has exhibited total comfort with destroying the social fabric of humanity to make a profit.

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.

When we find ourselves working in a system that favors one side of the equation over others, it’s our job to correct the system. You want a design problem? There it is. The biggest design problem of our time.

Let’s not get regulations and ethics confused. Trafficking in private user data was as unethical before the GDPR as it is after. It’s also now illegal.

Try this: go to your Twitter content settings and change the country to Germany. The Nazis go away! It’s the software equivalent of D-Day. Nazis gone. The next time Twitter tells you they don’t know how to find the Nazi stuff, be assured they’re lying. They’ve already had to tag it.

DESIGN EDUCATION STINKS

we need to stop convincing students they’re special unicorns immune to consequence.

Working ethically is a skill, and it’s a skill that needs to be taught and then developed. It’s not easy to tell the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that the product they just asked you to design is harmful. It takes more than guts. It takes knowing what questions to ask. It takes knowing how to test the effects of the product. It takes knowing how to build a good argument. And it takes seeing yourself as an equal stakeholder in the product. It takes seeing yourself as a gatekeeper. And frankly, it takes some designers who’ve come from backgrounds and experiences that were harmed by the products of Fortune 500 companies.

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

There was a time when teaching design within art schools might’ve made sense. It usually meant graphic design, which is great, and maybe graphic design should remain in art school. I love graphic design! I still buy vinyl records because I love the covers. But when we’re talking about interactive design, or UX design, or design thinking, or any other bullshit terms we’ll make up in the next six months, we need to expand our curriculum by a wide margin.

The problem with UX design as a field is that it’s so relatively new that we’re not sure how to teach it, but the consequences of getting it wrong are so massive. Training tomorrow’s designers is a complex job, and we can’t do it with yesterday’s tools, in yesterday’s schools.

Oh, this is probably the point at which the white boy libertarians are screaming that I’m not backing up my assertions that diversity helps us build better products with any data. “Show me the data!” they like to scream. Okay, here it is: you jackasses have been running the world for millennia and it’s a garbage fire. You’ve been running Silicon Valley for decades, and it’s a Nazi-filled viper’s nest. There’s your data. You fucked it up.

Nothing you make is ever truly done. In fact, the story of your work starts when it passes from your hands and into the world. Because all the good work that you did to ensure the work is good, and that its impact is beneficial, can only truly be evaluated when it’s finally out in the world.

To be quite honest, we’re using young people—who have never known a life without these platforms—as lab rats in our unethical experiments.

We might have better luck teaching psychologists how to design for the web instead of teaching UX designers how to learn the psychological tools we need for this new landscape.

You cannot take someone’s intent away. There are no ethical reasons to design dark patterns, no matter what Brad from Marketing tells you. Brad is a liar.

“We’re sorry to see you go” is fine, “if you leave, we’re going to be totally depressed and it’ll be your fault” is not.

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.

The problem here isn’t someone making an unethical decision, although they are. The problem is the system which puts a worker in that position.