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

by Mike Monteiro

I intend to show you that 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.

For the sake of putting it to bed, I’ll offer this explanation: Someone who won’t bake a wedding cake for a gay couple is making a moral decision. (They’re also an asshole, which is a great example of me making a moral judgment.) Someone who’d take the order—and put poison in the cake—is making an unethical decision.

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

Saying no is a design skill. Asking why is a design skill.

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

Not hiring someone because they’re not a good cultural fit is either elitist, racist, or sexist, or all three.

I may practice my craft at your service, but you haven’t earned the right to shape how I practice that craft.

Any system eventually bends to the ethics of those designing it, but also to those investing in it, because they have as much of a hand in designing a product as anyone, sometimes more.

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.

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.

Every time there’s a high profile attack, one of those CEOs comes out and does a dog and pony show about how Twitter will now finally—no really this time for real—actually look into cutting down abuse and then three weeks later, they roll out rounded corners for tweets instead. (I guess the tweets won’t hurt as much now that the corners aren’t so sharp?)

We get the job applicants we deserve.

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

I’ll say it again: I am both racist and sexist, because I’ve benefited from both racism and sexism.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the point of life is to earn the death that comes at the end.

When it comes to applications and services that track our whereabouts, we need to design with assholes in mind. Sometimes they’re the biggest market.

The first amendment was put in place to ensure that the government didn’t start forcing the majority’s views on us, and also to ensure that the press could tell us what the government was doing! It was not put in place to ensure that WhitePowerBob5000 could spew his racist bile to 50,000 people. We don’t owe WhitePowerBob5000 jack shit. We don’t owe him a platform. We don’t owe him our time, and we don’t owe him our protection.

Our question is whether it’s ethical, and the law often drags far behind what’s ethical.

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.

None of this can happen if we’re being humble. Humility is a trait we simply don’t have the luxury of entertaining. Too many people are counting on us.

(Designers like chairs almost as much as they like glasses.)

People make decisions based on feelings and emotion more than they make decisions based on data.

Don’t confuse an inconvenience with a constraint.