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

by Mike Monteiro

The machine we’ve built is odious. Not only can we not participate in its operation, nor passively participate, it’s now on us to dismantle it. It was built on our watch and it needs to burn on our watch.

Licensing for our profession is coming. This isn’t necessarily a decision we’ll have to make, as much as one which we’ll have to prepare for.

A community can be a group of people with whom we share a spiritual connection, such as in a church, synagogue, mosque, or Run the Jewels show.

While their initial reactions went from from pretending this wasn’t happening to being outraged and wanting to leave the company, within days they’d circled the wagons. Their collective mindset turned to something like “We’ll be fine. We’ll get through this.” They were rallying in support of what they saw as their community, and by the insidious design of that community, they ended up protecting the corporation that designed it.

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.

We need to know that team is making sure that tool isn’t going to have adverse effects on those communities. Will that slow us down? You bet. That’s a feature, not a bug. We’ve seen where moving fast and breaking things has gotten us.

Like Blockbuster Video, who eroded into oblivion because they didn’t anticipate the importance of streaming video, the AIGA dug their own grave of irrelevance by ignoring UX designers that were part of their community.