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

by Mike Monteiro

society. But if the patient opted to frantically mop as the water gushed over the sink, failing to turn off the faucet or remove the sink’s plug, they were deemed insane and prescribed more time in the psychiatric hospital: they failed to acknowledge and address the root of the problem. Many of you in the tech industry are frantically mopping.

In that time, I’ve been asked to design things that would lie to users, trick subscribers, and hold customers hostage. I didn’t enjoy doing those things, but for a time I did them because I thought that was the job, and it didn’t occur to me that asking myself whether I was doing the right thing was allowable.

People don’t look at our interfaces to appreciate them, they use them to get things done in their lives.

An object that is designed to harm people cannot be said to be well-designed, no matter how aesthetically pleasing it might be, because to design it well is to design it to harm others. Nothing a totalitarian regime designs is well-designed because it has been designed by a totalitarian regime.

What about empathy? Empathy is a pretty word for exclusion. I’ve seen all-male all-white teams taking “empathy workshops” to see how women think. If you want to know how women would use something you’re designing, get a woman on your design team. They’re not extinct. We don’t need to study them. We can hire them!

In 2014, Facebook ran an experiment on over 600,000 human beings using their service. Facebook filled those users’ newsfeed with overwhelmingly negative news to see if it had an effect on those users’ mental health. Facebook ran a human mental health experiment on its own users without their consent. Obviously anyone with mental health issues had no opportunity to opt out. Neither did anyone else. It was designed that way.

Anna Eshoo asked him, “Are you willing to change your business model to protect users’ privacy?” His reply: “Congresswoman, I don’t know what that means.” I believe him. It was designed to work this way.

On November 6, 2016, Donald Trump received 2.9 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The Electoral College—originally designed by elite white men to entice agrarian, slave-owning states to join the union—handed the election to the candidate with fewer votes, who also happened to be a white supremacist. It was designed to work that way. 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.

There are two words every designer needs to feel comfortable saying: “no” and “why.”

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

“You may be hiring us and that may be your name on the check, but we do not work for you. We’re coming in to solve a problem, because we believe it needs to be solved and it’s worth solving. But we work for the people being affected by that problem. Our job is to look out for them because they’re not in the room. And we will under no circumstances design anything that puts those people at risk.”

European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR not only regulates what you can collect, but how soon you need to report a data breach. This applied to any organization with business ties to the EU. That’s pretty much any online service you use and most likely the company that cuts your checks. The cost of non-compliance is some hefty-ass fines of up to 20 million Euros or 4% of your annual global turnover. Whichever is higher.

This is great, but plenty of legal activities are still unethical. For example, it’s not illegal (yet) for Uber to keep tracking you once you get out of their car and go about your business. (As

Why don’t they turn it off worldwide? Great question. In fact, I asked Jack Dorsey that question in person. He said it’s not illegal in the United States. It may not be illegal, but giving a voice to someone who uses it to silence others is indecent, unethical, and cruel.

I’ve interviewed design school graduates who couldn’t write an introductory email, don’t know how to talk about their work, who cried when I gave them feedback, who had too narrow a definition of design (I’ll only do these things!), and who couldn’t name three designers they admired.

They were a bunch of guys. More accurately, they were a bunch of white guys.

This is true of anyone. You will design things that fit within your own experiences.

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.

why teach people to think outside the box when you can hire people outside the box.

Why should you listen to me? You shouldn’t. You should listen to all the women out there telling you their stories of harassment in the workplace. You should listen to all the black people who can’t get inside the door because they’re not a “culture fit.” If you’re lucky enough that this industry was built in your image, realize how lucky you are.

“didn’t hate men,” as a measure of self protection, or say something that in some way excused behavior (it was the times, etc.)

For years, I used to tell this story as a lesson in hustle and confidence. It isn’t. It’s a story about privilege.

Twitter didn’t intend to build the perfect tool for harassment and abuse. Airbnb didn’t intend to build a racist housing market. Facebook didn’t intend to endanger trans people with their Real Names project.

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.

I’ll say it again: I am both racist and sexist, because I’ve benefited from both racism and sexism. If you are reading this and you look like me, you are those things too.

and we still set the world on fire. We don’t get to stand in front of the raging dumpster fire we created and ask for a medal.

Ethics cannot be a side hustle.

So, rather than asking yourself “won’t somebody else make it?” ask yourself “what if me saying no is the inspiration for other people to stand up? What if me saying no is the first step in a movement? What if me saying no is the first step to making things right?”

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. And if that answer is yes, that’s where we need you to fight.

Some of the designs included a mall on the U.S. side of the wall. Many included amenities, as if the reason we believe concentration camps were awful was the lack of gift shops!

There is no way to ethically build a concrete border that separates families.

ETHICS AND PAYING RENT Inevitably, when I bring up the topic of designers working ethically, someone will reply with some flavor of “that’s nice, but I have rent to pay.”

Throughout your career, you’ll find yourself in spots where your only options might be doing a little work for one of the Travis Kalanicks of the world, or starving. By all means, don’t starve! Just be honest with yourself about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and for how long you’re going to do it. Because once you lose sight of that, the justifications start.

severe, I mean babies being born with no arms or legs. Richardson Merrell, despite putting a ton of pressure on her, never got their green light to release thalidomide in the United States, all because Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey did her job. She stood at the gate and said this shall not pass. A job she kept doing for another forty-five years, by the way.

Although she was being paid by the FDA, and being pressured by a gigantic pharmaceutical company, she understood that her ultimate responsibility was to the women and children affected by that garbage drug. She had an ethical responsibility to do her job.

Don’t ask for permission to do your job. You got it when they hired you, although you may have to remind the people who pay you once in a while.

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men, once told the New York Times:1 “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’”

and behold, we’ve found that when you give a population that’s roughly fifty percent female an equal chance, you end up with a roughly fifty percent female staff.

Because we’re trying to design great products. We’ve found that the more diverse points-of-view we let into the design process, the better our work is, the more likely it is to be understood by a broader segment of the population, and the more successful our clients are because of it. We already have one person who thinks like me in the office.

but no amount of empathy or research will ever, ever allow me to design things from a woman’s point-of-view. Just like I will never be able to experience the world from a black person’s point of view.

When you don’t see yourself

reflected in those positions of authority, you begin believing they aren’t accessible to you.

What about merit? Great question, if it weren’t that the merit argument is used in the most ironic way possible. I’d ask why a small percentage of the population (for the sake of argument, let’s use white males as our example) has merited taking such a high percentage of available opportunities? Could it be that they are inherently more qualified than other groups? Of course not. No one would argue that point, lest they be thought a fool. That would be akin to arguing that Jackie Robinson was the first black ballplayer good enough for the major leagues. One could argue that thos...

You can’t level a playing field without bringing in a few bulldozers.

The first question we ask anyone we’re in the process of engaging with at Mule is “why are you making this?” If the answer comes back as any version of “because there’s an opportunity to make money,” we’re out.

That answer is usually what your users’ hold most dear: their private information. I don’t care what it says in your terms of service, that’s some unethical shady shit.

We were finding that early-stage startups (again, I’m generalizing a bit) weren’t interested in doing research. They just wanted the thing in their head made real. They wanted us to execute their vision.

Twitter, a company where designers work and make decisions, was making money from publicly shaming an eighteen-year-old who did a dumb thing. It was doing it because it was designed to work that way.

“No thanks, I don’t want to get smarter.” “I have enough friends and I enjoy being lonely.”

“I enjoy being fat, thanks.” “Yes, I do want to die alone.”