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

by Mike Monteiro

Be upfront about what things do and what effects they’ll have. “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.

I write a bunch of form labels on the whiteboard, in a nonsensical order, along with a bunch of randomly sized input boxes. I include first name, last name, address, gender, city, state, email address, etc. Then I tell the interviewee that we’re designing a form to sign up for an email newsletter and to arrange them in the right order. Only people who ask me why I need the users’ gender, or physical address, or really, anything but their email address get a second interview.

The data we collect from users should be the absolute bare minimum in order to do the thing we are telling them is happening.

If you honestly have a real reason that you need to know someone’s gender, just leave it an open field. People are gloriously complex.

Their reasoning for this is there are places and cultures where people have much longer names than in the US, where Twitter was born. (Of course it took them over ten years to realize this.) If you’re designing for a global audience, you need to design not for, but with, that global audience.

If you go to the gym, it’ll tell you which of the other people there might be potential matches for you. Coffeehouse two doors down? Same thing. Wanna follow a potential hook-up to the grocery store? Places makes it easy to follow someone along a daily path. The other word for this is stalking.

Uber announced that it would be tracking its riders for a full five minutes after they got out of vehicles, regardless of whether you were still using the app or not. According to them, they were tracking how many of their riders had to cross the street after a drop-off. The tracking was for safety reasons. Perhaps that was the intent.

Because of this amendment, all our national parks have sad little areas by the entrance with a little brown metal sign that says “Free Speech Area.” That means that any US citizen, myself included, can go stand in front of that sign and start ranting and raving about how the animals are naked and the trees are too tall and the gift shops never have keychains with your name on them, as long as what we’re raving about doesn’t break some other law, like screaming about how you’re going to kill the president. There are limits. We get to do that because the national parks are run by the government and according to the first amendment, the government cannot restrict our speech.

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.

They could easily make the elimination of private gun sales automated and effective. If they wanted to. When someone asks you to take on a chore they could more easily do themselves, it’s generally because they don’t really want to do it.

That’s when I understood. A lot of designers equate designing with the pushing of pixels. (So do the people who hire us.) We equate our power with the ability to move this tiniest of units into proper and pleasing placements.

Like many designers, I spent the beginning of my career using the humble approach, hoping that at some point someone would notice that I was good at what I did; hoping the work would get noticed, hoping that I’d made the work so obviously clear that I wouldn’t have to advocate for it. It never happened. Finally, my frustration at seeing good work thrown in the garbage can overcame my fear of speaking up. Because that’s what it was, fear. Humility is just lipstick on a pig called fear.

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. Strong caveat: confidence is not the same as cockiness. Confidence is about the work. It means I’ve done the math, crossed my t’s, dotted my i’s, and listened to feedback. Cockiness is about ego. It means I don’t think I have to do any of those things. Cockiness got us to the garbage fire we find ourselves in today.

“I’m a designer. Please allow me to do the job I was hired to do. You’re going to be making decisions in this meeting which impact design and I need to be there. Finding out about this stuff afterward is going to cost us all time and money and possibly take us down some bad paths. I can help by being in the room.”

“If we launch an ad tool that lets you target users by race, we’re going to get someone killed,” is gonna get your bosses’ attention better than, “I have some concerns about our new ad tool.”

Yes, this is all design. The person who convinces the boss that you need more time for research has done more to influence the design of the product than the person placing the pixels by a long shot.

Also, you need to follow that up with something like, “I’m excited to find out,” or, “Give me until the end of the day/week to look into it,” and make sure you do.

It’s a little crazy-making, but it’s also understandable. I told you people don’t make decisions based on data; they make them based on feelings.

Get really good at persuading people, because the alternatives aren’t easy.

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.

We must be free to do our jobs, and to do them as they need to be done without our family’s healthcare hanging over our heads. To understand the reasons why people who might want to do the right thing don’t always choose to do it, we need to understand the entire system in which they work. Health care is a huge part of it. Education is another.

Heather Champ, who did community management at Flickr for years—and was damn good at it! She had this to say: “Let’s say Facebook is bringing you over and you’re on some sort of visa. If you lose your job, you immediately have to leave the country and that’s going to have a big impact on how much you’re going to push back on something. You know, I initially started working in the US on a NAFTA visa and if I lost my job, I had two weeks to leave the country. That’s going to have a big impact on whether or not I’m going to push back.”

I do, however, empathize with those situations, and my advice would be that if you’re encumbered by a need to pay off student loans or to care for health needs of family members, to avoid working at places where you’ll have to fight too much.

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

If your reply is that we didn’t design and build these things to be used this way, then all I can say is that you’ve done a shit job of designing them, because that is what they’re being used for.

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

(Not to mention that this cripples the community’s genetic pool.) We circle the wagons.

Facebook employees saw a story about their community being attacked and protecting itself. They circled the wagons.

Many of them don’t view the city as their community. That’s the problem. The tech bubble, which eviscerated the rental market and led to thousands of evictions within the city, didn’t just destroy multiple communities. It replaced them with non-communities. San Francisco, once a vibrant imperfect city with a million weird and wonderful communities, has become a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.

The multitudes that get harassed and abused online by the very tools we build? They are our community. They deserve our allegiance. The corner bodega that’s barely getting by because all their customers have been evicted? They deserve our business. The school system that’s suffering because teachers can no longer afford to live where they teach? They deserve our tax money.

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.

Our power derives from our collective power.

If you walk out of your job in protest, you have a problem. If you can talk your entire department into walking out with you, then your company has a problem.

site Metafilter, if it was too late to start a design community. Here’s his reply: “No, I don’t think it’s ever too late to start anything. I mean, the world’s not done being formed in any aspect. So I can think of anything as the most established subject matter in the world and still think someone new can come along and just do it anytime they like, and do a better job of it and offer someone a different way. It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s possible.”

the AIGA dug their own grave of irrelevance by ignoring UX designers that were part of their community.

Collectively, we are amazing. Collectively, every weakness one of us has is another’s strength.

Some, sure. Anytime you get people together, the possibility they’ll behave badly is on the table. That goes for unions, governments, corporations, and PTAs. Corruption certainly isn’t exclusive to unions.

Professionals do not hand you gifts. They are hired to solve a problem they are experts in solving. They solve it, and they hand you an invoice.

DISPUTES A few months ago, a very good friend of mine found out the recruiter who’d

hired her into a company had lied about her pay scale. She’d been told she was coming in at the highest pay scale possible for her position. Instead, she’d come in at the lowest.

The recruiter was giving different information to male and female recruits. She took this information to her manager. Things got weird. Performance reviews, which had been stellar to that point, started going badly and getting strangely personal.

Your human resources department does not work for you. They work for your employer. Their job is to protect them, not you. They’re the department of Judas.

Tech companies do this for a simple reason—benefits are expensive; they want to maximize profits; and they’re cheap. Gig workers have two main options: go without insurance or buy their own.

Writer John Steinbeck once noted that American workers tend to see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Do I care if you have a license when you’re designing data collection for two billion people? Yes, I do. Actually, it’s not even the license that I care about. I care that you know what you’re doing. I care that you understand the job and the ethics behind the job.

We may think and do our work in creative ways, but we’re not special in that regard. Everyone else in the office who’s worth their salt works in creative ways. Make them call you by your name. That name is designer.