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

by Mike Monteiro

By choosing to be a designer you are choosing to impact the people who come in contact with your work, you can either help or hurt them with your actions.

People don’t look at our interfaces to appreciate them, they use them to get things done in their lives. The things we make have consequences. You are responsible for what you put into the world.

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.

Your job is not just to produce that work but to evaluate the impact of that work.

A designer uses their expertise in the service of others without being a servant. Saying no is a design skill. Asking why is a design skill. Rolling your eyes and staying quiet is not. Asking ourselves why we are making something is an infinitely better question than asking ourselves whether we can make it.

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

A team with a single point of view will never understand the constraints they need to design for as well as a team with multiple points of view.

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

No one wakes up one day designing to throw their ethics out the window. It happens slowly, one slippery slope at a time. It’s a series of small decisions that might even seem fine at the time, and before you know it you’re designing a filtering UI for the Walmart online gun shop.

We are not hired hands, we are not pixelpushers, we are not order-takers. We are gatekeepers.