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

by Mike Monteiro

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.

Because I love you, I need to tell you something: you’re not special. You have no unique properties. There is absolutely nothing about you that makes you different than anyone else. Even if you are the most creative person you know, I guarantee there are ten million other people. Just. Like. You. This is good news. We’re no different than anyone else. We’re not special. We’re ordinary and we live by the same social contract. Yes, designers can change the world—but it’s because we have the same responsibility as every other ordinary person on this planet. And just like everybody else, you need to opt in. We can’t afford you not trying.

I’ve had similar conversations where I’ve tried to tell people they’re not special, and that’s a good thing! But it never goes over well...

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

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.

A broken gun is better designed than a working gun. There is no ethical way to design a wall that keeps refugees from safety. A database that keeps tracks of immigrants for the sake of deportation will always be broken.

The more a team includes the audience it is problem-solving for, the more thoroughly it can solve those problems. That team can come at a problem from different points-of-view, from different backgrounds, from different sets of needs and experiences. 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.

Empathy is a pretty word for exclusion.

🤯

when your edge case contains twenty million people, you need to be careful about what you’re breaking. The cavalier attitude of “moving fast and breaking things” is deadly at that scale.

People don’t see the things they’re rewarded for as problems to fix.

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

We’re building complex systems that touch people’s lives, destroy their personal relationships, broadcast words of both support and hate, and undeniably mess with their mental health. When we do our jobs well, we improve people’s lives. When we don’t, people die.

Society runs more efficiently when all the metro stops are the same, and all the streets are a certain width. And everyone just agrees to behave the same way, follow the same rules, and eat the same thing. (Soylent is very efficient.) We could all wear the same shoes. (Allbirds are very comfortable.) What if we all voted the same? And spoke the same language? When I was a little baby designer, I was taught that good design meant simplifying. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. Make the system efficient, with as few variations as possible. I’m sure the same goes for setting up style sheets, servers, and all that other shit we do. My city would run more efficiently if we simplified everything. But I wouldn’t want to live there. My city is a fucking mess. My country is a fucking mess. The internet is a fucking mess. But in none of those cases is the whole answer to look for efficiencies. We need to celebrate the differences. Celebrate the reasons the metro stops aren’t all the same. Celebrate the crooked streets. Celebrate the different voices. Celebrate the different food smells. Understand that other people like things you don’t, and you might like things they don’t. And it’s all cool! That’s what makes this city, and all cities, a blast. When all these amazing people, some of whom we don’t understand at all, go online, they are going to behave as inefficiently in there as they do out there. That is awesome. Your job, the glorious job you signed up for when you said you wanted t...

For years, the startups of Silicon Valley have screamed disruption while the libertarian boy-kings at the helms shoveled maggot-infested, rancid, addictive software at us. They still scream about disruption as they beg cities for tax breaks. They scream about the evils of regulation as they continue to exclude already marginalized people from their ranks. They babble on about freedom of speech while they protect the rights of bullies to silence the vulnerable. They deny their workers benefits and personal lives. They make their quarterly profits by accepting payments in rubles to insert fake foul news into the same timeline as your children’s photos.

Because no matter how good a designer’s work is, at some point they’re going to have to have to stand in front of someone who can fire them and keep them from doing something stupid. That’s the day you actually become a designer.

And my personal favorite: Ability to self-manage workload between multiple stakeholders. That, dear reader, is how you describe a toilet.

Engineers’ definition of design — the people in the bunny hats who make the colors — is still widely accepted by a large majority of designers working in the field today. Unfortunately, it’s a definition that’s been accepted by designers as well. And perpetuated by anyone who claims the mantle of “creative,” which is a self-loathing term that needs to be killed with fire. The truth is that design, when it comes to digital products, is a team sport. Designing a complex tool well takes people from a lot of different fields. Be they engineers, strategists, developers, or yes, designers.

The age of creatives is over. It led us to a garbage fire. The age of gatekeepers is at hand. Yesterday’s solitary geniuses need to make way for collaborators. We fought for a seat at the table, and now that we have it, we should talk to the other people seated there! It’s time to take off the expensive headphones, move to the desk in the center of the room, and start taking the lead on how things in our organizations are designed. Today’s designer needs to encourage collaboration between people with different skill sets and experiences. She includes the people who need to be included in the design process, especially the ones who’ve been excluded in the past. She does this with authority. With agency. With good communication. And with conviction.

You will design things that fit within your own experiences. Even those that attempt to look outside their own experiences will only ever know what questions to ask based on that experience. Even those doing good research can only ask questions they think to ask. In short, even the most well-meaning white boys don’t know what they don’t know.

when your team all have roughly the same experiences, and you end up building the tool that works for that team, you’ve marginalized everyone else.

There’s no quicker way to destroy someone’s confidence than teaching them that what they’re saying isn’t as important as what you’re saying.

We get the job applicants we deserve. Today’s design isn’t done by rock stars. It isn’t done by ninjas, and it isn’t done by solo supermen. It’s done by teams who know how to work together, to look at a problem from multiple points of view and a diverse set of experiences. So, let’s stop writing job descriptions to appeal to solitary boy geniuses with hero’s journey damage—and start hiring grownups.

Was I consciously attempting to leave people of color out of the project? Of course not, but the effect is the same, and that’s the thing to focus on. We could argue about my intent, but that makes it about me. Whether by action or inaction, whether by malice or blind spot, there were no black people in the project. They’d been marginalized once again.

When I look out over the horizon at everything white boys have built while they were in charge, I don’t see good things. I see harassment and abuse. I see the re-emergence of Nazis. (You idiots let Nazis come back! Killing Nazis was one of the few things you used to be able to point to with pride!) I see racism going mainstream.

Your desire to change things from the inside is only possible when a company is open to being changed. Very few companies want to change. Especially if what they’re doing is working out financially, if not socially. Change is hard. You’re going to have to fight people who are benefitting from the way things are being run.

Even though someone may have hired you for your technical expertise, as is usually the case, the minute they hired a designer, they got the technical expertise and the ethical framework that goes with it. They cannot be separated. You do not need anyone’s explicit permission to do your job the right way.

Too often, designers present their work as if the goal is to get someone to like it, as if our job is to make someone happy. (Ask yourself how many times you’ve ended a presentation with “Do you like it?”) That’s not the job. You were hired to solve problems. Your work should be evaluated on how well it solves those problems (without creating new ones.)

We love our brooding solitary boy heroes. All of Silicon Valley is a revenge fantasy about getting picked last at dodgeball.

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. (It’s enough). We want to create an environment with as many different experiences, viewpoints, and ways of looking at the world and solving problems as possible.

With a little bit of research, empathy, and acting I may be able to almost-kinda-sorta see things from the point of view of a guy who likes cars, golf, and nachos; 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.

The second question we ask all of our clients after “why are you making this?” is “how does this make money?” Turns out that helping them answer that question is an important design problem as well. If you don’t have a clear answer from the get go, you’ll eventually find yourself in a dilemma

Twitter has purposefully, knowingly used anxiety and fear to build a business. Sadly, they’re not alone. We’re at the edge of the map. We’re in “here there be dragons” territory.

You cannot take someone’s intent away. There are no ethical reasons to design dark patterns, no matter what Brad from Marketing tells you. Brad is a liar.

On the one hand, manipulative language is messed up. On the other hand, I’m glad there’s an internet job my mom is qualified for.

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.

you cannot put the onus of enforcing policies on your users. It’s one thing to flag things that fall through the cracks. Things always fall through the cracks. When your entire system for enforcing violation relies on users policing themselves, you’re not doing your job responsibly.

To design is to influence. 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. To design is to influence people. To design is to build new connections in people’s minds. To design is to build relationships where there previously weren’t any.

The first design decision on your project was made when a budget was allocated. Sadly, a lot of design decisions get made in places that haven’t granted you access—yet. We need to change that. It’s time to move beyond pixel into argument. If we truly want to influence what our labor is being used for, we need to start pushing people into proper and pleasing placements.

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.

If you want to have a say in what’s being designed you need to be in the room where design decisions are being made. By design decisions, I mean things like metrics, strategy, outcomes, definitions, timelines, and resources. All of those things will influence what is being designed a million times more than where pixels ultimately get placed.

Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done. Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

From the CIA’s “The Simple Sabotage Field Manual”

We pointed out that all these things were odious, but we were told that they were making money, so chill out. Then we became sick at heart.

How it’s going

Imagine what a different world we’d be living in today if Twitter employees had reacted to hatred, abuse, and harassment on their platform by demanding change, and putting down their tools until they were heard. That world was within our reach. If Twitter employees had the courage to walk out, the world would be a different place today.

We don’t get to make fun of poor people buying lottery tickets or poor people voting against their self-interests when we’ve traded all our hard-won worker’s rights for stock options, a campus masseuse, and swordfish at the company cafeteria on Fridays.

You cannot get upset or surprised when you’ve been working unethically and someone decides to slap a governor on you. We had an opportunity to work ungoverned, and we failed.

Every industry starts out wild and then matures. The dangerous ones get regulated for society’s safety. We need to care more about the safe-being of the people using what we design than we care about how much profit those things generate.

to say that designers shouldn’t get political isn’t just naive, it’s revisionist. We were being political when we built those tools. Whether we did it on purpose or through ignorance is irrelevant. We did it. Anyone out there telling you designers need to stop getting political is a fool.

By political, I’m talking about caring who our work is affecting. I’m talking about caring about who it’s helping and who it’s hurting. I’m talking about who’s making design decisions, and who’s being left out of them. I’m talking about increasing our definition of design beyond aesthetics and into ramifications. I’m talking about what we’re willing to support and what we’re willing to lay the tools down for. I’m talking about taking care of people.

Yes, design is political. Because design is labor, and your labor is political. Where you choose to expend your labor is a political act. Who you choose to expend it for is a political act. Who we omit from those solutions is a political act. Finally, how we choose to leverage our collective power is the biggest political act we can take. If we choose to work collectively, we have a ton of power. If we continue to behave like servants, we’re not just letting ourselves down, we’re letting down everyone whose lives we swore to improve.

But mostly, mostly, mostly, thanks to Gritty. When the world was at its darkest, you descended into our lives like a magical agent of chaos riding a wrecking ball of joy. You’re the hero we needed.

LOL