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

by Mike Monteiro

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...