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

by Mike Monteiro

“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.”

So, who do designers work for?

doctors take an oath before they begin practicing. This doesn’t ensure they’re all going to behave ethically, but if they’re going to behave badly, they certainly can’t claim ignorance.

Now imagine a doctor runs into a sketchy hospital administrator who’s trying to keep a hospital afloat by telling doctors to order tests patients don’t need, or to prescribe medications from pharmaceutical companies the administrator’s made deals with, or charging people for services they didn’t receive. You get the idea. This isn’t much different than working for a boss who asks you to target poor people with addictive products, or to collect user data you don’t need in case the company might want to sell it later. Except when a doctor is asked to do those things, the oath they took supersedes the signature on their paycheck and they understand that by committing those acts they’re violating their oath. When a designer faces these issues, there’s no oath in place.

More importantly, if a doctor is caught behaving unethically, there’s a fairly good chance they could lose their license. A designer who behaves unethically for a shady boss might get a raise.

We’re no longer pushing pixels around a screen. 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 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 efficien...

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 w...

do out there. That is...

Your job, the glorious job you signed up for when you said you wanted to be a designer, is to support all of these people. To make sure none of these incredible voices get lost. And to f...

as a bug and not the greatest feature...

Society doesn’t serve Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley needs to serve society. We are big. We are multiple. And we are amazingly inefficient. And of course, we don’t all want the same thing, do we? Except that yes, we actually do. We all want to thrive.