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

by Mike Monteiro

The goal of this book is to help you do the right thing in environments designed to make it easier to do the wrong thing. (If you work at Uber or Twitter, just quit. We’ll also be talking about when to walk away later in this book.)

Summed up

More importantly, they cannot design the things they imagine without regular people like us. Our labor is what makes us special, and what gives us power.

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.

Teaching a designer to be creative without teaching them ethics is akin to a medical school teaching a surgeon how to open up a torso without teaching them how internal organs work.

Design is not about expressing yourself. Design is not about following your dream. Design is not about becoming a creative. Design is about keeping people from doing terrible things to other people.

The age of creatives is over. It led us to a garbage fire. The age of gatekeepers is at hand.

Let’s say your kitchen sink explodes. Most of us, me included, have no idea how to fix a busted sink. I know how to cut the water off, that’s about it. So, after cutting the water off, I’m gonna call a plumber. I’m going to explain the situation, and they’re gonna give me a quote. I’ll tell them the quote is fine and then go watch TV while they fix the sink. If I’m lucky, I don’t see the plumber again until the job is done. If I’m unlucky, they’re in the living room every five minutes asking how I want something done, asking which tool they should use, asking if I mind they turn the water back on. Now, I get this isn’t a perfect analogy, because good design is collaborative in nature, whereas fixing a sink feels like a solo job. But the point is that I’ve hired an expert and I expect they’ll know how to do the job. I also expect that if they’re trying to do the job while I’m hovering around them, they’ll politely, but directly, tell me to back off and let them work.

Mule is a research-based design shop. We’re firm believers that solving a problem can’t happen until you understand the problem. That generally means talking to the people who are having the problem. Once we understand it, we’ll come up with a few solutions, then evaluate them based on whether the people having the problem can use the thing we made to make the problem go away.

Ten years ago, before the iPad and iPhone were mainstream, the average person had an attention span of about twelve seconds. Now research suggests that there’s been a drop from twelve to eight seconds... shorter than the attention of the average goldfish, which is nine seconds.

There’s one design test I give interviewees at Mule. (I stole it from legendary designer Kim Goodwin, who’s smarter than I am. By the way, I never told her I stole her design test. She’ll only ever find out if she reads this book. Ethics!) 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. I won’t hire a designer who doesn’t ask why, and I won’t hire a designer whose desire to arrange boxes is more important than their desire to protect users’ data.

Meanwhile, Twitter, who, as we’ve previously discussed has to eliminate all traces of white supremacy, hate speech, and Nazi paraphernalia in order to operate in Germany, makes their users report the same violations by hand in the US.

“Do you ever miss designing?” Do I ever miss designing? Quite honestly, I didn’t think I’d ever stopped designing. Here I was giving a talk about design ethics. I’m writing about design all the time. I do workshops with designers. I help clients solve problems all the time. All of this is design to me. In my own mind, I was evolving as a designer. (Or maybe that was just the story I was telling myself.) So when he asked me if I missed designing, I was taken aback and replied “What do you mean? I’m designing all the time!”