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August 27 - November 21, 2019
We designed the combustion engine that led to global warming (climate change deniers can just stop reading right now). We designed the guns that kill school children. We designed shitty interfaces to protect our private information. We designed the religions that pitted us against one another. We designed social networks without any way of dealing with abuse or harassment.
I intend to show you that design is a political act. 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.
this book wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t read Design for the Real World as
Once you raise your voice, you will be amazed how loud it is.
Our labor is what makes us special, and what gives us power.
The internet is a harassment and abuse factory in part because designers implemented things they shouldn’t—like Facebook’s ad network that allows advertisers to target by race, and because companies didn’t implement things they should have—like Twitter’s failure to deal with abuse.
The work we do has become astonishingly complex in the last twenty years. I don’t just mean technically complex, that was the easy part. I mean ethically complex. Our field has matured and we need to mature along with it.
A designer is first and foremost a human being.
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.
A designer is responsible for the work they put into the world.
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.
designer values impact over form. We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our ideas.
A designer owes the people who hire them not just their labor, but their counsel.
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
A designer welcomes criticism.
If your work is so fragile that it can’t withstand criticism, it shouldn’t exist.
The role of criticism, when given appropriately, is to evaluate and improve work. Criticism is a gift. It makes good work better. It keeps bad work from seeing the light of day.
designer strives to know their audience. Design is the intentional solution to a problem within a set of constraints. To know whether you are properly solving those problems you need to meet the people who are having them.
A designer does not believe in edge cases.
For years we referred to people who weren’t crucial to our products’ success as “edge cases.” We were marginalizing people. We were making a decision that there were people in the world whose problems weren’t worth solving.
These are the trans people who get caught on the edges of “real names” projects. These are the single moms who get caught on the edges of “both parents must sign” permission slips. These are the elderly immigrants who show up to vote and can’t get ballots in their native tongues.
A designer is part of a professional community.
If you are dishonest with a client or employer, the designer behind you will pay the price. If you work for free, the designer behind you will be expected to do the same.
A designer welcomes a diverse and competitive field.
Not hiring someone because they’re not a good cultural fit is either elitist, racist, or sexist, or all three.
On March 15, 2019 a white supremacist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during evening prayer service. He murdered fifty people. He was wearing a camera and live-streaming his act of terror. The video went viral across multiple platforms, despite a public outcry to take it down. The platforms were doing exactly what they were designed to do: spread, sensationalize, and drive engagement. As teams across the major platforms attempted to eradicate the video from their services they found out how difficult it is to get a system to stop doing what it’s been designed to do.
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“The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.”
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 we do our jobs well, we improve people’s lives. When we don’t, people die.
Travis proceeded to dress down a person attempting to make a living off his service. (The driver was good enough to record it for all of us.1) It’s
It’s very simple: when designing something, imagine that your relationship to that system gets determined after you’ve made it. For example, if you’re designing a system of government that allows slavery, you might end up being enslaved. If you’re designing a ride-sharing service, you might end up as the driver or the rider.
On March 1st, 2017, Jared Spool, who’s been doing yeoman’s work for design for the better part of forty years, tweeted out the following: “Anyone who influences what the design becomes is the designer. This includes developers, PMs, even corporate legal. All are the designers.”
Design is a verb, an act.
Today’s designers need to be systems thinkers, experts in regulation, collaborators, communicators, and fearless. We need to understand our job is to be advocates for the people who aren’t in the room.
To paraphrase Google Sydney’s Tea Uglow, why teach people to think outside the box when you can hire people outside the box.
If you’re lucky enough that this industry was built in your image, realize how lucky you are.
I teach a workshop in presenting work with confidence. In fact, it’s called “Presenting Work with Confidence.” Clever. The unofficial secret name for the workshop is “Teaching Women to Speak Up and Teaching Men to Shut Up.”
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.
If you want to do good work, start doing it at your day job. Start asking questions about what you’re building. Start asking questions about who benefits from what you’re building. Start asking questions about who gets hurt by what you’re building. Take a look at your team. Does it look like the audience you’re trying to reach? Especially if you’re building something in the social sphere, where trust, safety, and understanding the needs of a diverse audience is paramount.
we need you at places like Facebook. But we need you with swords drawn. We need you going there to fight. Facebook is either here for a long time; in which case it needs to be fixed, or it’s falling apart, in which case it needs to be imploded carefully. Facebook data is like plutonium rods. If Facebook falls, it needs to be disposed of carefully and with intent.
By all means, don’t starve! Just be honest with yourself about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and for how long you’re going to do it. Because once you lose sight of that, the justifications start.
Like Dr. Kelsey, you were hired to do a job. You were hired for your judgment. You were hired to look out for the people affected by your work, no matter what pressure you might be getting to do otherwise. You were not hired to do someone’s bidding. You were not hired to be someone else’s hands. You were not hired to green-light someone else’s work without a second thought.
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.
People hire you because you’re an expert at what you do and your expertise is obviously needed or they wouldn’t have hired a designer. Once you’re through the door, you spend a lot of time asking the people who hired you how you should do your job. They told you they didn’t know how to do your job when they hired you to do it!
Almost every designer goes up there and says their goal is to “get approval” for their work, as if they’re being graded. As if they’re presenting their work to their parents with the hope they’ll stick the work on the company fridge.
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.)
You work the case. You do the research. You talk to the people you work for. You ask questions. You work the use cases. That’s the job. That’s the job you signed up for. Don’t ask for permission to do your job.
The first step of setting up for success is including as many different points of view in the room from as many different cultures as possible with as many experiences as possible. The fact that Chuck went to Berkeley while Todd and Stew went to Stanford is not diversity.
“Follow the money.” Always know where the money is coming from, how the money gets made, and where the money is going.
Easy peasy.
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. (For more on research, check out Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research. She explains it better than I do.)
