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

by Mike Monteiro

The people doing the work have a tremendous amount of power in these situations. That’s you! Are there repercussions? Absolutely. You might lose your job, and in America, that’s likely to mean your health insurance as well. (That’s by design.)

A designer’s job is always to look out for society’s best interest. Sadly, at this particular moment in time, Silicon Valley’s goals run counter to that. This is why we need to stay and fight. We have people counting on us. We have more power than we think. Trust me on that.

The tech industry is at the exact same place now as the meat packing industry was when The Jungle came out. 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.

The GDPR isn’t an outlier. It’s the first big step toward a more government-regulated internet. And we don’t get to complain about it because we had an opportunity to regulate ourselves and we didn’t. Even in the absence of regulations, safeguarding the people we design for is the job.

Pro tip: if your boss asks you to do something and says, “It’s not technically illegal,” it’s probably unethical.

Working ethically is a skill, and it’s a skill that needs to be taught and then developed.

It takes knowing what questions to ask. It takes knowing how to test the effects of the product. It takes knowing how to build a good argument. And it takes seeing yourself as an equal stakeholder in the product.

And frankly, it takes some designers who’ve come from backgrounds and experiences that were harmed by the products of Fortune 500 companies. It

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 trick to not being stressed out about getting fired is to expect it every day. Work toward it. Be willing to say the thing that might get you fired, because if you’re not, then you’re holding back. Otherwise, you’re giving the answer you think people want to hear, or the answer that you think saves your skin. That’s not the job. Your job is to design things the right way, the ethical way, even if it gets you fired.

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.

We need to understand our job is to be advocates for the people who aren’t in the room. We need to understand we have a greater responsibility to society than to the people who sign the checks. The age of creatives is over. It led us to a garbage fire. The age of gatekeepers is at hand.

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.

At the scale we’re working, when we fuck up, we don’t just break code, we break people. We break relationships. We break civil discourse. The moment to slow down is here.

All the white boys in the room, even with the best of intentions, will only ever know what it’s like to make decisions as a white boy.

Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with threats because none of the people designing it had ever gotten a death threat. It didn’t come up. Twitter didn’t build in a way to deal with stalking because no one on the team had ever been stalked. It didn’t come up.

Twitter was broken from conception. Twitter’s original sin occurred the day that four white boys sat around a room and designed the seed of what the platform would

The idea that every voice is worth being amplified is core to Twitter’s philosophy. Theoretically, I agree with that, but when theory hits reality, the results aren’t always pretty.

When you use your augmented right to question someone else’s right to live, love, and/or pray as they see fit—you lose the right to that augmentation.

The last thing I want you to do is take your team of white boys out into the field and “see what the women think.”

Claire L. Evans writes in her excellent book Broad Band:

Before a new field developed its authorities, and long before there was money to be made, women experimented with new technologies and pushed them beyond their design. Again and again, women did the jobs no one thought were important, until they were.

Why should you listen to me? You shouldn’t. You should listen to all the women out there telling you their stories of harassment in the workplace. You should listen to all the black people who can’t get inside the door because they’re not a “culture fit.” If you’re lucky enough that this industry was built in your image, realize how lucky you are.

Until you let everyone in the room, until you give everyone a chance, you do not get to say you’ve earned anything in this business. At least not fairly. As long as you’re the beneficiary of sexist, ableist, and racist hiring practices, you didn’t earn that job. It was handed to you. And don’t come to me complaining about quotas when “hire the white guy” is the biggest quota program in history.

For years, I used to tell this story as a lesson in hustle and confidence. It isn’t. It’s a story about privilege. It’s a story about the world being made in my favor.

“If you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist.” That quote is from Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race,

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.”

Everyone earned the right to be heard at work when you hired them, and not only do they have the right to be heard, you’re an idiot for not listening to what they have to say! Here’s an opportunity to hear from someone with a different viewpoint than yours and you’re silencing them? What are you afraid of?

If you’re a dude, you have a responsibility to tell your male co-workers to shut the fuck up when they interrupt someone.

This is the shit we say and do without thinking twice. We may even be stupid enough to think some of it is complimentary. (I’m guilty of that.) But it’s not. It sucks to deal with.

They suggested talking about how this hire would be complementing an already great team. They suggested emphasizing the company’s goals rather than individual achievement, and how rather than saying things like “you need five years experience doing x,” you’re better off with “be ready to discuss how your previous experiences can help us do x”. Because let’s face it, it’s hard to get five years of experience doing something when you work in an industry that won’t hire you to do it.

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. It was racist.

You put people from different backgrounds together, and they can see things from multiple points of view. They cover each others’ blind spots. It’s the smart move.

the topic of “being good allies” came up. To which my new Danish friend shouted that men our age had committed too many sins and done too many things wrong to ever be good allies in any sense of the word. The best thing we could to for the planet was to die.

A code of ethics will not magically transform us into people who behave decently. Its imposition, coming from the top, will have no transformative power. Only an agreement to follow it, made at the rank and file level, can change how we work.

We had everything going in our favor. We had to work half as hard as anyone else. We got all the breaks, and we still set the world on fire.

We don’t get to stand in front of the raging dumpster fire we created and ask for a medal.

You can’t make up for the terrible things you do at your day job with ethics offsets. If you want to truly do good work, you’re better off applying your ethical framework to your day job.

Ethics cannot be a side hustle.

So, rather than asking yourself “won’t somebody else make it?” ask yourself “what if me saying no is the inspiration for other people to stand up? What if me saying no is the first step in a movement? What if me saying no is the first step to making things right?”

You cannot afford to be neutral. Right now, more than ever, you need to reach down deep into your core, find your ethical strength, and bring it to your day job with you every day.

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.

You can change a company that’s afraid of change. You can change a company that finds change uncomfortable. You cannot change a company that doesn’t want to change, especially when leadership doesn’t want to change.

In Twitter’s case, we can almost pinpoint the exact second this happened: It’s when they measured a Donald Trump tweet that broke their guidelines against the engagement it was getting, decided to leave it, and started defending that decision.

The bucket we haven’t talked about yet is the truly odious. Ideas that are unethical to the core. Places where under no circumstances could you do good work, because doing work there and doing it to their definition of “well” would mean to do work that hurts others in some way.

There’s no ethical way to design a gun because to design it well is to design it to kill better. We cannot do that.

Good work cannot be done in situations where the work is to hurt people, deceive them, or manipulate them.

Find a place with good leadership. Find a place that wants to listen to what you have to say. Find a place filled with people you want to collaborate with you, and people you’re willing to collaborate with.

Are they successful? Yes. For now. It’s that little “for now” that you have to add that should give you pause. Their success is a house built on sand. Can you be successful by throwing ethics out the window? Yes, you can. You can also eat three burritos in one sitting. But in both situations, that act is coming back up on you, and it won’t be pretty.

Deciding not to put what you’re designing through an ethical test is not only lazy, it’s dangerous. Feigning ignorance that ethics is not part of your job as a designer is no longer valid. Knowing that it’s part of the job and ignoring it is criminal.