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

by Mike Monteiro

Look around at the other professionals you interact with on a daily basis. Your doctor. Your grocer. Your mechanic. Your congressperson! How would you react to knowing they’re entertaining doing their job unethically?

I don’t want designers on the same list as your congressperson. I’d be honored to be on the same list as your butcher.

despite putting a ton of pressure on her, never got their green light to release thalidomide in the United States, all because Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey did her job. She stood at the gate and said this shall not pass. A job she kept doing for another forty-five years, by the way.

Although she was being paid by the FDA, and being pressured by a gigantic pharmaceutical company, she understood that her ultimate responsibility was to the women and children affected by that garbage drug. She had an ethical responsibility to do her job.

The minute you start saying things like, “I’m here for your approval,” all of that goes out the window.

so stop it with the imposter syndrome stuff. When someone decides you’ve earned the right to call yourself a professional designer and get paid for it—believe them.

You work for the people who’ll ultimately come in contact with your work. You work for the people who aren’t in the room.

Imagine being so insecure that you spend your life justifying your own career by uplifting people who look like you to reinforce the idea that you come from genius stock.

Lo and behold, we’ve found that when you give a population that’s roughly fifty percent female an equal chance, you end up with a roughly fifty percent female staff.

The point is to foster an environment where different viewpoints are not just welcomed, but encouraged.

With a little bit of research, empathy, and acting I may be able to almost-kinda-sorta see things from the point of view of a guy who likes cars, golf, and nachos; but no amount of empathy or research will ever, ever allow me to design things from a woman’s point-of-view. Just like I will never be able to experience the world from a black person’s point of view.

When you don’t see yourself reflected in those positions of authority, you begin believing they aren’t accessible to you.

This has less to do with merit than with a systematic underrepresentation of women and minorities.

As designers, we are tasked with solving the problems of the world. The more we and those we look up to reflect the face of the world around us, the better our solutions will be. If we continue to behave like it’s a white man’s world, we’re not only doing ourselves a disservice, we’re doing our society a disservice.

Sometimes merit needs a push. You can’t level a playing field without bringing in a few bulldozers.

when people’s main driver is financial, that means the health of the people using the product and the products effects on society are by definition secondary.

When I say that Twitter hasn’t done anything about abuse on their platform I’m not being totally honest—they’ve profited from it.

everything your labor is used for should have the goal of helping people. While that may sound a little high-minded, it’s really not. Using our labor to help others should be the basic minimum that we aspire to.

Twitter makes money by getting you to fight with Nazis.

The second question we ask all of our clients after “why are you making this?” is “how does this make money?” Turns out that helping them answer that question is an important design problem as well. If you don’t have a clear answer from the get go, you’ll eventually find yourself in a dilemma where you’re short on cash and looking around for what’s valuable. That answer is usually what your users’ hold most dear: their private information. I don’t care what it says in your terms of service, that’s some unethical shady shit.

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.

In my experience, fear of doing research is always about ego and fear, which is a horrible combination. If you have a good idea, you should be happy that someone is willing to kick the tires on it.

If you’re afraid of having those tires kicked, it’s because you know there’s something wrong or you’re afraid there’s something wrong.

Helping people realize shitty ideas in order to preserve their ego is an equally shitty way to earn a living.

Tire kicking is a gift. If someone kicks the tires on your work and it falls apart, that person is your new best friend because they just saved your ass. They helped you keep bad work out of the world.

I want to stay with the role of feedback and ethics. It is absolutely wrong to release something into the world that you know has a problem. That means you need to gather people together to elicit their feedback on what you’ve made and you should hand them sledgehammers with a smile on your face.

Also, we’re not talking about things like “are you sure you want to delete all your photos?” That’s a failsafe. We’re talking about hiding the link that says “yes, I am sure.”

You cannot take someone’s intent away. There are no ethical reasons to design dark patterns, no matter what Brad from Marketing tells you. Brad is a liar.

Whether you’re writing them or not, you’re a checkpoint. They’re coming through your gate. You cannot let them. Also, offer to write them. Designers should be able to write their own interface language.

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.

“Snapchat dysmorphia.” People want to match what they look like in their filtered images. They worry about meeting an online friend in person because they won’t match the images they’ve been putting out.

Very few of them ask the question “who built this shit?” We built it.

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.

If you want more of their data to do something else later, you need to tell the user. If you, as the designer, don’t know what that something else is, do not let it make it onto the interface.

took them over ten years to realize this.) If you’re designing for a global audience, you need to design not for, but with, that global audience.

So no, asking people for their names is not an easy question. Your name is your identity. Identity is a choice.

Maybe race will be easier to discuss than names. I almost couldn’t finish that sentence! Look, if you’re going to ask people for their race, ask yourself what the worst people in the world would do with that information.

So again, when someone tells you to design something to collect a specific piece of data, ask them what they intend to do with that data. You have a right to know, after all, the work they’re asking you to do is going out with your name on it. Plus, you may be able to design a way that gets them what they need while also protecting the person interacting with the tool you built.

Digital surveillance is easy and a lot of people are still so excited that they can do it, they haven’t begun worrying about whether they should do it. Now that everyone carries GPS devices in their pockets, it’s possible to know where they are all the time.

When it comes to applications and services that track our whereabouts, we need to design with assholes in mind.

for “AR15” would yield dozens of results. We methodically went through a reporting flow of about five screens, a flow that was randomized so that it was never exactly the same two times in a row.

About half of what we reported came back as not being a violation. We’d challenge the decision. About half of those came back as not being a violation.

They have some pretty smart people designing some pretty sophisticated software. They could easily make the elimination of private gun sales automated and effective. If they wanted to. When someone asks you to take on a chore they could more easily do themselves, it’s generally because they don’t really want to do

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.

When you are designing these platforms, you cannot put the onus of enforcing policies on your users. It’s one thing to flag things that fall through the cracks. Things always fall through the cracks. When your entire system for enforcing violation relies on users policing themselves, you’re not doing your job responsibly.

In other words, “We’re not sure what we did, but once we find out, we’ll tell you how it’s right.” I’m

Overton window, which describes what we’re willing to discuss or tolerate over time—or as the window opens or closes. What was once unthinkable (window closed) such as putting children in cages or constant surveillance or a president breaking with standards of decorum, slowly becomes policy (window open) as we get used to new behavior. Now, this isn’t always a negative. Overton’s window can also be applied to things such as gay marriage, black presidents, and legal weed, all of which were once unthinkable, even in my lifetime, and have come to pass.

My goal here isn’t so much to give you the specific method to destroy specific unethical behavior because like all viruses, they’ll mutate, and the tools we use today may not work tomorrow. The constant here can’t be the method. The constant needs to be the gatekeeper. That is you.

Many of the design practices in this chapter can even live in murky legal waters. Is it legal? I don’t care. Our question is whether it’s ethical, and the law often drags far behind what’s ethical.

above their pay grade. Also, it’s bullshit. Making ethical calls on what goes on the interface is exactly what you are being paid to do. So, if you’re not doing it, you’re actually not doing your job. You’re as much of a stakeholder as anyone in that building. You have agency and as we said back in an earlier chapter, you were hired for your counsel. Give it.