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

by Mike Monteiro

We equate our power with the ability to move this tiniest of units into proper and pleasing placements. We still believe this to be our one true purpose. This, and only this, is design work. Thus everything I was currently doing wasn’t design work, but rather things keeping me from doing true design work.

A pixel is just a point of proof in the stage of execution. It’s the period at the end of the sentence. That sentence though? That’s the important thing. To design is to influence people. To design is to build new connections in people’s minds. To design is to build relationships where there previously weren’t any.

It’s time to move beyond pixel into argument. If we truly want to influence what our labor is being used for, we need to start pushing people into proper and pleasing placements. If we truly want to influence what our labor is being used for, we are going to have to do it with our voices. We need to focus less about where our pixels are placed, and to focus more on where our bodies are placed. If we want to design the right way, we are going to have to do it by talking to people. We are not pixel pushers. We are gatekeepers.

Humility is just lipstick on a pig called fear.

My confidence in the work then passes from me to you and puts that work one step closer to helping the people it’s intended to help. My confidence isn’t for my benefit or even my boss’s benefit, it’s for the people’s benefit.

then humility isn’t just expensive, it’s also selfish. How dare you allow your fear to keep people from being helped.

Strong caveat: confidence is not the same as cockiness. Confidence is about the work. It means I’ve done the math, crossed my t’s, dotted my i’s, and listened to feedback. Cockiness is about ego. It means I don’t think I have to do any of those things. Cockiness got us to the garbage fire we find ourselves in today.

Fuck yeah PREACH

a willingness to get fired needs to be your baseline state if you want to persuade people. Unless you walk into a situation willing to get fired for doing good work, you’re holding back. If your priority is to save your own neck, you’re gonna hold

“The only way to make the chair more comfortable is to go back in time to when the chair was being first discussed.” Bingo!

“I’m a designer. Please allow me to do the job I was hired to do. You’re going to be making decisions in this meeting which impact design and I need to be there. Finding out about this stuff afterward is going to cost us all time and money and possibly take us down some bad paths. I can help by being in the room.”

You may not get in the room the first time you ask. So ask again. Make yourself a nuisance about it. Eventually they might relent just to shut you up. That’s fine. It gets you in the room. What’s the worst thing that can happen? They fire you from a job they weren’t allowing you to do anyway.

For example: “If we launch an ad tool that lets you target users by race, we’re going to get someone killed,” is gonna get your bosses’ attention better than, “I have some concerns about our new ad tool.”

There’s a metaphor used in journalism called the inverted pyramid. In short, you give the most important information at the very beginning, increase the details as, or if, the reader continues reading the article, and then finish up with relevant background.

The inverted pyramid moves the reveal, which you’ve been saving up for the big finish, right to the top.

the next time you want to convince people they’re making shitty software that might get people killed, start by telling them they’re making shitty software that might get people killed. Then tell them why. Then tell them how you can keep that from happening.

The person who convinces the boss that you need more time for research has done more to influence the design of the product than the person placing the pixels by a long shot.

Speaking up is part of the job. Some of us are natural extroverts, but the rest of us have to work

If you believe there’s a problem at work, you’re probably not the only one. (And if you are, it might be time to leave.) Find the people who agree with you or who can be swayed. Find the people willing to have the discussion. Whose eyes lit up when you brought up an issue at a meeting? Who was paying more attention than usual to what you had to say? Who asked follow-up questions? Reach out to them. Use those people skills.

At some point, as much as you may have prepared and practiced, the person you’re attempting to persuade will ask you a question that stumps you. (This moment is where careers are made, by the way!) You have a few options here: You can lie, but only assholes lie. You can try to make something up on the fly, but they’ll see right through that. Plus, it’ll probably be wrong, in which case, it’s a lie. You can buy for time with a strategically stretched out series of ummmmmmms until a co-worker bails you out. But every ummmmmmm that comes out of your mouth is decreasing the room’s confidence in you. Or, or, OR! You can say the most confident thing that has ever come out of your mouth: “I don’t know.”

But letting people know that you’re confident enough to admit that you’re at a loss is when you beat the level boss. No one has all the answers, and pretending you do doesn’t make you look confident; it makes you look like a fool.

They know you’ll admit when you don’t know something. They know you won’t lie to them, and that’s huge.

When I’m trying to persuade someone, I start by painting a picture in the person’s mind. There’s a future where you do what’s right, and I paint that rosy. There’s a future where you do what’s wrong, and I paint that dismally. My goal is to get you to walk into that rosier future, the one where everything works out. If you want to persuade someone, you need to take them on a little journey.

If you’re not persuading people, you’re not telling a good enough story.

The stain of bad decision-making gets everywhere. At some point, the fault passes from leadership, who’s giving bad orders, to the rank and file who keep following them.

There are things worth quitting for. There are things worth getting fired for. This is the time for good trouble.

According to Forbes, the percentage of companies that fully cover their employees’ health insurance has decreased from thirty-four percent in 2001 to nine percent in 2016.

We must be free to do our jobs, and to do them as they need to be done without our family’s healthcare hanging over our heads.

America punishes young people for wanting to learn. This needs to change.

we’ve got young kids with very little job experience working at these massive companies that pay them enough to pay down that student debt and are supplying their health insurance. This is not a good recipe for an ethical revolution. This is a recipe for how to build a workforce that’s beholden to you.

Some professions have either unions or professional organizations to help mitigate this and to bargain collectively. Designers do not. This needs to change.

Just so we’re clear, neither our horrific health care system, nor educational debt, nor immigration status, absolve you from doing your job ethically; and nor do they make it okay to work unethically. I do, however, empathize with those situations, and my advice would be that if you’re encumbered by a need to pay off student loans or to care for health needs of family members, to avoid working at places where you’ll have to fight too much. Meanwhile, join us in solving the health care, student debt, and immigration problem at the polls.

We don’t walk away when things get hard. We walk away when things get impossible. My goal here is to affect change, not to cause mass unemployment.

As we already discussed, there are no ethical offsets. No amount of donations to the ACLU will offset working at Palantir. As a company, no amount of employee time given to good causes offsets running a platform of harassment and abuse.

So, if you’re staying and fighting, make sure you’re fighting. Lest Overton’s window get slammed on your fingers.

Why do I call it a design manual? Because, like we’ve discussed before, design is the solution to a problem within a set of constraints. We have a problem: Nazis. We have a solution: sabotage. We have constraints: don’t get caught. It’s a design manual. Among the highlights are: Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done. Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker. And my personal favorite: Act stupid.

How to fight twitter

I’m just gonna call it a universal truth. Nazis were/are hateful fucks, and sabotaging their work isn’t just ethical, but is your duty as a good human being.

Sabotage is an ethical option when a better option isn’t available to you.

There is a time to put down the tools. If there’s one thing I want you to walk away from this book realizing, just one thing, it’s how much power you have in these situations.

This shit that’s destroying the world is being made with our labor. They can’t make it without our labor. They need us! That gives us power. We have agency and we are a collective force. We are fucking legion!

None of those situations were enough for Twitter employees to put down their tools. So if Twitter employees do have a breaking point, we know those things weren’t

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Not everything can be fixed. There is a time to burn things down.

We failed because we were naive enough to believe everyone had the same goals we did. We failed because we underestimated greed. We failed because we didn’t pay attention to history. We failed because our definition of we wasn’t big enough.

When the sun crosses the Earth, it collects our stories along the way. Tales of outrage, aggression, marginalization, and exclusion. Tales of toxic masculinity and racism. Tales of teenagers being abused online to the point of suicide. Tales of women being harassed and threatened with unthinkable things. Tales of immigrants being abducted while they drop their children off at school. Tales about the tools we built with our own hands and enabled. That same sun eventually sets on Silicon Valley, a big flaming orange ball dropping into the ocean at the end of America, at the end of capitalism. Let the fires we set rival the orange glow of that setting sun. Let it all burn down. Let those that come after us sift through the ashes to learn from our mistakes.

We need to hold our entire community accountable for doing the job the right way. We can and should argue. We can and should cajole. We can and should fight for the right thing.

to deny the liability of our work means passing it on to the people who come in contact with it. We can’t ask the people we’re protecting to be braver than we’re willing to be.

Finally, not doing the job correctly should have a cost. A doctor who steps outside their ethical framework loses the ability to practice medicine. A lawyer who steps outside their ethical framework loses the ability to practice law. A designer who builds a tool to lie to a regulatory body is likely to get a promotion. Time to end that bullshit.

The idea that we could lose the ability to earn a living doing what we love by doing it wrong ends up being a strong motivation for doing it well.

Licensing for our profession is coming. This isn’t necessarily a decision we’ll have to make, as much as one which we’ll have to prepare for.

Where most of the world saw a story about corporate malfeasance and corruption, Facebook employees saw a story about their community being attacked and protecting itself. They circled the wagons. Their community was under attack. If your community was under attack, you’d circle the wagons, too.