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

by Mike Monteiro

The people who would sack you in a heartbeat to improve their quarterly earnings report are not your community, and they don’t deserve your allegiance.

We need to know that team is doing something those communities need. We need to know that team is making sure that tool isn’t going to have adverse effects on those communities. Will that slow us down? You bet. That’s a feature, not a bug. We’ve seen where moving fast and breaking things has gotten us.

When we organize, they have a problem. Even the biggest companies in the world

Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

Companies where employees aren’t taking a stand, companies where employees aren’t awake to the complicity of their labor, companies where employees aren’t willing to put the tools down and take an ethical stand, will eventually die. They’re creating a workforce no one wants to join, and building toxic products no one wants to use.

Not necessarily because I trust the company, but because the employees have shown me that I can trust them.

If you think I’m calling for the unionization of designers, you’d be right. A professional organization is by any other name a union, so let’s stop beating around the bush. We need a union. In fact, my first book, Design Is a Job, contained a line about designers needing a union. It was edited out, and I didn’t fight to keep it in.

Collectively, we are amazing. Collectively, every weakness one of us has is another’s strength. Don’t be a cog in their machine. Not when we can use all those cogs to build our own machine!

common set of standards is the first step to acting collectively and harnessing our power. Is this hard to do? Of course, but since every other profession worth their salt has figured this out, we also know it’s not impossible.

If the company you’re working at is doing unethical work, and you’ve tried every option to convince them to stop, putting down the tools is the most ethical, responsible option open to you. To organize you need an organization.

My friend’s performance reviews didn’t start going badly because she was performing her job badly, they started going badly because she was pointing out a systematic issue outside of her job duties.

When those designers attempt to do the job the right way, they get bullied, they get intimidated, or it just feels like they’re alone. Legal representation from a professional organization would mean never feeling alone again.

Your human resources department does not work for you. They work for your employer. Their job is to protect them, not you. They’re the department of Judas.

Legal representation from your professional organization would work for you and be paid through your professional dues.

When people start dying, we regulate industries and we license practitioners.

The ability to license and unlicense others to do their jobs will no doubt attract the weak-willed and corruptible, but it will also attract people who want our profession to rise to new heights.

Let’s start by dealing with the “everyone is a designer” issue. First off, it’s true. Ish. Everyone in your company impacts design from the people allocating budgets to the people making decisions on timelines to the people allocating resources.

Our argument is that we’re too special to be held accountable. We’re not. We’re still making diapers for parakeets. Our industry is growing up. It’s hurting people, and we’re throwing a temper tantrum. Maybe the parakeets aren’t the ones needing diapers.

There’s a reason I wrote these last three chapters in this order. Community breeds standards; standards breed accountability; accountability breeds trust; licensure validates that trust. It’s a journey. It may be a long journey, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking. Do positive things.

In her book, Read & Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot writes:

Now is not the time for designers to get political. That was yesterday. Now’s the time to wake up and fight.

Yes, design is political. Because design is labor, and your labor is political. Where you choose to expend your labor is a political act. Who you choose to expend it for is a political act. Who we omit from those solutions is a political act. Finally, how we choose to leverage our collective power is the biggest political act we can take. If we choose to work collectively, we have a ton of power. If we continue to behave like servants, we’re not just letting ourselves down, we’re letting down everyone whose lives we swore to improve.

We’re late to the party. The world is working exactly as we designed it to work, and that’s the problem. We’re here because we’ve abdicated our responsibility as gatekeepers. We’re here because we forgot how much strength we have. It’s time to remember. Wake up and fight.

But mostly, mostly, mostly, thanks to Gritty. When the world was at its darkest, you descended into our lives like a magical agent of chaos riding a wrecking ball of joy. You’re the hero we needed.