Ruined by Design Quotes

“If you believe you need to do what your boss wants because they’re paying you, you also need to believe the doctor should provide the oxycodone if the addict is willing to pay for it. The exchange of cash for services doesn’t supersede ethics. Following unethical orders won’t keep you out of jail.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Ethics cannot be a side hustle.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“It should freak you out that gangsters can agree on a code of behavior but designers can’t. Crime is more organized than design.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“The world isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to work. And we’re the ones who designed it. Which means we fucked up.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Empathy is a pretty word for exclusion. I’ve seen all-male all-white teams taking “empathy workshops” to see how women think. If you want to know how women would use something you’re designing, get a woman on your design team. They’re not extinct. We don’t need to study them. We can hire them!”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“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.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“I write a bunch of form labels on the whiteboard, in a nonsensical order, along with a bunch of randomly sized input boxes. I include first name, last name, address, gender, city, state, email address, etc. Then I tell the interviewee that we’re designing a form to sign up for an email newsletter and to arrange them in the right order. 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.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“For the record, I have nothing against art. I love art. I’m an artist myself. I’m also a designer. I understand the difference between the two. Design is the solution to a problem, but that problem is never your self-esteem.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effects those things have upon the world.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“As long as you are a designer, you have a responsibility to make the world better for the rest of humanity. If you are a designer, you are a human being first. It is your job to stop those that would denigrate humanity for their own selfish benefit.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“[As designers] We need to advocated for the people who aren't in the room, and stand up to those who are. That's the job. We must be engaged in the process of what gets designed way before it enters the phase where traditionally and erroneously thought of as design.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey published the world’s first tweet: “just setting up my twttr.” On July 22, 2018, Donald Trump tweeted: “To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” (Capitalization his.) In the twelve years between those two tweets, some things happened that are worth exploring.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“People don’t see the things they’re rewarded for as problems to fix.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, and is now so entrenched in the lives of young people that it is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people's mental health issues.” Shirley Cramer, chief executive, Royal Society for Public Health”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“We need to challenge the idea that a CEO’s primary mission is to make money for shareholders.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men, once told the New York Times:1 “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Jack’s main priority was making sure he couldn’t be accused of having made a decision. His obsession with remaining impartial has made him impotent to act, even on the side of decency. He wants to be able to cast blame on an algorithm, rather than his own actions. That way he wouldn’t have any blood on his hands.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“For years, the libertarian con artists of Silicon Valley have been telling us they want to change the world. But when the people at the top tell you they want to change the world, it’s generally because they’ve figured out how to profit even more from those below them. (To be fair, not even in my wildest dreams did I think even those dirtbags would be okay normalizing fascism to make that happen. Yet here we are.)”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“To design is to influence.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“We need to value the consequences of our actions more than the cleverness of our ideas.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“The first driver’s licenses in the US were issued in 1903 by Massachusetts and Missouri. You didn’t need to pass an exam to get them. California didn’t start issuing licenses until 1913, and didn’t require exams until 1927. For the first couple of decades of cars’ existence, they were a curiosity that shared the road with carriages, horses, and scared the occasional cow. They operated on roads that were intended for much different traffic. Once their numbers rose, and they started crashing into each other and into other things, we started regulating them.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“most of the states in America practice at-will employment, which means your boss can fire you for any reason, at any time. (All my readers in Scandinavia just passed out.) Some professions have either unions or professional organizations to help mitigate this and to bargain collectively.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“The vast majority of design programs across the world still live within art schools. Not to shit on art schools—they’re a fine place to learn how to make art; but art has as much in common with design as a lobster has with a carrot cake.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Working ethically is a skill, and it’s a skill that needs to be taught and then developed. It’s not easy to tell the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that the product they just asked you to design is harmful. It takes more than guts. 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. It takes seeing yourself as a gatekeeper. And frankly, it takes some designers who’ve come from backgrounds and experiences that were harmed by the products of Fortune 500 companies. It takes a lot.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“In design school, professional practices are usually grouped together and referred to as “soft skills,” taught in something called a “portfolio class” by whichever professor drew the short straw that semester. Unpacking professional practice is less glamorous than holding forth about creativity. To be fair, I doubt many high school seniors are excited to choose a design school based on how well they teach professional services. I certainly wasn’t. We choose design schools based on how amazingly creative and special they make us feel.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Make them call you by your name. That name is designer.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“The first amendment was put in place to ensure that the government didn’t start forcing the majority’s views on us, and also to ensure that the press could tell us what the government was doing! It was not put in place to ensure that WhitePowerBob5000 could spew his racist bile to 50,000 people. We don’t owe WhitePowerBob5000 jack shit. We don’t owe him a platform. We don’t owe him our time, and we don’t owe him our protection. The people to whom we do owe all of those things are the people that WhitePowerBob5000 attacks on a daily basis. We owe it to society to uplift the voices that WhitePowerBob5000 is attempting to silence. If we truly care about free speech, let’s make sure those voices are free. WhitePowerBob5000 can go fuck himself. He is, however, free to go spew his bile in that sad little area in front of the national park. Hopefully one with large hungry bears. You do not have to build WhitePowerBob5000 a platform.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“Now, if you’re at work, I want you to do an exercise. (This is especially important to do if you’re a Twitter employee.) Those of you not currently at work can do this the next time you’re at work. Ready? Stand up. Look around. Are you currently in a national park? No? Are you in a government building? Also no? Great. Then the first amendment does not apply to you, or to the people that use your service. You do not need to hang a little brown metal sign that says “Free Speech Area” in your workplace. In fact, and this is the really interesting part, you are allowed to hang a “management refuses the right to service” sign in your office, as long as you don’t refuse the right to serve a discriminated group. Again, there are —and should be—limits.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

“In some cases, the companies started out fine, and made the decisions to take ethical shortcuts, usually because of a lethal combination of market forces and unethical staff (including leadership). 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.”
― Mike Monteiro, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It