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

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.

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

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 boy kings of Silicon Valley love a good algorithm-they've designed some great ones over the years. But there are problems even the best math can't solve. There are times when you physically have to walk over to a server and pull the plug. I get why they want an algorithm to do it-lack of accountability. Intentionally pulling the plug on someone who's trolling women on your service is a decision. It requires agency, leadership, and a point of view. different matter.

lf it’s impossible to eliminate the negative impact of the work, it's your job to stop it from seeing the light of day. In other words, we're not hired to just dig a ditch, but to evaluate the economic, sociological, and ecological impact of that ditch. If the ditch fails those tests, it’s our job to destroy the shovels.

We confuse solving design problems with personal expression.

A professional designer brings to the act of making products is intention, so behave intentionally. We are the gatekeepers of crap.

The people affected by our actions are always more important than our intent.

Diversity in a team is important because they cover each others blind spots.

You can justify anything if you try hard enough. Or just want to.

You were not hired to green light someone else’s work without a second thought. You were also not hired to get someone’s approval.

You work for the people who will ultimately come in contact with your work. You work for the people who aren’t in the room. The success we crave isn’t our own, it’s the success of the people we work for. The ones on the ground. We want the work we do be successful for them. That’s the job.

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.

Fear of doing research is always about ego and fear, which is a horrible combination.

It’s our sole duty to make sure our work is well thought out, beneficial, and as free from error as possible once it’s in their hands. Even then, we owe them vigilance.

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.

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. We are the gatekeepers.

The important work won’t get done at the pixel level. 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.

If left unchecked, today’s monsters become tomorrow’s objects of comfort.

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.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the point of life is to earn the death that comes at the end. And perhaps, no — most likely, that death is best earned by doing everything we can for those coming up after us. Earn your death by making room for the generation behind you. Might they fuck it up as well? Of course. But you already have. They still have a chance.

There’s no quicker way to destroy someone’s confidence than teaching them that what they’re saying isn’t as important as what you’re saying.

The work you bring into the world is your legacy. It will outlive you. It will speak for you. What do you want it to say?