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

by Vivianne Castillo

In the early 1900s, some psychiatric hospitals gauged patients readiness to integrate back into society through a simple and peculiar test. The patient was ushered into a room with a sink, where the hospital staff would place a plug in the sink, turn on the faucet, and wait for the sink to overflow. As water bubbled over the ledge and splashed onto the floor below, the patient was then handed a mop and the staff would leave the room, closing the door behind them. If the patient turned off the water, unplugged the sink, and mopped up the water that had spilled onto the floor, they were deemed as ready to go home and enter back into society. But if the patient opted to frantically mop as the water gushed over the sink, failing to turn off the faucet or remove the sinks plug, they were deemed insane and prescribed more time in the psychiatric hospital: they failed to acknowledge and address the root of the problem.

Many of you in the tech industry are frantically mopping.

Youve said things, done things at your company that crushed your soul but paid your bills. You avoid talking to your friends and family about your company and ethics because, well, your company is always in the news for their lack of regard for peoples privacy, data, and overall well-being. Youve applied to companies who frequent news cycles for doing harm to others because you really want their name or a title on your resume. You want to laughthen sobat all the hypocritical, unethical design decisions youve witnessed, engaged in, or readall under the banner of human-centered design, empathy or design thinking. You dont want to talk about politics and how it affects design, your job, your co-workers, and society. You dont understand why or how design is political nor do you care to engage that conversation. Youve found yourself saying, Well, I know that Project WTF is unethical and problematic but thats not my team. Youve started to feel cynical about the state of the tech industry, wondering if itll ever get better.

Youre frantically mopping, and havent quite figured out how to address the waters youve waded into.

In this book, Ruined by Design, Mike Monteiro crafts an impressive and thorough commentary on the disturbing trends in the tech industry, provoking the reader to muse on their own complicity in harming others through skillful storytelling and the desire to do and be better. Each section thoughtfully evokes a sense of urgencythreaded together with rightful anger and ultrapractical hopeand provides space for the reader to grapple with the importance of community, professional organizations, and licensing.

If youve grown content and comfortable with the constant repackaging and selling of books that discuss best practices and how to more effectively implement [insert design agency name and their claim to fame for inventing a method or design process], then this book isnt for you.

But if you want to wade into the murky waters of the tech industry; if youre wanting to think more deeply about the power and ethical responsibility you have in this industry; if youre perplexed but not in despair; if youre ready to think about the direct impact our work has on the individuals and families exposed to the experiences and products you help create; if youre ready to turn off the faucet; rip the plug out of the sink, and put your mop to usethis book is for you.

We are so fucked. In fact, we are so fucked, it may already be too late for this book.

By the time you read this, Greenland may have melted, causing the worlds oceans to rise by twenty feet. By the time you read this, everyone in the United States may be dead in a gunfight. By the time you read this, some idiot country may have launched a bomb at another idiot country. Facebook may have accidentally released everyones private information into the public sphere, Twitter leadership may be getting measured for their new Hugo Boss uniforms, and Silicon Valley may be lobbying Congress to just make women illegal. In which case, nothing in this book will matter.

So the fact that Im writing this book is either the most stupid or the most hopeful act I can imagine. To be honest with you, I think its a bit of both.

Either way, all of the horrible things listed above may happen, or may not happen, but theyre definitely within the realm of possibility. And theyre within the realm of possibility because we didnt do what we could to stop it. More than that, its possible because thats how we designed the world. We designed the combustion engine that led to global warming (climate change deniers can just stop reading right now). We designed the guns that kill school children. We designed shitty interfaces to protect our private information. We designed the religions that pitted us against one another. We designed social networks without any way of dealing with abuse or harassment. We designed a financial incentives system that would lead Mark Zuckerberg to assert whats good for the world isnt necessarily good for Facebook; and lead Jack Dorsey to believe engagement was a more important metric than safety. Either by action or inaction, through fault or ignorance, we have designed the world to behave exactly as its behaving right now. These are our chickens coming home to roost.

The world is on its way to ruin and its happening by design.

Should we survive the current clusterfuck by the very slimmest of margins, this might be a good time to ask ourselves how we got here, what our role was in getting here, and what our role will be in making sure we dont get here again. Thats what this book is for.

First of all, writing this book is a hopeful act. For this book to matter, we need two things: the desire to do the right thing and enough time to change course. And while we may not be able to do much about the latter, the fact that you picked this up and youre reading it gives me hope for the former.