November 26, 2019: Ruined By Design

Ruined By Design

This morning, Dan introduced Ruined By Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro. For the first part of class, we discussed the main points of the book and our reactions to it.

Discussion

Mike Monteiro runs his own firm and is trying to bring ethical practices into design. Some of the themes of our discussion:

• Does design do enough to educate designers in ethics and theory, in addition to making?
• If we as designers are part of businesses with profit-seeking motives, are we shooting arrows in the dark trying to be more ethical?
• If we are trying to make experiences more pleasurable and desirable, are we increasing addiction and seducing people to do or buy things they don’t need?

Part 1:

• Without the support of other people, without cohesion, we can’t stand up and advocate for what’s right. You should never do work that clearly does harm.
• Design is not making something beautiful, or just making. It needs to be valued for its impact in the world, instead of how clever or beautiful it is.
• If you’re going to work for a business, it’s your responsibility to know how the business works and understand how they make money.
• John Rawls and the veil of ignorance: If you are creating a justice system from scratch, a way to make it fair is to imagine that you won’t know your role in the system until after it’s made. In other words, you might be on the receiving end of it, in the role of a criminal, for instance. Therefore, it’s in the best interests of the designer of the system to make it as fair as possible.

Part 2:

• You can make a difference by being inside. You don’t need to leave your job in order to make a social impact; you can start right where you are.
• Do the job you were hired to do, to the best of your ability. This is different than making your bosses happy.
• Working inside large organizations and designing products that reach millions of users is a position of power.
• Why are we doing this? Where is the money going? Being aware of those things whatever your role will enable you to see where you can make a difference.

Part 3:

• This section is devoted to what we can do about the problems he lays out in the first two sections.
• First is community: the social texture of design. Second is organizations, and third is licensing. If you’re impacting billions of people, then you should have some sort of license.
• There are different models out there, like unions and professional organizations.
• He also talked about the positives and negatives of campuses.
• If you do things that affect a lot of people, there should be some licensing for it. There would need to be some sort of exam or way to gather evidence and certify that you were qualified for your profession.

Workshopping System Components

In the second part of class, we did an exercise to try to define and develop an idea for some aspect of the points raised in the book.

Our ideas

Team 1: Regulatory Bodies

• An inclusive design certification for software products. This team proposes designing a set of criteria for what constitutes a well-designed digital product. There would be a badge certifying products that met criteria like accessibility. One reference for this idea was a USDA Organic sticker.
• This idea was appreciated for putting the onus on the product to be certified, as opposed to an individual designer. It allows for teams to share responsibilities for making ethical, certified products.

Team 2: Regulatory Bodies

• This team proposed a design license for the professional design community, involving a public ceremony to confer a license to an individual. It would allow for specializations within the field, much like the medical field. Enablers would include interdisciplinary advisory boards.
• The rite of passage aspect of this idea makes it more official and symbolic of the process that you went through.
• Would it need to be paired with a mechanism or structure to let designers progress? Having a structure might make designers feel more responsible.

Team 3: Community

• This team proposed a dictionary for a common language about design. They also considered a decentralized network, as well as a regular event for gathering. These elements connected with one another. They thought about the dictionary existing at the lowest scale, with a gathering at a mid-level, and a network at the highest scale.
• The dictionary is interesting in its ability to enable standardization. To have a community means you need some sort of common language. A dictionary that accounts for the plurality of views and definitions could help to define that common language. A wiki form might help to keep plurality and context alive.

Next week, we will conclude the course with final presentations on pilot projects.