Sometimes if you wanna see the light at the end of tunnel, you have to build the fucking tunnel.

What if we get through this?

Mike Monteiro
Dear Design Student
7 min readJun 27, 2017

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Let me just put this here. Because I need a little bit of hope, and maybe you do too.

Because every time my phone vibrates I expect find out that we’ve launched a nuke, either into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or a reporter’s house. I expect that one branch of our government has declared war on another branch, or that members of the same branch are fat-shaming each other. I expect that an active gunman is mowing down children in a playground. I expect that US Senators are physically expelling Americans in wheelchairs from the Capitol. I expect these things because these things are actually happening. Things that would’ve freaked us out just five months ago are now barely worth taking note of. Because the next mess is hauling its way toward us just behind it.

And as mornings become more difficult to face, and the desire to find out how close we are to the bottom becomes stronger than the desire to keep fighting a daily barrage of disillusion in the rest of humankind, and SSRIs become the newest flavor of M&Ms, I wonder if maybe we need to be reminded of what it might look like if we made it through this shit show.

What if, despite all odds, we get through this?

It’s said that in good times we crank out novels of dystopian futures to keep us humble. Perhaps the inverse also needs to be true. Perhaps we should clear out a little corner of the dumpster-on-fire and pen some fan fiction to give us a smidge hope.

What if, despite all odds, we get through this? What if, against all odds, we pulled out of this nosedive while there was still the chance, the opportunity, the responsibility to fix whatever was left.

What should we do?

Let’s fix tech

The service economy, where tech is putting the majority of its time and money, is built on income disparity. We create services for people to drive us around, to pick up our clothes, to sort our mail, and all of these services require the availability of two things: people who have and people who have not. The whole tech sector is based on exploitation of the lower class.

How did we get here? We got here because once the internet turned into a business it was taken over by the people who run the business world. Rich white boys with business degrees who’ve relied on poor people to cook and clean for them their entire lives. You build what you know.

If we achieved income parity, the tech sector would collapse! You can’t build an economy on the need for a class structure and then act surprised when it results in a class structure. Is this the kind of system you want to be supporting with the short amount of time you have on earth? Imagine if we put our time and energy into creating the infrastructure for an economy that actually leveled the playing field. An economy that served those who needed help the most first and foremost.

The service economy has been with us for a long time.

Isn’t this socialism? Yes. Deal with it. But we’ve seen where the service economy leads. And we’ve seen where excluding everyone who isn’t a rich white boy gets us. It’s time to open the gates. The people solving the problems need to look like the world. They need to come from every corner of the world. And if you’re investing your time and money in solving problems, it’s time to start valuing how your work is affecting the world around you more than how your own personal wealth.

We have more cognitive resources, computing power, and data available to us now than at any other time in human history. And we’re using it to get poor people to do our laundry. Imagine taking all this intelligence, all this money, all this energy, and dedicating it to coming up with a plan that begins to make the world work better for everyone! And you’re included in that everyone. Is it hippie dippy pollyanna? Sure, but it’s my fan fiction.

Let’s fix education

A country that purposely undereducates its electorate in order to stay in power loses the right to call itself a democracy.

And the education system, which has historically underserved women and minorities, doesn’t get to look out on a graduating engineering class that’s 95% male and come to the conclusion that women aren’t interested in engineering. You can’t simultaneously cause a problem and use the results as justification believing the problem doesn’t exist.

For decades we’ve been increasing the cost of higher education to levels that exclude lower-class kids (of all races and genders) from attending college. And those that do manage to attend are saddled with so much debt that it dictates the degrees they’re willing to get. (We’ve basically made humanities degrees extinct.) And the result has been a pipeline of self-perpetuating caucasian chicken nugget sludge.

This is by design. We’ve created an undereducated electorate that we can bully with fear and anger. Democracies don’t do that.

Imagine prioritizing education enough as a country that we shifted our tax dollars to guarantee that anyone who wanted that education could get it. For free. SF State is doing it. New York and Rhode Island as well. This has never been about lack of money, but about priorities.

Let’s destroy bro culture

When you show the world your product team looks like the photo below, you’re telling everyone who doesn’t look like this that they can’t be on a product team. The prerequisite for being on this team isn’t a skill set, or a level of education — it’s a cock.

We need women and minorities in positions of leadership. And we need to deal with the educational system so that we increase the diversity of people available to interview.

Then we need to deal with a bro culture that dismisses people on the basis of fit, which is nothing but a code word for misogyny and racism. Meritocracy? Don’t even. That lie’s been exposed too much recently. Not just by the good women we’ve kept down, but by the mediocrity that we’ve elevated to the top.

Imagine building teams that actually reflected the communities we’re serving? Imagine having a trans person in the room when you propose a “real names” initiative? Imagine having someone who’s been stalked in the room when you suggest adding places of employment to dating profiles. Heck, imagine having a woman in the room when you craft a health-care bill! That’s right, we don’t get to make fun of Congress’ shit when ours stinks just as bad.

It’s time for designers to become grownups. We need a code of ethics and we need to get licensed.

Let’s fix UX design culture

The days of the wild west are over. When I started doing interaction design, I didn’t have a degree. Because no one was teaching it. It was a brand new field. We figured out how to build the internet by building it. And it was great.

But those days are over.

The stuff we’re designing now is deeply enmeshed in the social fabric of our lives. We’re designing things that put people in strangers’ cars, that control devices in our homes, that administer medication. We design privacy settings that have deep repercussions in the ethical walls we’ve had to create for our messy, messy, wonderful lives.

When I started designing things on the internet, if you fucked up you got a broken link. Now if you fuck up, you mess up someone’s life. And as much as I love doing my job, I’m beginning to think it’s insane that I don’t need a license to do this shit! I have no training in it!

And as our work gets more complicated, the ethical concerns about what we’re doing get bigger and nastier. (Look no further than all the shit we went through with Uber.) And I’m out there talking to a lot of designers. I’m genuinely scared at the amount of them who don’t see ethics as a part of the craft. This needs to change.

A doctor who gets busted working unethically loses their license. Can’t practice medicine anymore. Same with lawyers. It’s time for designers to become grownups. We need a code of ethics and we need to get licensed. I’ll be writing more about this in the weeks to come.

Let’s get there

This is some of the stuff we need to fix. There’s so, so, so much more. But this is the stuff that I think I can have a hand in trying to fix in my own field. And maybe, just maybe if we get through this current hell we can get a chance to tackle some of these.

…unless maybe, dealing with this shit now is how we can ensure we get through it. Maybe.

Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.

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