 Bon dia. My name is Miguel Montaigne. Are there any designers in the audience? Stand up. If you think I can do this whole thing in Portuguese, you're nuts. Stand up. Come on. You're designers. This is good. Give yourselves a round of applause. Because I am about to make you feel terrible. And then I will make you feel good by the time it's over and you'll thank me. Like I said, my name is Mike Montero. Don't do that. I'm a designer. There's your hashtag. And I became a designer for the same reason that I'm guessing most of you became a designer. Because we enjoy making things. We enjoy creating. We enjoy making, bringing new things in the world. Because yesterday something didn't exist. And today it does. And that's because we made it happen. And that is some powerful shit. And I'd always wanted to earn my living. Being a designer, unfortunately, or fortunately, I was a terrible employee. And I ended up getting fired a lot because I like to argue with the people who were paying me. So in order to keep making things, I ended up having to build a company of my own. And then I had to think about things like running a business, which I realized I was neither really good at or enjoyed very much. So my partner and I, we had to learn about all of this stuff, about how to run a business and handling clients as we went. And at the same time, my view of what design was expanded because now that I got to choose what to work on, I also got to choose what not to work on. And we got to say no to those things. Because I wanted to be very careful about what was going out into the world with my name on it. And I began to see design not just as an act of making things, but also an act of choosing what not to make. And along the way, we made a ton of mistakes. And we learned from those mistakes. And after 10 years, I'd made enough mistakes to write a whole book about them. So I did. And it's about things like getting clients and handling contracts and presenting your work and getting paid. Has anybody here read this? I love each of you and I have room in my heart to love the rest of you. But what this book is really about is responsibility. Designers taking more responsibility for their careers. And there was something that I touched on in the book just a little bit that I want to elaborate on today. And that's your responsibility not just to yourself and to your clients, but also to the wider world. We are designers because we love to create. But creation without responsibility breeds destruction. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. And it starts with a story that was in the Wall Street Journal just over a year ago. This is Bobby Duncan. And at the time this story was written, Bobby was 23 and a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin. And like most 23-year-olds, and I'm guessing like most of the people in this room, Bobby used Facebook a lot. Bobby also likes to sing and play the piano. So when she got to the University of Texas, she decided she wanted to join a chorus group at the school. Oh, and Bobby's also a lesbian. And she ended up joining the Queer Chorus at UT Austin. Which, like many organizations, has a Facebook group page run by the chorus's president who is understandably proud of his group, as he should be. So when Bobby joined the group, he routinely added her to the group's Facebook page, like he does. Because that's how he communicated with members of the chorus about rehearsals and how he communicated with members of the public about when to come see him and things like that. Here's the other thing that we need to know about Bobby. For reasons that are absolutely her own business, she hadn't come out to her parents yet. And she carefully managed her Facebook privacy settings to create a wall between things that her friends could see and things that her parents could see. And once again, I'll reiterate, the reasons for this are her own damn business and none of ours, but that's how she chose to live. Now, if you've ever waited into Facebook's privacy settings, you know what a nightmare they are. They're divided into categories and subcategories, and nobody knows what this shit actually does. Here's a diagram that The New York Times put together to try to explain it. This is from a year ago, by the way. Here's what they look like now. This slide never gets enough laughs, so I put in a laugh track. Also, it's 9 a.m. But here's what happened to Bobby. When the chorus president created the Facebook group page, he made it open. Because in his words, I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud. As he should have been, this isn't a secret organization, it's a chorus group for kids. Now, unbeknownst to him, Facebook had made three very important design decisions. One, that anyone beside you can add you to a group. They don't even need to know who you are. Two, when somebody adds you to a group, it goes up on your wall for everyone who follows you to see. And three, and this is the most important one, here's the kicker. The group's privacy settings override your own. The settings that Bobby had worked so carefully to set up for herself. So a third party without any malice whatsoever on his part, inadvertently notified all of Bobby's followers that she was now part of the queer chorus at UT Austin, including her father, who, according to The Wall Street Journal, left vitriolic messages on her phone demanding she renounce same-sex relationships and threatening to sever all family ties. And he posted this on his own Facebook page just a couple days later, a Facebook page that Bobby had helped him set up. Bobby was understandably devastated. She had made a very careful decision about how to handle her life. She thought it through and she did the work of setting it up. And it was completely undermined by a careless design decision. Of course, this was all a few years ago, or a few months ago, and Facebook has learned its lesson. They've actually simplified their privacy settings. Just this October, they did away with a search setting that lets you opt out of public searches. Their reasoning? Less than 10% of their users opted to use it. Now, Facebook claims to have over a billion users. Do you know what 10% of a billion is? That's 100 million people. Now, to be fair, they did say it was less than 10%. Maybe it was 90 million people, or 80 million people, or 70 million people. Let me know when this number gets comfortable for you. Let's take it all the way down to the smallest possible percent, and that's still 10 million people. With one fell swoop, Facebook changed the privacy settings for at least 10 million people. And you can bet there were some Bobby Duncan's in those 10 million people. But it's cool. They care about your privacy. Let me show you another example. This is Facebook Graph Search, whereas Tom Scott pointed out on his site, actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com, I can do things like search for Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran and also find out where they work. Well, what the fuck could go wrong there? This is irresponsible design. And you may be thinking, oh no, this isn't design. This is a business decision. Bullshit. It may have started life as a business decision, but to get on the interface, to go live, to where people can see it and interact with it, it goes through design. And when a designer lets a bad business decision through, well, that's a decision as well. Facebook's reply to what happened to Bobby was, our hearts go out to these young people. Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy policy. In other words, we are sorry that our clusterfuck of settings and our general disregard for your privacy destroyed your family, but it's not our fault. It's not our fault. Now, I was raised Catholic, and I'm assuming most of you were too since we're in Portugal, and you know that once there is fault on the table, nobody gets up until it's been assigned to someone. So whose fault was it? Because Facebook's privacy settings don't just happen. They're a decision. They're designed to work that way. And at the heart of this, there's design, and hopefully a designer. Now, sadly, design happens whether there's a designer present or not. But too often it happens in the presence of a designer who either doesn't care or doesn't see the problem or worse sees it but doesn't speak up. And I imagine they weren't designed by one person. I imagine it takes a team of people to design something like this. Very smart people, one would think. After all, you don't get to design privacy settings for a site with over a billion users unless you're pretty smart. I would hope. And I have to think that at some point along the line, one of those very smart people might have realized that what they were designing was problematic. Too hard to understand. A violation of privacy. And possibly even unethical because yes, I do think it was unethical. And as soon as one of those very smart people noticed what was going on, one of three things could have happened. One, they ignored it. They saw something that was badly designed and potentially harmful, something that if you just walk through a few use cases, you will see can easily result in somebody's privacy being violated. And they didn't speak up. Perhaps they were afraid to get fired. Perhaps the culture they work in isn't a culture where designers speak up. And you're probably thinking, holy shit, what irresponsible jerks. But I'm guessing that most of the people in this room have been at the point in a project where we are just so tired and so ready to be done with it that we just think, this is good enough, let's ship it. Number two, let's say they did the right thing. Let's say they ran it up the chain. They followed chain of command and entrusted the person above them to take care of it. In a well-run organization, we can rely on the person above us to take care of things and make allowances to the schedule in order to get things correct. Unless, of course, the person above them ignored it. We've all been here. We spot a problem. We bring it to somebody. They tell us it's not that big a deal. We'll fix it later. We'll send out a patch. Maybe somebody's bonus depends on something being shipped on time so we end up shipping crap. In other words, someone says fuck it. Someone else says fuck it. The person above them says fuck it. Or in our wonderful language, you want to Instagram this one, Bruno will be really happy. And yes, those privacy settings are a nightmare, but I don't want to turn this into a single use case for one single bad user interface. I'm sure half of the people in this room could fix those stupid privacy settings in half an afternoon if given a chance. What I want to focus on this morning is why. Why we approach the job like we do. Why we take on the projects we take on and why we give up so easily. I want us to talk about our responsibility as designers. And I want us to understand the cost of what happens when we make shit. We are all familiar with these scenarios. We come across them every day. We see things going out the door that we're dissatisfied with. Or don't work properly. Or don't conform to best practices. Or worse, violate the trust that our users put in us. And some of us try to keep these things from happening. And some of us don't. We may see it as somebody else's job. We hope that somebody else shows up in time to fix the mistakes we see. And we get upset when they don't. But who in your organization can pull the plug on something that sucks? The answer, of course, is you. There ain't no cavalry. There's nobody else that's going to do your job, but you. Now, we are mired in a design culture that either doesn't understand its responsibility to the world we live in, or worse, doesn't care. It doesn't take malice to bring bad design into the world. All it takes is carelessness. Design is nothing more and nothing less than human beings attempt to explain and manipulate our environment. Design isn't just how something looks and feels, but also how something works. And more importantly to us today, how something affects. How it affects an individual, a class of people, and ultimately the environment that we live in. And when designers disregard the effect that that manipulation has on the environment, they are, at best, negligible. At worst, culpable. And when design is practiced without forethought or consequences, without responsibility, what we get is not creation, but destruction. Which reminds me of this tongue twister of a quote. And you'll forgive me, but it was written by a scientist and they can be a little long-winded. Basically it says, let's just make shit and we'll figure out what to do with it later. That's cool. We'll throw a bunch of people in a room together and eventually something interesting will happen. And then we'll figure out what to do with it. This is how Silicon Valley works, by the way. We throw the same people in a room time after time, give them millions of dollars and see if they can come up with something. After all, it's worked so well for us in the past. We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we fear the consequences of speaking up. We need to fear the consequences of our work more than we love the cleverness of our own ideas. And when the fear of taking responsibility and the fear of getting in trouble is greater than the fear of causing harm, well, we stop becoming designers. We become agents of recklessness. When we create thinking, without thinking, we become deaf. This is Victor Popinac. Anybody ever heard of Victor Popinac? Nice. Victor was a designer, an educator, and author. He was one of the very first advocates of responsible design. Way before the design community was ready to hear about any of this stuff. And Victor hated bad design. That looks like a man who hates bad design. And he didn't take too kindly to the designers who made it, either. Victor believed that designers had an ethical responsibility to design things that were beneficial to the world and design them well. And more importantly, that we have an ethical responsibility to not design things that are harmful to the world. In Victor's Popinac's eyes, we are gatekeepers. And in 1971, Victor published this book, Design for the Real World. I was having dinner with somebody last night, and they were telling me that they were having trouble finding a book about design and ethics. That was you. This is it. And I encourage you all to read it. This book has shaped how I think about design more than anything else I've ever read. And in it, Victor describes a design community that is in rampant disarray and in service to consumerism and gives it the smack upside the head it needs. This is the very first sentence of the preface. There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And I think if Victor was writing this book today, after the proliferation of the web on society, he would get rid of that word industrial as being too limiting. The design community, as you can imagine, was not very happy with Victor. He was blacklisted, scorned, and shunned by the very people that he was trying to elevate. But the thing is Victor Popinac was right. Taking responsibility is not a nice-to-have design skill. It is core to what we do. It is not something you get to tack on later. It is not a luxury. It is not something you do after you've built up your portfolio or made a name for yourself. This is not something that you allocate a small percentage of your time for. Responsibility is core to design. You are responsible for the work that you put into the world and you are responsible for the effect that work has on the world. Whether you are a physicist or a banker or a web designer, because today's web, it's in our phones, it's in our cars, it's in our schools, it's in our traffic lights. We can use the web to control our home security systems, to keep an eye on our children. We can use the web to monitor what medicine our parents are taking and even to find out what subversive things we might be doing in our public parks that day. And as Bobby Duncan can attest, the web is in our closest and most intimate relationships. Cerebro exists and we built it. And whether we end up calling it Facebook graph search or something else, we will have designed it. We will have built it and we will be responsible for its existence. And while we may build things with the best of intentions, we live in the world where the bad guys are billionaires who dine with the presidents and the good guys get chased down by the Department of Justice. And as the web expands its reach into our lives, we need to completely understand the responsibility that we hold in our hands, in our fingertips. Anything that is that pervasive when handled irresponsibly carries with it the power to destroy us all. And we, as designers, we stand at the gateway of what can be built and not built. What comes to the web goes through us. That is some powerful shit. And we can either ignore the consequences of what we choose to make or we can say, no, that is bad design. That does not get through me. I will not build it. We focus so much on what we can do that we forget to think about what we should or shouldn't do. But at the end of the day, the monsters that we unleash onto the world will be named after us. But I'm not here to bum you out. I want you to feel good. I want you to feel good about what you can do. Because I love being a designer. And I want you to love it too. And the more you understand your power as a designer, the more of it there is to love. Responsibility isn't some burden that you have to carry around. It's a potential for you to fulfill as a designer. Your potential to create rather than to destroy. Your potential to move humankind forward into the future. So I'm going to tell you about your four fundamental responsibilities as a designer. There's only four. That's easy. We have a responsibility to the world we live in. This is not a choice. This is the job we signed up for. Design works in the service of a better world. Design is, by definition, solving problems. And we are so blessedly full of problems right now that we are going to be very busy for a very long time. So ask yourself, are the problems that you're taking on problems worth solving? Do we need 36 more iPhone docks? Do we need 59 more iPad cases? What about 179 camera apps? I think we're good there. There's a company called MakeSpace. Just a couple of weeks ago, they got $10 million. They call themselves Dropbox for your stuff. This is literally a fucking box. And don't even get me started on shit like this. You cannot do less with the time you have on earth. The world economy is crap. Major media outlets are fleshing entire investigative journalism departments down the drain. Wall Street is awash in criminals. Europe is in debt. And billions of people can't get basic medical care, food and water and jobs. And we are building apps to raid our sandwiches, tell each other where we are, who we're with, and how long we'd have to walk to get laid. We used to design ways... We used to design ways to get to the moon. Now we design things to keep us from having to get out of bed in the morning. This is Portugal. No one owes us anything. We didn't wait for the world. We went out and found it. And it's time to get back to work again. Too many smart people are deciding on what problems to tackle, what to put their time and energy into, not based on whether those products will solve anyone's actual problems, but rather they can be funded and flipped. And if we only ever tackle the problems that Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google are interested in acquiring, then when do we finally get around to tackling the ones they're not? Making rich people richer is not disruption. It's the same old bullshit. And the further we get from the problems of real people in the actual world, real people whose daily needs are getting their kids educated, getting proper nutrition, getting their bills paid, getting proper drinking water, people whose biggest problem isn't Uber surge pricing, the further we get from designing problems that push the world forward and the closer we get to declaring that our true goal is driving towards the apocalypse in maximum comfort, it is time to stop hoping that other people solve these problems or hoping that other people give us permission to solve these problems and just start solving them. Recognize the power that we have as designers to change things. Recognize the power that we have to make things happen and recognize that with that power comes the responsibility to do it right and to do the right thing. And remember that every single time you as a designer make it easier and more pleasant for anyone to find and use information that help people live their lives, you have contributed something important to the world. We have limited resources, whether natural, cognitive, or financial. Please stop contributing them to people wasting them on crap. Number two, we have a responsibility to this craft we share. We have a responsibility to uphold it and uplift it. The way you work individually gives us the ability of all other designers to do their job. And each job that you do is a contribution and a representation of the entire craft. Every time you agree to take on a job that's detrimental to the craft or behave in a way that undermines design, you are putting the rest of us in a hole that we have to climb out of. I can't tell you how many times I've had clients come to me apprehensively looking very hesitant and the story is always the same. They've worked with another designer in the past who they've entrusted with the project and they've gotten let down. Now the reasons for that are myriad. But the result is the same. They feel cheated. They no longer trust design and I need to rebuild that trust. Their budgets have been squandered and they're looking for all sorts of guarantees that it won't happen again. And this makes my job harder. And this should not be harder than it needs to be. And you benefited from all of the designers who came before you. Now you need to help your fellow designers and those who follow after you. You are merely the present link in a chain that extends to the dawn of time and a part of a network that spans the globe and just like you learned from the mistakes and successes of designers in the past you need to document and share your own successes and failures for those that come after you. Learn from those who came before and inspire those who came next. That is your responsibility to the craft. Number three, we have a responsibility to the clients that we take on and designers cannot not have clients. First and foremost, consider that you're choosing the right clients for you to work with. People who have problems that actually need solving and people whose skills you're uniquely qualified to solve. You have a responsibility to do the work right even if they're trying to talk you into doing it wrong. Don't work for anybody that you're afraid to say no to. Remember, you are not an order taker. You are not a pixel pusher. You are a gatekeeper. Tell your client when they have a bad idea. Tell them when they ask you to do work in a bad way. Tell them when they aren't giving you what you need to do your job and then tell them what the right thing is and then do your job. You were hired to do good design not to make people happy. You want to make people happy? Make them sandwiches. People love sandwiches. If every designer prevented their client from going to a bad place, less clients would do it and they would stop expecting it from other designers. You do not need permission to do the job. It was given to you the moment you were hired. Imagine a world where the CEO and the marketing director are locked in a room and they're sweating it out and they're saying we are never ever going to be able to talk the designer into doing this very terrible thing we want. That's a fucking beautiful world. And it is within our reach. Most clients want to do the right thing. They just don't know what the right thing is and we're not stepping up and telling them. They hired us to tell them what that is. Don't be shy. Imagine how this plays out three to six months down the road. You've done everything that the client asked you to do. Even things that you knew were terrible but you did it anyway and the project fails and the client calls you into their office and they say hey the project failed and you say oh I knew it would but I had to do all those things that you asked me to do because I didn't want to get yelled at and I didn't want to get fired and I was scared of upsetting you and I really wanted you to like me. I should have just made you a sandwich. Well guess what? You are about to get fired. So why not risk getting fired when there's still a chance of doing the work right? When there's still a chance to solve the problem correctly. Before you've blown the budget before you've wrecked the schedule or you've cost other people their jobs by not doing yours. If your client tells you to do anything that prevents you from doing the job right you have to tell them. Designers complain about clients doing this stuff but they never actually step up and take care of it because designers are afraid of getting fired. Sometimes the best thing that you can do for your client is to be willing to get fired. All of these responsibilities though are just part of your ultimate responsibility your responsibility to yourself because all of this other stuff isn't about altruism it's in your own best interest. If you take responsibility for your work you will do better work. You will enjoy it more. You will have the respect of both your clients and your peers and that will lead to better opportunities in the future. This isn't a perfect world. I know that and sometimes the only thing you can do is take on the work that you can to keep the lights on. I get that. But remember you always have a choice and your personal choices have personal consequences. The work that you choose to do defines you not just as a designer but as a person. Your portfolio is a record of your choices and if you do work just to keep the lights on consider how those choices accumulate over time. One cigarette ad in your portfolio is a youthful indiscretion. Ten cigarette ads are a love letter to the tobacco industry and while you have a responsibility to earn a living doing it at the expense of society's well-being makes you no better than a Wall Street banker. Your portfolio is just another word for your reputation which is just another word for your integrity. And every time you make a conscious choice in your profession, an intentional choice rather than just letting things happen or accepting what is handed to you by others a choice of problem to solve a choice of client to serve even a choice of what compromise to make you are fulfilling your responsibility to yourself. This is all possible. I've taken the bad jobs. I have executed the bad feedback. I am here as a survivor of all the terrible mistakes I'm telling you not to make. I've made them all. But what I found was when I started saying no to things when I started saying no to bad ideas the client actually listened. The client actually respected me more. When I turned down a bad job a better job appeared and when I stood up for design clients took me more seriously and when I did the right thing the right job it led to an even better job after that. Don't design in fear. Now when we started today I promised we were going to destroy things and I brought kerosene and I brought matches so we're setting something on fire because we don't have to destroy the world. We are designers. We can actually build a better world. But first we're going to have to blow some shit up. Destroy your ego. You are not bigger than the problems you're solving. Stand up for yourself. Walk proud. Carry yourself with self-respect but never put yourself above the work. Real self-respect is tempered with the humility to understand when you are wrong and the confidence that you can learn from it. Your ego is nothing but fear getting in the way of solutions. Can we do this? Can we do this? Somus Kapash! I cannot hear you. Other people may have given up on you in the past but I am not giving up on you now. Can we do this shit? You can say it louder than that. One more time. Can we do this? Yes! Much better. Destroy your fear. You will be wrong. The person next to you is probably better than you at this. That's okay. You are not going to get every job. You will fuck up some of the jobs that you do get. You will make mistakes. These things will happen and you can fully recover from them. Never trust a designer who hasn't been punched in the mouth. Not only have they never done anything interesting enough to get punched in the mouth for but they live in constant fear of what getting punched in the mouth feels like. Get over your fear of speaking up. When something is wrong, it is on you to voice it. You cannot keep bad design from happening if your mouth is closed. There will come a day when you will have to raise your voice and you will be surprised at the sound it makes. Can we do this? Yes! Louder! Destroy your apathy. Every day, thousands of designers go to work not caring what they are going to work on and who it affects. They just grab the next thing on their plate, complain about it and do it. Be intentional in your actions. If you don't care what you're designing, stop designing. There is an opening at the sandwich shop. There are other professions. Find one that you actually love. Life is too goddamn short to spend it doing something you don't enjoy. Can we do this? Destroy petty authority. You know that art director that hangs over your shoulder telling you what to do? You're letting him do that. Every time you let somebody tell you how to do your job you are teaching them that that is how the job is done. And I'm tired of designers complaining about that guy but not saying anything to that guy. Try this. Don't tell me what to do. Tell me what's wrong. Let me earn my salary by figuring out how to fix it. Act like the fucking expert that people hired. Can we do this? Bullshit. Can we do this? That's better. Destroy the voice inside. The one telling you to accept less than your worth. You are designers. Do not design with emotional approval in mind. The voice telling you to design not what you know is right but what you think will be easier to get approved. The voice telling you not to rock the boat. The voice telling you not to get in trouble. Designers should welcome trouble. Can we do this? And I hate that I have to include this slide but I will include this slide until I need to. Misogyny is rampant in our industry and it is shameful. Almost every day I hear stories about women who get up on stages like this or women who put their opinions online and they get threats. And it is shameful. And never forget that we work in an industry where a CEO hit a woman 177 times and got a congratulatory letter from his board of directors. We are supposed to be building a better world and pointing the way to the future. And yet we cling to the bullshit and the hatred of the past. To build a better world we are going to have to learn to be our best selves. We must look at all our problems from a diverse point of view and we have to give a hand up to the people that we have kept down. And when we tolerate this bullshit we are just as capable as the people who commit it. Can we do this? Wake up and be aware. Be aware of the impact that you have no matter where you work. If anything a designer working for an oil company needs to be more aware and give more of a shit than a designer working for the resistance that a designer working for a large multinational is in a position to do a lot more damage. So if anything we need our best designers working at Facebook. We need our most belligerent gatekeepers working at BP. And we need our biggest assholes in a position where we can tell Rupert Murdoch to go fuck himself. Bobby Duncan needed a designer at Facebook to do the job right. She did not get one. And some of us don't work in companies where we can choose what to work on. I get that. But you do have a choice in working for that company. You always have a choice. Just because you aren't willing to take it doesn't mean it isn't there. And even if you work for the most evil company in the world it is still your job to evaluate every single thing put in front of you and decide whether you're okay having your name on it. But you'll get fired. That's true. You might get fired and getting fired sucks. But you can always get another job. You can always get another client. It is easier to recover from losing a job or a client than from losing yourself respect. You can always start another company. You can always get another idea. You can always dust yourself off and claim victory tomorrow. Not only can designers change the world, designers need to. The fight for good design is a fight for an equal web, an open web, a more accessible web. And we don't fight just for the sake of design. We fight for the sake of people like Bobby Duncan. We fight for the sake of those who need us and we fight for the sake of those we've lost. When you decided to become a designer you accepted the role of gatekeeper along with it. You are responsible for the work that you put into the world and you are responsible for the effect that work has on that world because we only have one of these. And it has always been our job to help the rest of humanity understand it, to help the rest of humanity farm it, fuck on it, escape it once in a while, grow things on it. This is what we do. We are designers, but most of all it has always been our job to protect it. Even if and especially when we have to protect it from ourselves. Thank you.