The center did not hold

There are two words every designer needs to feel comfortable saying: “no” and “why.” Those words are the foundation of what we do. They’re the foundation of building an ethical framework. If we cannot ask “why” we lose the ability to judge whether the work we’re doing is ethical. If we cannot say “no” we lose the ability to stand and fight. We lose the ability to help shape the thing we’re responsible for shaping.

Victor Papanek, who attempted to gift us spines in Design for the Real World, referred to designers as gatekeepers. He reminded us of our power, our agency, and our responsibility. He reminded us that labor without counsel is not design. We have a skill-set that people need in order to get things made, and that skill-set includes an inquiring mind and a strong spine. We need to be more than a pair of hands. And we certainly can’t become the hands of unethical men.

A designer who loses their hands is still a designer, but a designer who doesn’t offer their client counsel is not.

We are gatekeepers, and we vote on what makes it through the gate with our labor and our counsel. We are responsible for what makes it through that gate, and out into the world. What passes through carries our seal of approval. It carries our name. We are the defense against monsters. Sure, everyone remembers the monster, but they call it by his maker’s name. And the worst of what we create will outlive us.

The creation will always carry its maker’s name. And outlive him.

There’s no longer room in Silicon Valley to ask why. Designers are tasked with moving fast and breaking things. How has become more important than why. How fast can we make this? How can we grab the most market share? How can we beat our competitors to market? (And for those of you thinking that I’m generalizing, and that your company is different — I am, and you may be. But you can’t argue even if you’re truly different there are days you feel yourself swimming upstream.)

The current generation of designers have spent their careers learning how to work faster and faster and faster. And while there’s certainly something to be said for speed, excessive speed tends to blur one’s purpose. To get products through that gate before anyone noticed what they were and how foul they smelled. Because we broke some things. It’s one thing to break a database, but when that database holds the keys to interpersonal relationships the database isn’t the only thing that breaks.

Along with speed, we’ve had to deal with the amphetamine of scale. Everything needs to be faster and bigger. How big it can get, how far it can go. A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? You know the rest of the line. When we move fast and break things and those things get bigger and bigger, the rubble falls everywhere.

Facebook claims to have two billion users. (What percentage of those users are Russian bots is currently up for debate.) But 1% of two billion is twenty million. When you’re moving fast and breaking things (this is Facebook’s internal motto, by the way) 1% is well within the acceptable breaking point for rolling out new work. Yet it contains twenty million people. They have names. They have faces. Technology companies call these people edge cases, because they live at the margins. They are, by definition, the marginalized.

Let me introduce you to one of them:

Copyright Lance Rosenfield / Prime

Bobbi Duncan was “accidentally” outed by Facebook when she was a college freshman. When Bobbi got to college she joined a queer organization with a Facebook group page. When the chorus director added her to the group, a notification that she’d joined The Queer Chorus at UT-Austin was added to her feed. Where her parents saw it. Bobbi had very meticulously made her way through Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings to make sure nothing about her sexuality was visible to her parents. But unbeknownst to her (and the vast majority of their users), Facebook, which moves fast, had made a decision that group privacy settings should override personal privacy settings. Bobbi was disowned by her parents and later attempted suicide. They broke things.

A year later I gave a talk at Facebook. I told Bobbi’s story, which was public at that point. An engineer in the audience screamed out “It was the chorus director’s fault, not ours.” And that somehow managed to be the scariest part of this whole story. We’re putting the people who need us most at risk, and we’re not seeing our responsibility. And to this I must both ask why and say no.

We’re killing people. And the only no I hear from the design community is about the need for licensing. If why and no are not at the center of who we are, and they must be, the center has not held.

We need to Slow. The. Fuck. Down. And pay attention to what we’re actually designing. We’re releasing new things into the world faster than Trump is causing scandals.