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I love art. I'm an artist myself. I'm also a designer. I understand the difference between the two. Design is the solution to a problem, but that problem is never your self-esteem.

— Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro (Page 201)

Venture capitalists have a thing they like to say. "We don't invest in ideas. We invest in people." That's true in a couple of ways. Let's get the funny one out of the way: they don't invest in ideas. Check. They invest in people. Specifically, they invest in people who look like they do, because today's venture capitalist was yesterday's startup founder and vice versa. They might as well be saying "we're both investing in our younger selves, and reinvesting in the idea that we've earned our place by perpetuating the idea that the next wave of us will come from the same pool."

— Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro (Page 110)

You can't make up for the terrible things you do at your day job with ethics offsets. If you want to truly do good work, you're better off applying your ethical framework to your day job. If you really feel bad about what you're doing at Palantir, go change what's happening at Palantir

— Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro (Page 90)

Foreword 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 sink's 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.

— Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro (Page 7)