Design shapes trust, behaviors, and systems—and we have a responsibility to try hard, give a shit, and get it right. I believe in prioritizing transparency, accessibility, inclusion, and privacy—not as checkboxes, but as a lens for every decision.
I think about this through the lens of social contracts. Society functions because most of us agree, implicitly, to a set of basic rules: don’t take what isn’t yours, return what’s been lent to you, tell the truth, don’t litter, etc. We extend a version of that trust every time we hand over our data, our attention, our financial information to a digital service. The expectation is that it will be handled with some basic level of care.
Designers sit in a highly responsible position in all of this. The patterns and experiences we ship don’t just solve problems, they shape behavior, establish expectations, and over time, quietly influence what people believe is normal. Doomscrolling didn’t exist twenty years ago. Binge-watching is a recent invention. These aren’t just features that got popular. They’re behaviors that were designed, iterated on, and optimized into existence.
What I believe, and what I try to bring into every project, is straightforward: design should materially improve people’s lives. It should anticipate failure states and handle them with care. It should protect what’s been entrusted to it. People should have the ability to opt-in to their data being used, have clarity and transparency about how it’s leveraged and processed, and the autonomy to opt out. Good design should consider not just what it enables today but what it normalizes over time, and whether that’s a direction worth going.
This isn’t a novel thought—many excellent books have been written about this—but it’s still my #1 principle as I shockingly find myself pushing back against deceptive patterns and objectively unsound or unethical design choices all the time.
I want to work with people who not only understand this, but care enough about it to champion design ethics as part of the fabric of a design leadership team. Not ones that have a values page on their website, but ones that have actually wrestled with what quality means from a humanistic and ethical standpoint, and let those answers shape how they build.