A designer is first and foremost a human being.
Before you are a designer, you are a human being. Like every other human being on the planet, you are part of the social contract. We share a planet. By choosing to be a designer you are choosing to impact the people who come in contact with your work, you can either help or hurt them with your actions. The effect of what you put into the fabric of society should always be a key consideration in your work.
Every human being on this planet is obligated to do our best to leave this planet in better shape than we found it. Designers don’t get to opt out.
When you do work that depends on a need for income disparity or class distinctions to succeed you are failing your job as a citizen, and therefore as a designer.
"A broken gun is better designed than a working gun." — Mike Monteiro
When you are hired to design something, you are hired for your expertise. Your job is not just to produce that work but to evaluate the impact of that work. Your job is to relay the impact of that work to your client or employer. And should that impact be negative, it is your job to relay that to your client along with a way, if possible, to eliminate the negative impact of the work. If it’s impossible to eliminate the negative impact of the work, it’s your job to stop it from seeing the light of day.
A designer does not believe in edge cases.
When you decide who you’re designing for, you’re making an implicit statement about who you’re not designing for. For years we referred to people who weren’t crucial to our products’ success as “edge cases”. We were marginalizing people. And we were making a decision that there were people in the world whose problems weren’t worth solving.
Facebook now claims to have two billion users. 1% of two billion people, which most products would consider an edge case, is twenty million people. Those are the people at the margins.
“When you call something an edge case, you’re really just defining the limits of what you care about.” — Eric Meyer
These are the trans people who get caught on the edges of "real names" projects. These are the single moms who get caught on the edges of "both parents must sign" permission slips. These are the elderly immigrants who show up to vote and can’t get ballots in their native tongues. They are not edge cases. They are human beings, and we owe them our best work.